Get T3 Blacksmith and you’ll literally bathe in Steel in a couple of days. And getting this T3 crafter is way, way easier than getting Black Ice in the EL. There are T3 Blacksmiths in the Exile camps near the Newbie river, so you can get one just after you learn the simpliest wheel of pain. On the other hand going for the Black Ice requires good armor and warming food not speaking of various “friendly” animals there. Of course you can get some at Warmaker Sanctuary but it’s not a low-level content as well (and it’s very cold there too).
I have several T4s on multiple characters. I’m not patient enough to farm steel for hardened steel so I use higher stuff with is way more readily available.
How about you just save yourself some time and skip all those steps entirely too.
Yeah gotta agree. I’m not that patient and imo the steelfire is far more limiting than the iron so t3 blacksmith doesn’t really save any time for me because am pulling 4k iron ore out while collecting stone for bricks. I prefer using the old fashioned way of smelting steel because it goes at the speed of the furnace and come out much quicker. In fact you can have it cycle from iron to steel to hardened steel before that blacksmith can convert the iron to reinforcements. The only time the blacksmith method makes sense is in areas of low ore resources like upper jungle and volcano.
I think the developers need to really look into balance of resources & gathering. When player says “I skip all tiers and jump into star metal pick”, I always tell them, why bother with star metal when you get black blood faster for just killing bunch of NPCs.
In my opinion those headhunter NPCs are making things bit too easy. Best picks, t4 thralls, 1000’s of steel (from supply bags) all that for killing bunch of sorcerers. I hope after Age of Sorcery this will be removed or at least looked into.
We were skipping to Black Blood and Eldarium long before those NPCs were added.
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Yep. I remember going up the grind out the BB tools way early game because it was easy with my godlevel trhall and repair kits were literally a dime/dozen in unnamed city chests.
Used in Silent Legion equipment from memory
Yes it will. Headhunters are temporary so get Black Blood tools now while they are so easy to get.
How would you get star metal? Need hardened steel to harvest that unless I be mistook.
“Here comes the BOOM BOOM BOOM” Love mass harvest 
Just don’t forget la Bombe Surprise 
Black Blood or Eldarium Tools works. As well as Sorcery.
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Indeed
Depends your playstyle.
Normally you need everything but at the same time you need nothing as well. If you wish to use every single available item this game has there’s only a way. Go pvp! The necessity in this aspect for every single item is viable. How long do you have to fix a dragon bone weapon, or an obsidian one? Not to mention the Teliths!
Its time consuming.
Steel takes 2.25x as long to craft as Star Metal or Eldarium. 4.75x as long if you need to smelt Iron.
Steel requires Iron, Tar, and Steelfire subcombines. Star Metal just requires just base materials. Eldarium just requires one material and is the fastest. However Star Metal Ore and Black Ice can be found in the same region normally.
If you play online it’s crafted “in the background” while you are offline.
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Why bother? Seriously, why would you bother with the effort to make all that Hardened Steel when you can use Star Metal instead? What’s the benefit?
What is the effort? Hardened steel SHOULD be available way way earlier then you are ready to go for the Starmetal Ore. You can get enough steel almost from the lowest levels on the Newbie river (Tar and Brimstone are not a problem). Just get T3 Exile Blacksmith and you’ll bathe in Steel. Hardened Steel tools should be available from lvl 40 and not 50 as they are now. IF you didn’t need Black Ice to get Hardened Steel which is too hard to get on low levels (as well as Star Metal). Learning them on lvl 50 makes them obsolete together with this new recipe for Hardened Steel requiring high-level material (Black Ice). Return the old recipe with Brimstone, move this feat to lvl 40, and Hardened Steel will be in a proper place between Steel and Star Metal tools.
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Learning Hardened Steel at level 1 isn’t going to stop me from skipping it (outside the around 500 I need for benches). Even when I play at less than 0.5x exp rates, I can be in Star Metal by the end of my first session or beginning of my second.
Steelfire gets converted directly to Steel Reinforcements. There is ZERO reason to waste time gathering 5x as much iron to make into steel. Take your own advice, and use a T3 Blacksmith to use the reinforce recipe and use any Iron you pull up into T3 buildings, and then go grab Star Metal (or preferably Eldarium if its available, or Black Blood) for everything else.
There is no reason to make Steel Bars and by extension Hardened Steel Bars in any sort of large quantity. Its a waste of time and inefficient. Except for the odd RP here and there.
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They did. Back when black ice t3 building set was first introduced. It had dirt cheap material costs and instead of using bricks it used new black ice resource. It was almost immediately pointed out that noone will bother using normal t3, because of how much more easier it was to gather black ice then spend countless hours and effort (back then you could only use smelters to reduce crafting speeds and fuel costs) cook usual t3 bricks. And after maybe a year(?) long forum discussing they finally made some changes - they literally increased black ice costs 
As if spending 1500 black ice to make 100 black ice foundations (instead of 150 pre-nerf) would make any real difference - star metal picks and x2 gather rates ment you had to swing a couple of more swings to compensate
Recent addition of yurts (t3 walls made out of silk) can clearly show how well FUNCOM can handle balancing. I think next time we will see t3 building blocks made out of twigs, because someone at FUNCOM still considers them being very labor intensive resource - after all, you have to go to a beach or river bank and individually pick up every twig by hand 