I used to be able to break the crust covering star metal meteors using grease orbs and setting them on fire with fire orbs, but it doesn’t seem to working anymore. Was that a bug that’s now been fixed? Are explosives the only way of breaking the shell now?
No, it’s still possible but sometimes you will encounter nodes which are bugged and doesn’t break. If you throw first your fire orb on it and the node doesn’t show up some blue shimmering cracks at hit, than just move on to the next node. Dragon bombs won’t work neither. To me, nodes which landed on mostly flat ground appear to be susceptible to this.