How do I make an iron pickaxe?

I can make every kind of pickaxe at the anvil except iron..

EDIT: Okay it doesn't exist .. Then what are crystals for ?

 

You don't. It's really weird, I know. Apparently iron pick axes dont exist~

 

That knowledge was lost in the great tentacle war

 

I saw this thread and LOL'd

 

You need the full version.

 

Uh so i'm stuck with copper until I gather enough siver? Crap.

 

Stone, Iron, Steel, Titanium and Durasteel Pickaxes/Drills would be so much more durable than a drill made of diamonds. Oh well, you are stuck with a copper pickaxe until you can 'upgrade' to a silver one.

 

Well a solid diamond drill would be hella-durable.. unless you tried to drill into another diamond.

Silver, platinum or gold on the other hand would be soooooooo soft as to be worthless as a pickaxe. Actually oddly enough silver would be the strongest, followed by gold, then platinum - the exact opposite of what is in-game.

hahaha.

 

May the God Emperor guide us in our search of the old wisdom.

 

You have to buy the 'iron pick' DLC for $5.

 

Diamond is strong as hell, what are you on. All hail the mighty carbon!
But yes, gold silver and platinum are all terrible metals

 

I hope you realise they use diamonds in real life industry because they're incredibly hard and durable, right?

 

Diamonds are one of the strongest things known to man.

 

To be fair, they coat tools in diamond particulate. They are mostly metal. A solid diamond tool would be VERY brittle.

 

Hardness =/= toughness. Diamonds have almost perfect cleavage lines through them, so any tough blow to one of these points will split the diamond easily. Sure, it can't be scratched easily, but it can still be broken. They're hard to scratch, but still brittle. If you're careful they'll stay together, but I doubt using a drill is the safe way to do it.

EDIT: BTW, hardness is how resistant something is to scratching. Toughness is how resistant something is to chipping, splitting, cutting, general force.

 

Most industrial drills are diamond tipped though, sure they wouldn't make a drill completely out of diamond because that wouldn't be very cost effective or as strong, but still~
We don't want to bother going through all that ingame now do we

 

Yeah, it would be a bad tool, too prone to failure. They use artificial diamonds to significantly lower cost as well. Diamond tools, even those styled as "diamond tipped" don't actually have a tip of diamond. It's typically metal impregnated or bonded with diamond crystals or a layer of diamond dust.

Can read about the standard types on this wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_tool#Categories

All in all, a solid diamond pick/drill/sword would be just terrible...

 

But it'd look pretty, and in the end that's all that really matters

 

I prefer my pretty looking things in-theme.