Steel vs Tungsten

As you might have heard, steel recipes are going to be replaced with tungsten in the upcoming update. The biggest difference between the two, aside from the name...

• Steel - smeltable from copper and iron
• Tungsten - smeltable from mined tungsten ore

I've been wondering - what are the community's opinions on that?

 

There's something about tungsten that just doesn't quite fit in Starbound's world. Also, what will become of copper?

 

I think tungsten is fine, but titanium and tungsten should be swapped in the crafting progression so that tungsten is at tier 3 and titanium is at tier 2. I'm pretty sure tungsten has a greater hardness than titanium so I feel like it would make sense for them to switch places. I still do miss steel though. Even if steel was no longer used for crafting armor and weapons, I feel like it could still be available for crafting tiles, furniture, machines, components, or even upgrades that slightly boost the stats of low tier armor and weapons. It's sad to see that the game will no longer have any alloys (I'm still not sure what's going to happen to impervium, ferozium and cerulium yet). Tungsten carbide would be pretty awesome.

Fun fact: Durasteel is an ore in nightly. Durasteel sounds more like an alloy to me, but since it's just a made up metal, it's not really that big of a deal. Just a minor complaint, really. Maybe they could call it duramite or duranium. Actually, those both sound kind of weird too lol.

Another fun fact: R̶u̶b̶i̶u̶m̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶b̶l̶u̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶o̶r̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶l̶y̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶.̶ ̶T̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶a̶l̶s̶o̶ ̶w̶e̶i̶r̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶i̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶p̶r̶a̶c̶t̶i̶c̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶a̶m̶e̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶f̶e̶r̶o̶z̶i̶u̶m̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶. As of the latest nightly build, rubium is completely gone and was replaced with ferozium. Impervium and cerulium are gone as well, so tier 6 is probably getting a revamp.

 

This is news to me. Also making me sad, I like the fact Starbound have you make alloys. I felt it was a better system than Terraria one ore per tier mining. If anything I kinda wish they went back and make higher tier armors require traces of outdated ores, such as copper for an ironman-like endgame suit for example. The fact you still find the outdated ores on the higher tier planets would make it so it wouldn't be that much of a pain. Kinda a shame they making it so boring and stereotypical. I can honestly say this is the first thing I heard about 1.0 that I am disappointed in.

 

If Tungsten is going to be added to the game, I'd want it to replace Durasteel instead of, well, regular Steel. In real-life, production of Tungsten ingots is impractical because it has the highest melting point of any metal. In Starbound, I'd imagine that it'd be the perfect starting material to use the Magnetic Crucible to smelt into Tungsten Bars. It's also quite rare on Earth compared to Iron and Titanium.

 

I can see why they did it, though. The various tiers of armors and weapons are supposed to be gated to worlds of a specific threat level, but at least with the more recent betas it's possible to get both the component materials for a given alloy before you'd actually need it, and without much time needed either.

 

They changed it because some people got all pissy over an iron+copper alloy, saying it didn't make sense. Never mind that it is a real alloy with industrial use.

Tungsten is fine as a material, but now the progression makes even less sense because tungsten is portrayed as being weaker than titanium, which irks me to no end.

 

And some people like yourself laser focused on the limited uses of steel with copper, instead of the general composition of steel which is just iron and carbon from coal (coke). Changing the recipes of all the alloys to make precious metals required and finally give them a use was a boring decision, and they did not need to remove Uranium and Solarium (inherently more interesting than any of the "precious metals") to balance their games progression.

And now Tungsten is a progression metal instead of Steel for whatever reason... all they had to do was switch literally one word in a recipe file to address 90% of complaints, but they decided to go the much more difficult route and replace Steel entirely...

Edit: Based on my quick google search for 'tungsten body armor', I am pretty certain the main reason they decided to go with Tungsten is because of Terraria, which has Tungsten Armor. As such, they probably wanted to appeal to the Terraria fanbase instead of striving to do their own thing... Guess I will be modding in Steel later on...

 

For the billionth time. Look up copper steel alloy. It has more copper than carbon in it, and is used in heavy industry, proving its strength.

Yeah, changing everything over to tungsten was the harder route to go, but there was no problem to begin with. Now we have an even more illogical mess because people got all pissy over a damn crafting recipe. Yet no one complained about the Titanium/silver alloy from before...

 

And there is that laser-focus at work. Never mind that the simplest steel is iron and carbon and that there is virtually no such thing as steel without carbon; the limited use of copper in certain steel alloys means it makes perfect sense for Steel in Starbound to require, in equal proportion, Iron and Copper to produce a strange 50/50 alloy of iron-copper that is somehow Steel.

It's not like it matters, though. Steel has been replaced by Tungsten, likely to appeal to the Terraria fanbase, so I will just have to mod Steel with a coal recipe back in later.

 

And a 50/50 iron and coal made more sense? Iron/Copper steel has more copper than iron/carbon steel has carbon. So yes, a 50/50 split of iron and copper is more reasonable within the context of the game, especially if you consider the progression they tried to do.

And again, no one complained about the titanium/silver alloy. You want to talk about "laser-focus"? You are so focused on iron/copper that you dismiss the other illogical combination sitting right next door.

Im not the "laser-focused" one. Your entire complained is that iron and copper is not a valid combination, when it is, which is why I've pointed out copper based steel so much.

 

Actually, since burning coal causes a lot of gas release, yes it does. A vast majority of the coal would burn away and some of the emitted carbon would alloy with the iron to produce low-grade steel. Hardly 50/50, whereas copper isn't flammable and would alloy 50/50 regardless. If it were, say, 5 Iron, 1 Copper and 1 Carbon, that would make much more sense for your hypothesis.

Except me and how I lamented over the loss of Uranium (previously alloyed with Titanium, and replaced by Silver) and the dumb decision to mandate precious metals for all alloys. If I didn't care about it, I probably wouldn't have changed the recipe in my Recipe Reorganization mod to:

It just wasn't the focus of any of the topics I replied to... which were always about Steel and not the fictional alloy Durasteel.

 

Personally, I would've wanted to include more primitive crafting tiers, like wood, bone, glass, and stone, and move Iron, Steel, and Titanium tiers, along with interplanetary travel in general, to the early-midgame part to encourage more player investment into their starting world, much like in Terraria (and to a lesser extent, the Koala versions of Starbound), but that's probably something that I'd want to reserve for a mod, possibly a total conversion mod, that's probably as ambitious as Frackin Universe.

Anyways, all this bickering about whether or not there should be Copper-Iron Alloys, or Carbon-Iron Alloys, or any other combination of materials all sound rather pointless to me personally. I'd much rather just wait and see for myself before I decide how I'd want to design my total conversion mod. If you guys still want to complain about where a certain material should be placed within the tier lists (heck, I personally find it strange that, in Terraria, Silver and Gold are both considered to be higher-tier equipment sets than Iron), perhaps you guys should look into developing your own Frackin Universe level mods.

 

what's the big deal anyway? copper already has uses, recipies and furniture, which was the major reason why it was included in the recipie for steel in the first place(its uses being limited after its ability to repair was gone).

I think its in a better position than diamond.

 

I've posted a suggestion relevant to this discussion. Actually it started as a comment to this very thread, but got carried away.

http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/metal-tiers.114700/#post-2895080

 

I prefer tungsten, because It gives like a "second stage" of the game, I explain myself, At the first world, only copper and iron are found, because you start at a lush and harmless planet, and most of the time, actually, allways, other planets are forest planets and dessert planets and at least one moon, these are "mostly harmless" when you unlock traveling to other planets you can go there and since the risk is higher these planets bring this more valuable ore, tungsten. What about copper? Yes, I know it would make it somewhat useless, but when I played with tungsten instead of steel, copper was used for the basic basics, like crafting a hoe, or making doors, chests, and copper decoration, and other things. All those things did gave copper a use of it and sometimes I did ran out of it so I had to get more and more. About Iron, I call Iron a tier-1 expensive metal, The first armor you make when playing is probably iron, then is replaced with steel and platinum and so on... So yes, it will make iron "useless" in the future, but isn't most metals useless in the future? You don't use steel when you already have that uuh... "metal used for the armor required for the penguin's weapon testing place?" Forgot the name, haha.

In conclussion I prefer tungsten instead of steel, I like copper as the basic material and tungsten as a "Tier-2 Iron".

 

They keep changing these superficial parts of progression, but still no indication that they have any ideas about how to make the 6 tiers play differently to each other.

 

Well, technically since they're tiers, they should be straight upgrades for eachother.
That said, it would be nice to have sidegrades, equipment made from monster drops, unique planet materials, etc. which would give different effects and stats than the basic [Race][Tier]Armors. Sort of specialized equipment, but not quite as specialized as the tier 5 and 6 stuff... That said, it would be nice if the tier 5 and 6 equipment had more specialization than just DEFENSE vs. DAMAGE... Stuff like increased attack with certain weapons, increased defense against specific types of damage, more attack speed or energy on certain sets, passive set abilities, etc...