Day 292:
I’m still experimenting with the iron ore, by the way. There’s a far distance between iron tools and steel tools, but all I know about steel is that it’s a different composite of iron ore and carbon than straight up iron is. And that means that I have to experiment to get it right.
In a lot of very real ways, this is why I end up making so many tools. One batch of iron will come out strong and solid and the next will be brittle and the pickaxe will snap, and the one after that will be soft and not much use for digging. On average I get about a day or two out of a pickaxe if I spend the whole day digging, and that sounds horrible but considering that before I found the iron ore I was literally making pickaxes out of stone and those were really fragile, I’ll take this.
And I think the diamond-ish ones will be better, but there’s not much diamond and if given the choice between making a harder pickaxe and protecting my brain pan, creating a helmet usually wins.