Beat the second boss — nice work. The swamp biome is now open. Unfortunately it’s not exactly welcoming: thick miasma, hostile aboriginals, and no obvious clue about where to farm anything useful. But if you want to upgrade your weapons and ship gear, you’ll need swamp iron ingots — and those require two specific materials that most players spend hours trying to track down.
Here’s exactly where to find them, and how to set up the most efficient farming route.
Table of Contents
Metal chunks: mine them in the swamp miasma
Metal chunks are the more common of the two resources. Deposit nodes are marked on the map with a pickaxe icon, so keep your eyes on the map as you explore.
In the world, these nodes look like silvery obelisks with dark, root-like bases — usually nestled among crumbling ruins and collapsed structures in the misty areas of the biome. Pull out your pickaxe and break them down; each node drops a handful of chunks.
Pro tip: don’t wander randomly. Start from your landing point and work the perimeter, tagging ore nodes as you go. You’ll build a clean farming loop and stop accidentally backtracking through the same fog-covered clearing three times.
Flammable powder: looted from enemies and ruins
This is where things get trickier. Despite what the item description might suggest, flammable powder is a rare drop — not something you stumble over on the ground.
There are two sources:
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Swamp aboriginals — killed enemies have a chance to drop it.
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Ruins — loot every structure thoroughly after clearing it out.
The catch is that swamp enemies hit hard and come in numbers. If you just arrived in the biome and haven’t upgraded yet, don’t charge straight into the heaviest fights. A smarter play: grab a few metal chunks first, head back to base, bump your weapon up a tier, then return for a full clear. You’ll spend less time dying and more time actually looting.
How to build the large smelter
There’s no smelting without the large smelter — it’s the dedicated third-biome crafting station. To find it in the menu: open the build tab → Crafting & Tools → scroll all the way down to the Processing category.
Short on mountain iron ingots? Check the trader — sometimes it’s faster to buy a few than to re-grind the second biome all over again.
Crafting the swamp iron ingot — and what to do with it
Once the smelter is up, load in your metal chunks and flammable powder and you’ll get swamp iron ingots. These are used for:
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Upgrading melee weapons.
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Improving ranged weapons.
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Enhancing ship equipment.
The large smelter also lets you produce iron and copper ingots and craft Aborum essence, so the build investment pays off well beyond swamp iron.
What to upgrade first
If materials are tight, prioritize your main weapon. A stronger weapon means faster enemy clears, which means more flammable powder per run. Once your weapon is solid, shift attention to the ship — you’ll have enough ingots flowing in by then to handle both.
