High Quality Metal Ore

Nobody goes out to farm it on purpose. It drops alongside the regular ore when you break metal nodes, a little from each one, and a furnace turns it into high quality metal. Those few pieces are worth more than the hundreds of metal ore sitting next to them in your bag.

Better tools pay off here more than anywhere. A salvaged icepick squeezes more out of each node, a jackhammer clears them faster, and over a full farming loop the HQM count is where you notice it first. There is a passive route too: a mining quarry can dig it up for you, and a quarry monument on the map produces it if you fuel it and hold it.

You get back from a run with a full inventory and the furnace already packed with sulfur. Pull some out and put this in first. It stacks only to 100, so it eats slots, and it is the ore you least want to lose if someone raids you tonight.