There are only a few ready-made iron rods in the dungeon. After that, you make your own by smelting scrap metal, which means building a smelter out of clay first.
Scrap metal and iron rods are different items. Picking up scrap won't count toward a recipe that asks for iron rods.
Where can you find an iron rod without a smelter?
Check the chest in the spider area: it holds two iron rods and a small key. That's the easiest early source.
Two more are tucked away: one in the jammed door near the smelting room, and one in an out-of-bounds part of the sewers. The sewer door only opens from the inside, so you have to get around behind it.
Hold on to these rods until you know what you're building. They run out fast.
How do you turn scrap metal into iron rods?
Build a smelter at camp, load it with scrap metal and coal, and collect the rods when it's done.
- Keep every piece of scrap metal you find. It lies around the dungeon passages, and there's a lot of it around the smelter deeper in.
- Get clay. The smelter recipe needs it, and clay only comes from mining goop piles with a pickaxe. See how to get clay.
- Build the smelter at camp. Select Smelter in the crafting menu.
- Load scrap metal and coal. While it works, the smelter shows a Smelting percentage and how much coal is left.
- Pick up the rods. In one run, nine pieces of scrap came out as three iron rods.
Should you dismantle camp equipment for iron rods?
No. Keep your cooking table, crafting table and iron pot. Breaking them down doesn't give back enough to be worth it, and if you deconstruct the cooking table before you've learned its recipe, you may not be able to build it again.
Before spending rods, check what's competing for them:
| Craft | Iron rods | Other materials |
|---|---|---|
| Workbench | 2 | 1 leather, 3 wood planks |
| Cooking Pot | 3 | 1 iron pot |
If the workbench is your next goal, set its two rods aside and go find the leather. It's easy to spend your first rods on a cooking pot and then be stuck waiting for clay before you can make more.