Metal Armor

Details

At 30 weight each it eats carry capacity fast, so bring a mount or park a chest nearby. At 30,240 gold it is worth real money to a merchant.

Metal Armor Crafting Recipe

Ingot×60

Leather×20

Cloth×10

Ancient Civilization Parts×2

What it really costs, once every sub-recipe is expanded

Ore×120Leather×20Wool×20Ancient Civilization Parts×2

Crafting it takes 92 materials across 4 types, and the bottleneck is almost always the 60× requirement — line that up first and the rest follows.

Where to Find Metal Armor

The recipe is not on the Technology tree — it is locked behind a schematic you have to find first. The best single source is sea base enemy camp boss stashes in the Grasslands at 0.6% per container, and the table below lists every tier and where each one drops.

Exactly one Pal in the game carries the Legendary schematic, and the timing is unusually kind. Alpha Kingpaca is a fixed level 23 encounter with a single spawn point, and the Technology tree opens Metal Armor at level 23 too — the strongest source for the top rung is standing there the moment the armour becomes yours to build. Its 3% is a drop roll, and a caught alpha hands over its table on the catch and rolls it again when you butcher the captured Pal, so a sphere turns one respawn into two chances: about 17 alphas against 33 straight kills. Kingpaca Cryst is no substitute — the ice variant's table carries no schematic at all, so the Snowfields version of this fight pays you nothing on this line.

Two caverns are the same route as their region's chests, which the pool names hide. Cavern of the Dunes draws the Desert chest table and Volcanic Cavern draws the Mount Obsidian one, and those two tables are where this whole schematic family lives — but only in their Grade 4 rows, so a plainer chest inside either cave pays nothing here. When a Grade 4 roll does come up it is dominated by this armour: 28.6% of that slot in Mount Obsidian and 25.9% in the Desert is some rung of the Metal Armor ladder, with the Cold and Heat Resistant schematics sitting beside the plain ones at exactly half the weight — the same containers are the route to all three Legendaries at once (0.046% and 0.041% for a specialised copy). No cavern feeds the Forest chest pool that also stocks this line; that one is overworld only.

Costed properly the ranking is not the one the raw rates suggest, because five of any rung fuse into the one above and a pool that stocks the whole ladder is worth far more than its top rung alone. Per container, converted into finished Legendaries: a sea base camp boss stash in the Grasslands 1.76%, enemy camp loot in the Forest 1.20%, camp loot in Mount Obsidian 0.96%, camp loot in the Desert 0.53%, a tier 1 treasure map dig 0.45%, a Mount Obsidian chest 0.37%, a Desert chest 0.33%, Desert fishing 0.27%. The sea base stash is worth about five times a cavern chest and it skips the weakest rung entirely — it stocks only the 2★, 3★ and 4★ copies, so nothing it gives you is a rung you have to grind 125 of. Clear the two caverns for the Pals, the eggs and the skill fruits; treat a schematic falling out as luck.

Using Metal Armor Well

The stat row hides the reason this line is the one that ends chest-swapping: every rung of Metal Armor, this Legendary copy included, carries Cold Resistance Lv. 1 and Heat Resistance Lv. 1 at the same time. Nothing before it does. Cloth Outfit and Pelt Armor give cold cover only, and their specialised versions do not add the missing half — Heat Resistant Pelt Armor trades all cold protection away for Heat Lv. 2, so a Pelt-era loadout means carrying two body pieces and changing at the biome line. From level 23 one build covers both bands, and it keeps covering them for the rest of the run: Refined Metal Armor at 37 and Pal Metal Armor later hold the same Cold Lv. 1 / Heat Lv. 1 pair, so upgrading past this piece never costs you climate coverage — only the numbers move.

Attack Up (S) is the half of the schematic that the stat table does not explain. The base craft off the Technology tree carries no attack passive whatsoever; the Uncommon build adds it at Lv. 1 and every tier steps it once, so Lv. 4 exists only on this Legendary copy. Parts follow the same curve — the 1★ and 2★ builds need none, the 3★ needs one Ancient Civilization Part and this one needs two — and work runs 20,000 on the base craft to 640,000 here, thirty-two times the labour for a single body slot. That is a Production Assembly Line job with your best Handiwork crew, not something to stand at a High-Quality Workbench for. Building an intermediate rung to tide you over is the one clear waste: the parts it eats do not come back, while fusing five schematics costs nothing but schematics.

This piece sits oddly against both its siblings and its successor, and the crossovers are worth knowing before you spend the parts. Cold and Heat Resistant Metal Armor open at 105 defence and 1,400 durability, under this build's 112 and 3,000, so a Legendary plain copy beats a freshly unlocked specialised one outright — it only falls behind once an Uncommon Cold or Heat schematic turns up at 136. Going the other way, the tree hands you Refined Metal Armor at level 37 with 150 defence and 500 HP, which reads as a clean upgrade until you notice it holds 1,500 durability against this one's 3,000 and, like every base craft in the line, carries no attack passive at all. The first Refined Metal build that keeps an attack bonus is the Uncommon at 195 defence, and it wants three Ancient Civilization Parts. Two parts for a piece that covers levels 23 to 37 is a cheap fourteen levels, and Alpha Kingpaca pays 3 to 5 parts on every clear at 100% — the fight that eventually hands you the schematic funds the craft many times over long before it does.

Against its own siblings the defence gap is the whole of this copy's lead, and it is worth knowing what the specialised builds carry that no plain rung ever does. Cold Resistant Metal Armor holds Cold Lv. 2 and keeps Heat Lv. 1 beside it; Heat Resistant Metal Armor holds Heat Lv. 2 and keeps Cold Lv. 1. Neither gives up the other band, so even the base-rarity specialised copy is strictly better insulated than this one — the 112 defence and 3,000 durability against their 105 and 1,400 is where the Legendary plain build actually wins, not on protection. On top of that each specialised piece carries an elemental damage cut the plain ladder never gets: Ice on the Cold build, Fire on the Heat build, and that applies to attacks, not weather. Heading into an Ice-heavy fight or the Volcanic Cavern, a specialised schematic several rungs below Legendary is worth building ahead of this one, because that mitigation is not something raw defence substitutes for.

Every Tier of Metal Armor

The same piece exists at 5 rarities, and the gap is not cosmetic: defense runs 70 to 112, a 1.6x swing. Which one you end up with is decided by the rarity of the schematic you built from, not by the recipe — so a legendary copy of this is worth more than the next item up built from a common one.

What Metal Armor Does

Metal Armor grants Cold Resistance Lv. 1: Temperature Resist Cold +1.

Metal Armor grants Heat Resistance Lv. 1: Temperature Resist Heat +1.

Metal Armor grants Attack Up (S) Lv. 4: Shot Attack +12.

Schematics That Unlock Metal Armor

The Technology tree hands you the plain Metal Armor at level 23 for 2 Technology points, but nothing above that base version — the rarer builds are schematic-only. One schematic grants the recipe, and they are world loot — chests, boss Pals and the late-game pools — rather than anything you research. Higher-rarity copies of the same schematic raise the quality of what you end up crafting.

Fastest route. Two routes to the top-tier Metal Armor schematic, and they are not measured in the same thing: about 33 kills hunting it directly from kingpaca (alpha), or roughly 85 containers farming the 3★ copy from sea base enemy camp boss stashes in the Grasslands and fusing five. Which is faster depends on how long one of each takes you. Schematics fuse five-to-one, so a lower tier with better odds can beat the top tier outright. Counts are containers of that source, not time.

Schematic	Rarity	Where it comes from
Metal Armor Schematic 4	4★	Grasslands sea base camp stashes, Forest camp loot, Treasure map digs (tier 1) +11 more — best 0.6% (grade 2/3/4/5/6) · Supply drops in the Forest (0.07%) · Kingpaca (3%)

Alternatives and Upgrades

Step up from here and you get Heat Resistant Metal Armor at 136 defense; step down and it is Metal Armor at 105. Weigh the jump against what the next tier costs you before committing the resources.

Heat Resistant Metal Armor136Metal Armor105

Other body armours at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:

Cold Resistant Pelt ArmorHeat Resistant Pelt ArmorCold Resistant Metal ArmorHeat Resistant Metal ArmorPelt ArmorTropical OutfitTundra OutfitCloth OutfitRefined Metal ArmorHallowed Plate MailPal Metal ArmorCold Resistant Refined Metal Armor