Refined Metal Armor

Details

At 35 weight each it eats carry capacity fast, so bring a mount or park a chest nearby. At 78,910 gold it is worth real money to a merchant.

Refined Metal Armor Crafting Recipe

Refined Ingot×60

Leather×30

High Quality Cloth×4

Ancient Civilization Parts×6

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

Coal×120Ore×120Leather×30Ancient Civilization Parts×6High Quality Cloth×4

Crafting it takes 100 materials across 4 types, and the bottleneck is almost always the 60× requirement — line that up first and the rest follows.

Where to Find Refined 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 treasure map digs (tier 2) at 1.0% per container, and the table below lists every tier and where each one drops.

Treasure map digs are the fastest route to the Legendary schematic, and only the tier 2 map pays — tiers 1, 3, 4 and 5 drop the Refined Metal line from their pools entirely, so banking better maps for this gets you nothing. A tier 2 dig rolls the Legendary at 1.026%, the Epic at 2.564% and the Rare at 6.41%, and it never rolls the Uncommon at all, which means every hit lands on the half of the ladder worth keeping. Five of any tier fuse into one above, so counted in finished Legendaries a single dig is worth about 1.8%. The maps themselves have one standout source: the sea base camp bosses in the Grasslands hand a tier 2 map over on 80% of clears, against 37.5% from Desert land camp bosses and 35% from Mount Obsidian. Chain the two and each Grasslands sea base boss you kill is worth roughly 1.4% of a finished Legendary — better than any container in the game for this line, from content twenty levels below the armour itself.

If you are not running maps, the ranking is not the one the drop table suggests, because a container that pays a fat Rare rate is quietly paying a Legendary at a fifth of it. Convert everything and per container you get: Mount Obsidian sea base camp boss stashes 1.07%, ordinary camp loot in Mount Obsidian 0.45%, Mount Obsidian chests and fishing 0.40%, Desert chests and fishing 0.37%, Sakurajima treasure chests and treasure fishing spots 0.35%, Desert and Snowfields camp loot 0.34%, Desert and Mount Obsidian supply drops 0.33%, Snowfields chests and fishing 0.22%. The sea base boss stash off Mount Obsidian runs a flat five-to-one ladder — 8.95% Rare, 1.79% Epic, 0.358% Legendary — so no tier in it is worth more than any other and you should be hoarding all three. Note how far its land-camp twin falls behind at 0.11%: the same boss on solid ground is worth a tenth of the one standing on water.

Cavern runs are the trap. Astral Mountains Cavern draws the Snowfields chest pool and Cherry Blossom Cave draws the Sakurajima one, so both can turn the Legendary up — at 0.055% and 0.088% a chest, the two weakest routes on the whole board. Converted the same way, one tier 2 dig is worth about eight Snowfields chests or five Sakurajima ones. Clear those caverns for the Pals, the Gold Keys and the training manuals; treat a schematic falling out as luck rather than a plan.

Using Refined Metal Armor Well

This piece is already temperature-neutral, which is the part people miss when they see the word plain. Every rung of the line — the 50,000-work base craft, all four schematic tiers, this Legendary — equips Cold Resistance Lv. 1 and Heat Resistance Lv. 1 together, so the body slot never has to be swapped for a night run, a Snowfields errand or the fringe of the volcano, and your head and leg slots are free to push whichever direction you are actually struggling with. Read the specialised versions against that floor rather than against nothing: a Cold or Heat Resistant copy keeps Lv. 1 on the side it is not named for and adds exactly two things, a step to Lv. 2 on its own side and an elemental damage cut — Ice Resistance Lv. 1 on the cold build, Fire Resistance Lv. 1 on the heat build. That damage cut, not the temperature bar, is the real reason to carry one, so keep the specialised chest for a Frostallion or Blazamut fight and wear this everywhere else.

Attack Up (S) is the hidden half of what the schematic buys. The base craft carries no attack passive at all; the Uncommon build adds it at Lv. 1 and each tier steps it up, so a Legendary lands on Lv. 4 — the only version of this armour that gives you offence as well as defence. Budget for it before you commit: the Legendary needs 6 Ancient Civilization Parts where the base craft needs none, and work climbs 50,000 to 200,000 to 400,000 to 800,000 to 1,600,000 across the five tiers, doubling every step. That is thirty-two times the labour of the plain piece for a single body slot, so queue it on the Production Assembly Line beside your best Handiwork crew and go do something else. Never burn parts building an intermediate tier as a stopgap — fusing five schematics costs only the schematics, while every build you make costs parts you cannot farm quickly.

The plain Legendary is not simply a cheaper Cold or Heat Resistant version — it is a different trade. Both specialised builds reach 288 defence and 12,000 durability against this one's 240 and 7,000, and both unlock later, at 40 and 41 rather than 37. What they cost is 80 Refined Ingot instead of 60, 40 Leather instead of 30, an extra High Quality Cloth, 2,240,000 work instead of 1,600,000, and either 8 Cryogenic Coolant or 24 Flame Organ on top. What they cost less of is the material that actually gates you: 4 Ancient Civilization Parts against this recipe's 6. If parts are your bottleneck and you hold both schematics, the specialised one is strictly the better build. The crossover on the schematic tiers is worth knowing too — a plain Legendary at 240 still beats an Uncommon Cold or Heat copy at 234, and only loses once a Rare one at 252 turns up.

Do not scrap this the moment Pal Metal Armor unlocks. That tech lands at level 46 and its plain craft is 220 defence, 750 HP and 5,000 durability — under the 240, 800 and 7,000 you are already wearing, and under it on every line at once. The first Pal Metal that genuinely beats a Legendary Refined chest piece is an Uncommon schematic at 286, so unless one has already dropped you are better off staying in this until Plasteel at 51, where even the no-schematic craft opens at 385. On a normal run that is a working window of nine to fourteen levels, which is long enough to justify spending the Ancient Civilization Parts.

Every Tier of Refined Metal Armor

The same piece exists at 5 rarities, and the gap is not cosmetic: defense runs 150 to 240, 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 Refined Metal Armor Does

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

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

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

Schematics That Unlock Refined Metal Armor

The Technology tree hands you the plain Refined Metal Armor at level 37 for 3 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. The fastest route is treasure map digs (tier 2), and the reason is the ladder rather than the top rung: that pool stocks every tier, so the common copies it hands you fuse upward into the one you want. Counting them, a top-tier Refined Metal Armor schematic works out at roughly 56 containers against the 97 the 4★ drop rate alone suggests. Spare low tiers are progress, not clutter. 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
Refined Metal Armor Schematic 4	4★	Treasure map digs (tier 2), Mount Obsidian sea base camp stashes, Mount Obsidian camp loot +13 more — best 1.0% (grade 3/4/5/6) · Supply drops in the Desert (0.08%)

Alternatives and Upgrades

Step up from here and you get Heat Resistant Pal Metal Armor at 250 defense; step down and it is Cold Resistant Refined Metal Armor at 234. The size of that step is what decides whether the crafting bill is justified yet.

Heat Resistant Pal Metal Armor250Cold Resistant Refined Metal Armor234

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

Hallowed Plate MailPal Metal ArmorCold Resistant Refined Metal ArmorHeat Resistant Refined Metal ArmorCold Resistant Metal ArmorHeat Resistant Metal ArmorV1 ArmorMetal ArmorCold Resistant Pal Metal ArmorCold Resistant Pelt ArmorHeat Resistant Pelt ArmorHeat Resistant Pal Metal Armor