Steel

Steel is not by itself a magical material. However, the manner in which it is manufactured in the Locus is significantly different than on Earth. As a result, the material is associated with various types of magic, either in its manufacture or its use.

Locus steel can be divided into three principal varieties or grades. These may then be used as a base for more specialized alloys. The principal grades of steel are as follows:

Core steel: Core steel is an alloy made from summoned core planetary material. The resulting material consists of iron alloyed with significant amounts of nickel, which in theory would give a relatively tough material. Unfortunately, the freshly summoned core material is also high in sulfur and silica, and must be processed to remove these impurities before it is structurally useful.

Core steel is made at specialized facilities called summoneries. These are usually located near rivers, which are dammed to provide water power. As this water is televated downward, the energy is then used to televate a much smaller mass of core material upwards. The freshly summoned material is then placed in a force bubble crucible, where it is allowed to cool slowly. Because the material is summoned at such an extraordinary temperature, sulfur impurities become unstable as pressure is removed and boil off. Remaining sulfur can be burned off by bubbling air through the hot liquid. Silica floats to the surface and can be skimmed off. This results in noxious fumes that must then be removed from the facility, but this can be done easily by using a televator as an extremely tall chimney to gate fumes high into the air.

The main advantages of core steel are its low cost and consistent quality. Because it does not have to be mined or smelted, core steel requires relatively little labor and no fuel to produce. Unlike mined iron, one does not have to consider the distribution of mineral deposits; core steel can be summoned with equal ease from any location that has the energy resources to power the summoning, and most populated areas have access to flowing water. Because all summoneries on a given planet summon from the same planetary core, there are no regional variations in the quality of core steel; the only variability is from the means by which it is processed to remove impurities.

Core steel has two main drawbacks. The first is that, while its quality is consistent, it is consistently mediocre. The starting sulfur content of core material is so high that no amount of mundane processing can bring it down to the levels needed for a high quality steel. The second is that the amount of energy needed to summon it is enormous. Diverting an entire river into a summonery produces only a thin trickle of liquid metal. While this thin trickle requires relatively little labor to produce and thus remains inexpensive, the supply of core steel is in practical terms hardly infinite.

Spring steel: While there are limits to the quality that core steel can achieve through mundane processing, magical processing gives a much higher quality of alloy. Harmful impurities in the core steel can be transmuted into helpful impurities, giving an alloy that retains the high toughness potential of the original nickel steel, but without the brittleness from the sulfur content. The resulting alloy is ideal in applications where high resilience is needed.

As the name suggests, spring steel is ideally suited to making springs. This type of alloy is commonly used to make crossbow laths. It can also be used to make armor, in which case its high suppleness gives it good resistance to physical damage.

The main drawback to spring steel is that its extensive magical processing leaves it contaminated with transmutation residues. This magical contamination means that the material can never be used in mass-produced enchantments; attempting to place an enchantment on a spring steel device renders the spell uncontrollable and causes the entire batch to fizzle. For this reason, spring steel is restricted to applications where raw mundane strength is good enough.

Pattern steel: This is steel made by actually smelting ores. Because of the economic supremacy of core steel, smelting technology is underdeveloped and persists only in specialized applications where the properties of core steel render it unsuitable.

The name derives from the means employed to compensate for limitations in smelting technology. Primitive smelting practices often have a difficult time controlling the carbon content of steel. This results in metal which is either to brittle or too soft. Combining these materials to form a composite, however, results in a material that is just right. This technique is known as pattern welding, as it creates a distinctive pattern on the surface of any article crafted from it.

Pattern steel is mainly used in the manufacture of magical weapons. This is because core steel is too brittle to make an effective and reliable weapon, whereas spring steel cannot be mass-enchanted. The use of pattern steel in a weapon usually indicates that the blade is magical, since there is no other reason to use such an expensive and unpredictable alloy. Since it indicates that the enchantment is specifically placed on the blade itself, this indicates one of a relatively limited range of enchantments. For this reason, pattern steel has come to be associated with the deadliest of blade enchantments, the dreaded melting sword.