Iron ore

Iron ore is a natural material that can be obtained with a pickaxe or a primitive pickaxe from Mining a natural iron source block. Each block possesses 1,500 ore that can then be smelted into a Lump of iron, Iron bar or Iron ingot using the Smelting skill. At launch, there was a total of 2,686,160,196 m3 iron ore blocks in the entire game

Iron ore veins are clearly distinguishable from Rock or other Ores by the iron typical colour (see Picture 1).

Storage
Ore cannot be dropped into "Dropped items" bags, and won't fit in most containers. However, it can be stored in carts, Warehouses, Smelting devices and Forging Devices.

Alternatively ore can be poured on the ground, then with a Shovel be retrieved via "lower ground level". Each drop or lowering activity transfers 30 ores. Don't make too big a pile when dropping - move on and make a line of ore.

''Warning! Pouring Regional ore on the ground with terraforming will make it loss its regional status. Store regional ore in a container or device as listed above if you want to preserve its regional status.''

Smelting
When smelting Iron ore, you have 3 choices for what you want to turn it into. To smelt iron ore, it must be heated to 1500 degrees or higher. You may turn it into Lumps of Iron, Iron Bars, and Iron Ingots. A conversion chart for the materials need to the items will be below.

You can save durability on your furnace by always melting ore into ingots and afterwards reheat the ingots to 1500 degrees and smelt them into bars or lumps. it produces the same amout of materials with only 4 uses of the furnace instead of 80 when making lumps for example. This is economic, but also gains you fewer skillpoints.