Originally posted by Ghevd:

Do you have the wishbone? You can find iron without finding crypts.

Stagbreaker is an alternative but a bit exploity.

I'm divided on the Stagbreaker method. It's very clever, and to be perfectly honest, it doesn't really give you a huge advantage or let you skip much of the game (With a little luck, it's not uncommon to find exposed scrap piles anyway if you know where to look, similar to silver). It's mostly used for alternate progress challenges and in fact, makes the game more difficult (One crypt is likely to yield an order of magnitude more iron than several hours stagbreaker sweeping)