Originally posted by Nerevar:

pretty useless. the outdoor piles are not cotaineing much iron to begin with. youll struggle to even get 100 iron. and most of them spawn below waterlevel on top where you simply cannot mine em fully. the bigger problem was always finding them without the wishbone.

the mistlands method is faster. more risky but definitly alot more reliable than digging around the swamp. the abom would speed this process up much to begin with if you dont know where the piles even are.

this is also not makeing iron available any earlier really. you can just kill oozers to get ironscrap or just FISH for it at any point in time aswell.

It's not a method to get large quantities, but to GET iron in the first place. Say if you want to make stone buildings, and you come across an early swamp before Elder, or even Eikythr. Mistlands is end game, and i'm talking about early game, unless that's a tactic, though sailing across the world to put in that much effort is probably not the best method at that stage. Oozers are a rare spawn that only have a 33% chance to drop 1? iron at time. And to fish you need access to the trader which is RNG, and quite unlikely before Elder (for me anyways), or by getting it from a frozen lake in the mountains, which again, is very rare, and high risk before Elder.

Abominations are roughly as common as trolls, and due to their aoe attack, they can mine deep underground, and the loot dropped pops up on the ground above.

So yeah, it's useless if you already are late game in mistlands, or have a fishing rod (though that's probably more tedious).