Alternate Materials

These rules address weapons crafted with alternate materials or techniques.

Bronze Weapons 

Bronze weapons are usually found as antiquities, but they can be purchased new in a few areas. Some cultures may prefer bronze for its beauty and ease of maintenance.
Any normal weapon or ammunition usually made wholly (or mostly) with iron or steel can instead be made with bronze. Bronze weapons have trouble holding a sharp edge. This applies a –1 penalty to damage rolls with bronze weapons or ammunition that inflict piercing or slashing damage.
Bronze-made weapons costs three-quarters of the price of normal, iron-made versions.

Adamantined Weapons

A skilled smith with access to this rare material can add adamantine components to a weapon to improve its ability to break objects; a hit against an object with an adamantine weapon is automatically a critical hit, and the material improves the weapon’s performance against certain construct creatures. This ammunition does not break in battle, allowing you to recover each piece after a fight if you spend 2 minutes searching.
You can add adamantine to a single weapon for 500 gp (or 1 piece of ammunition for 50 gp.) This cost represents the price of the material and the expertise needed to add adamantine to the weapon without making it less effective.

Ersatz Weapons

Some cultures lack the tools and techniques to fashion weapons out of metal, treated leather, and similar high-grade materials. For others, such materials are too rare or expensive to acquire. Such societies often turn to alternatives, particularly non-metal materials, to construct their armor and weapons.
Ersatz weapons are made of similar materials or obsidian, bone, wood, horn, antler, stone, or crystal.
Almost any normal weapon can be made of alternative materials, even those not normally crafted from metal. Weapons that have the ballistic or ammunition weapon properties cannot be made with ersatz materials, but their ammunition can be.
Ersatz weapons cost one-quarter their normal, listed prices. Such gear initially performs as well as the real thing, but its fragility is quickly exposed if used for any significant period. Each ersatz weapon is burdened with the ersatz weapon property.

Silvered Weapons

A skilled smith can add silver components to the striking surfaces of a weapon without degrading the weapon’s performance. Such weapons affect creatures that are normally immune to or resistant to damage from non-silver weapons.
You can silver a weapon for 100 gp (or a single piece of ammunition for 10 gp). This cost represents more than the price of the silver; it includes the time and expertise needed to add silver to the weapon without making it less effective.

Other Materials

A skilled smith can add other minerals to a weapon for 100 gp, or 10 gp for a piece of ammunition. Alternately, a player character can perform the craft using smith’s tools, taking 20 days for a weapon or 2 days for a piece of ammunition. 
This is useful if the character encounters a source of special metal, particularly if monsters have new and exotic immunities, resistances, or vulnerabilities; like fey creatures that are vulnerable to cold iron or shadowlands monsters that have resistant to nonmagical attacks not made with jade-infused weapons. 
Whatever the case, the character must supply the raw materials in addition to the smith’s fee. The process requires 2 pounds of the metal (or 20 standard gemstones powdered among other material) to integrate with a weapon. 
It doesn’t make sense when an upgrade uses more weight of metal than the entire weapon. If you wish, you can halve these material requirements for any weapon that already weighs only 1 pound or less, like a dagger. 
Likewise, you peg the cost of an alternate-material ammunition to its equivalent weight in material (plus 10 gp) for each. For example, a gold-treated arrow would cost 10 gp for the labor and 2½ gp for the material (1/20th of a pound of gold, the same weight as an arrow). 
You apply these adjustments to silvered or adamantined weapons too.