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When someone burns Allomantic pewter, they get a handful of physical enhancements. The most notable of these being an increase in physical strength. Your strength is increased based on what your strength is without an enhancement; all your muscles are equally enhanced, so more muscle means more strength. But, wouldn’t you need more investiture, more energy, to enhance more total muscle mass? (By the way, this post is based on how I understand Allomantic pewter, and I could be wrong, so if I'm incorrect please don't hesitate to tell me.) Okay, let’s say there’s a Pewterarm who relies on their power too much and doesn’t work out. They can only bench press 100 lbs. without any enhancement, and they can bench press 200 lbs. while burning pewter without flaring. There’s another Pewterarm of equal Allomantic power who is a bodybuilder, and they can bench press 300 lbs. without any enhancement, and can then bench press 600 lbs. while burning pewter without flaring. Even though both Pewterarms are of equal Allomantic strength, one is clearly getting a far greater energy output from their Allomancy. So, what the heck is going on? Energy can’t just appear out of nowhere, so where is it coming from? Is a Pewterarm with bigger muscles simply more efficient than a Pewterarm with weaker muscles, similar to how Radiants who are of a higher oath are more investiture efficient than lower oath Radiants? Are the Pewterarms with bigger muscles somehow drawing in more investiture than other Pewterarms? I'm just a little confused as to how Pewterarms are doubling or tripling their strength seemingly without any extra investiture.

What Allomantic Metals Would be Best to Enhance? I made a post awhile ago in the Cosmere Q&A that said it might be possible to add multiple Hemalurgic charges together by using Raysium to combine them into a single spike. If one could do this, it would potentially allow them to gain a massive amount of strength to whatever power they were grafting onto their spiritweb. I recently went and looked over it, and it got me thinking; assuming that this method would actually work, what powers would you actually want to go though the effort of enhancing? What Allomantic powers would actually be useful if they could be enhanced using this method, and what powers would be useless or of minimal use? I think that Allomantic bronze and copper would be the most useful to enhance as neither, if burned away at an accelerated rate, would affect your performance in combat much, and having a massively increased range to your bronze sense and the ability to easily pierce Copperclouds would be extremely beneficial for rooting out Allomancers. Having enhanced copper would allow you to conceal yourself from anyone else with enhanced bronze, and you’d be able to protect yourself from even the most powerful Soother or Rioter. Allomantic pewter would have some potential risk in an enhanced form, as the rate at which you burn a metal is directly related to the amount of effect you get out of it, and pewter already burns quickly, which makes it the Allomantic power most likely to run out of fuel in the middle of a stressful combat encounter. However, having what is essentially a far more controlled version of a duralumin/pewter burn would be very useful in combat, since you could receive a massive boost to strength, speed, dexterity, and durability without completely draining your Allomantic reserves, and you could do it over a short period of time rather than a momentary burst. Zinc and Brass would be the next in terms of potency if enhanced; you could potentially pull a Lord Ruler and smother or explode the emotions of others, and dominating Hemalurgic constructs would be a breeze. However, in most cases you want to use only a little bit of a push on them, as this is the best way to be sneaky and subtle, and having a greatly enhanced use of this power would likely make controlling your rate of burning more difficult. Allomantic steel and iron, while potentially useful in an enhanced form, would be very, very dangerous it you weren’t equally enhanced by pewter, as you could easily rip yourself apart or crush yourself to death if you weren’t careful. Cadmium and Bendalloy would gain minimal benefit from being enhanced since your already can stretch time a decent amount with them, and they already burn very quickly. I don’t see much use for gold, but Allomantic electrum might be decently more useful if you could see anywhere from a few extra seconds to a few minutes in the future. Chromium, nicrosil, aluminum, and duralumin would not benefit in any practical way from being enhanced from what I can tell. Tin would actually be counter productive in most cases, as all you would accomplish is overwhelming your senses, or incapacitating yourself from the smallest of pains. What is your opinion on this matter, fellow 17th Sharders?

If someone who had the potential to become a Misting or Mistborn was given a Hemalurgic spike before they had the opportunity to snap and come into their powers, would the Connection to Ruin prevent them from snapping and gaining their inborn Allomantic powers from Preservation's power?

I remember reading a post asking about how Kelsier discovered new metals and alloys that work with allomancy. This got me thinking enough to realize that the feruchemy metals and allomantic metals are the same (do the alloys have to be the same or can they be different?) so if a feruchemist can store and tap into a metal then it must also be allomantic! No need to eat, try and burn it, fail and get sick. Has this method been confirmed anywhere? Because I Googled and nothing related comes up. Do you guys think that this is a viable method?

The Bands of Mourning allow for this to work, but they’re a special case. From a meta viewpoint, it feels far too powerful an ability to just hand out. Even using Hemalurgy to gain access to compounding require sacrifice, but if you could gain that kind of power without the cost? Not only that, but if people can make these so that they have compounding available, then why would anyone make an Unsealed Metalmind that doesn’t allow compounding, since those abilities would be so superior to non-compounding abilities? So, would Unsealed Metalminds made from multiple people, the way they are typically made, just not allow this to work? Or are we just going to see a lot more compounding in the future?

We know from RoW that in order to 'reverse the polarity' of Investiture and turn it into anti-Investiture, at least in the case of Lights, you need to separate it from its normal tone and then make the next thing it 'hears' that same tone with different intent. Now, Navani accomplished this isolation using vacuum tubes. However, I think that with access to allomancy, there's an easier way. So we know that, besides muffling allomantic pulses, coppercoulds interfere with Rhythms. Therefore, I think that if you put a Light inside a coppercloud* and then exposed it to its proper anti-tone while it was still in there, you'd get anti-Investiture. *It's possible you'd need a copper savant or multiple overlapping clouds or something to fully block out the tone, since we know that with enough juice a coppercloud can be pierced, but maybe not. I want to say just taking scale into account that Shards' pure tones would be pretty good at piercing copperclouds, but looking back it feels like the tones are actually pretty difficult to hear outside certain special conditions.

It’s been mentioned by Brandon Sanderson in his mistborn annotations that metals piercing your body can be allomantically burned. Could someone burn away a sword stabbed through them? Could they compound a metalmind too large to swallow by having a small part of it pierce their body?

Do we know how quickly metalminds burn when compounding? Does the whole metalmind go at once like an enhancement metal, releasing 10x whatever you had stored with it and forcing you to either use or store it away again in the space of a moment? Or is it more like tapping, where you control the rate at which you draw out power, and the burn rate fluctuates based on that? Or is it something else?

In The Hero of Ages, we see Vin use Allomantic electrum, but she comments on how it doesn’t really affect the fight except to counter Atium. Not only did electrum not “affect the battle much”, neither Vin nor Elend uses it outside of combat. Is Allomantic Electrum just not very useful? What’s more, wouldn’t it not truly counter another form of future-sight unless you could actually use it to reliably change your decisions by seeing the future?

Which is better of these two powers? Allomantic electrum or Feruchemical Chromium?

Which is better for detecting investiture? A Seeker burning bronze, or an Awakener holding Breaths?

Personally, I think that Feruchemical duralumin would be the best, as you could understand the local language, and you’d have an easier time interacting with the local magic system. Barring that, Allomantic bronze might also be a good option, as you would be able to sense sources of investiture, and Allomantic chromium would be a good option too, because you could sap the investiture from certain things that otherwise could harm you.

This WoB says that Allomantic bronze could sense sources of investiture that are harder to detect normally, but that it would require a minor “tweak” of some kind Holding Bio-Chromatic Breaths allows one to sense nearby sources of investiture, including those that aren’t active. If an Allomantic Seeker could get ahold of some Breaths, could the interaction between the two sources of investiture allow their bronze sense to detect these sources of inactive investiture as well?

Between these two quotes we can see that Smokers and Seekers should both be able to affect the rhythms of Roshar in the same way they're able to dampen/detect allomantic pulses. And in the first quote, Brandon explains that the rhythms are tied to the spiritual realm, not so much the cognitive. So what I'm thinking is, copper and bronze being treated as 'cognitive' metals is one of those "Scadrians don't have a complete understanding of the metallic arts, there's some errors in the provided information that will clear up as the timeline and in-universe research progress" (heavily paraphrased) things that Brandon's talked about before. I would almost suggest that the proper grouping for copper and bronze would be with gold and electrum, since all four seem to tie to the spiritual realm more directly than other metals, except that would throw the whole internal/external division of allomantic metals into question since all four are internal metals.

A small theory that I think got some solid support with RoW. So we saw in Rhythm of War that the Allomantic/Feruchemical/Hemalurgic metals have functions outside of the Metallic Arts and are one of three key components in fabrials alongside spren & gemstones. It makes sense, metal acts as a key for Allomancers to access Preservation's Investiture. Without Allomancy in your Spiritweb, you can't access that Investiture but you should still be able to use the metal to filter other Investiture that you do have access to. That is kind of similar to how the Polestones themselves function, why they can hold Lights Their small differences in chemical structure & colour is all that is needed for Investiture to distinguish them. An element's atomic structure absorbs and reflects different wavelengths of light (or Light), the light can be used to identify those atoms & molecules. A metal's structure is used as a filter for Investiture, the same probably goes for a gemstone. Colour is more important magically for gemstones but this is what the colour of an object means in physics & chemistry, their molecular structure would be a bit different. A metal acts as a filter and lets Investiture through and a gem both filters it (what gem you use does matter for Soulcasters and Artifabrians) and holds it. So, gemstones should, like metals, work across the Cosmere, and be able to hold other types of Investiture than just the Rosharan Lights. Idea came from here: Edit: we have confirmation that the Mists can be trapped in gemstones Edit: in the Brandon spoiler livestream at 33:20, Brandon confirms that Autonomy's Investiture can be stored in the Polestones but he isn't sure if that is something that could happen naturally (but it could definitely capture the Dor) and even if it does, it would be very ineffective, maybe it would store very little bit of charge that would only be perceptible to someone with the right instruments and it would soon dissipate. I've noted previously in discussions that White Sand requires surprisingly little Investiture to recharge. I think the oldest instance of this theory is here: While it takes four hours for black sand to recharge back to white sand on Taldain's Dayside, just proximity to Shallan's Lightweaving was enough to charge Hoid's white sand in OB, this happened when Kal, Shallan, Adolin and Elhokar went to Kholinar. In the very same section and following section that took place in Shadesmar, it is noted that Shallan's Lightweaving used far less Stormlight than Kaladin's Lashings. Keep this in mind. I do have an idea on why White Sand could apparently recharge from Taldain's sunlight or apparently even from very far from its starlight as per a prev WoB, but would be difficult to store in a gemstone. In RoW, we see Navani use a prism to separate the light emitted by Towerlight back into the bands of Stormlight and Lifelight, she notes that she didn't separate the Lights or the Investiture, just the "Investiture radiation". I think that's what Taldain's sun outputs: not gaseous Investiture but Investiture radiation. And that's why it outputs so little Investiture that it takes black sand exposure to direct sunlight for four hours in order to recharge and turn white again but Stormlight, even sheer proximity to a Lightweaving, which in itself is noted to use much less Stormlight compared to Surge of Gravitation.

I once made a theory that you could possibly Hemalurgically spike an Allomantic gold shadow and then graft it to yourself in order to overwrite your spiritweb, kind of like a bootleg version of Forgery. But could you instead spike an Allomantic electrum shadow? Perhaps you could give yourself skills and memories from a hypothetical future version of yourself? You normally would only be able to see a few seconds into the future, but maybe duralumin or reverse compounding would allow you to stretch it further.

Can an allomancer burn a piece of metal that is held within a thin container, or has a thin coating? If so, then maybe this method could be used to burn Harmonium or Tanavastium, if the metal pieces were kept secure and didn’t break out.

I couldn't find the quote, but Sanderson has said that there is more investiture in surgebinding than allomancy. I believe this to be the reason why a twinborn's resonance to be less pronounced than a radiant's; there's simply less innate investiture involved in the system. Any thoughts on this?

Hemalurgy works ripping off peices of someone's spiritweb, then stapling it into someone else's spiritweb to give them that stolen ability. But an allomancer who got their power from hemalurgy burns a metal, do they draw from Ruin, or Preservation? In addition, is the investiture inside the spike Preservation's investiture forced to work for that person, or is it a copy of the same ability, but made of Ruin's power?

Of all the Cosmere's known magic users, I'm not really sure that anyone can compare to the fullborn (mistborn + full feruchemist) in terms of raw power. They can: 1. Get a nearly infinite supply of any feruchemical attribute that they want as long as they have the metals available, then tap them at pretty much any speed that they want. 2. Reverse compound somehow (probably feruchemical nicrocil at work here, but it has yet to be confirmed) to increase their allomantic powers to a ridiculous amount, pretty much as much as they want, similar to their feruchemical counterparts. 3. There isn't really a maximum limit to the amount of investiture that they can store, except maybe the amount of metalminds that they can carry, which is still a lot. It doesn't seem like fullborn have the traditional limitations that you'd expect to see on other metalborn, surgbinders, awakeners, or any other magic users really. How powerful are they, really, and what would it take to bring down a competent fullborn? (Mcguffins such as shards of Adonalsium or Dawn shards don't count, I'm referring to "normal" magic users)

So, what got me thinking about this was Spook's observation on how well a-Tin and a-Pewter pair together, sort of like they're two halves of the same whole (not his exact words, but that seemed like the gist of it). Now, I know that's certainly not the case for all push/pull pairs, but I think for a-Gold and a-Electrum it is. a-Gold, on it own, is a very disorienting metal to burn. Your brain isn't equipped to handle existing in two self-states at once. However, we know that Atium enhances your cognitive abilities to be able to process the information you get from the atium shadows, and as near as I can figure a-Electrum would have to do something similar with your own electrum shadows. So if you burn them together, I think the enhanced cognitive abilities from a-Electrum would let you process the increased information coming in from a-Gold.

I can’t find the source for it, so sorry I can’t cite it, but I remember reading somewhere that becoming an aluminum savant would cleanse you of impurities. So, if you had multiple hemalurgic spikes and you didn’t want to be controlled by any shard you came across, could you burn enough aluminum to cleanse your spirit web of impurities, seamlessly melding your spirit web and the spliced spirit web together, leaving one’s self protected against direct control?

In the Hero of Ages and in a few other Mistborn books, we see that hemalurgic creations, namely Marsh, were able to maintain a sliver of their own autonomy, even while being controlled by Ruin or another Shard/allomancer. Electrum is capable of storing determination, and compounding it would magnify that determination. So, if you were burning an electrum metalmind and Harmony tried to take over your mind, would you be able to resist him through virtue of nothing but pure willpower?

I actually brought this up as a side in my Metallic arts Challenge, but after thinking about it's implications, I think that it deserves a thread of its own. If someone with an allomantic ability, such as a mistborn, could remove it with a hemalurgic spike, then heal back the power (probably via unsealed gold metalmind), would burning that spike then result in them increasing their power for that ability? We know from WoB that burning a hemalurgic spike has the effect of splicing your spiritual DNA with the person whose power the spike contains, so to me this line of reasoning seems logical.

I absolutely love scadrial's magic systems. They feel diverse and like there is a lot that can be done with them if you're creative, but at the same time, they're simple and straightforward enough that the average joe (such as myself) can enjoy coming up with ways that they might be useful. If you have any ideas on how allomancy, feruchemy, and hemalurgy can be used creatively, I'd love to hear them The rules of the challenge are: 1 you can only use powers and effects granted by one of the metallic arts, though you can reference other magic systems to explain what you are attempting to accomplish, or to try and prove why it seems feasible. 2 you can use theories that are not yet fully proven canonically possible, though you should explain why it seem doable. 3 you can use any combination of powers or abilities granted via allomancy, feruchemy, or hemalurgy, even if they would be extremely difficult to get a hold of in practical terms.