Yeah, scanning is idiotic. The whole printer is, honestly. Here's my ideal:
-No cost to scan, item is not destroyed.
-
Small cost to print.
-Anything can be scanned or printed; attach much higher costs to printing weapons/armor/ore/bars/etc. So for example if it costs 1p to print a single concrete block, 25p to print an office desk, etc., have it cost 500p to print a ~level 5 sword, 3000p to print a level 40 gun, 2000p to print a diamond, etc.
That'd give you the utility it
should have (easily making building supplies and props to order), give you a way to circumvent the worst of the grind if you're careful about saving pixels, but not let you just ignore having to mine by printing off all the bars you need. Also, it would give you a legitimate way of sharing a cool item you found with a friend, rather than duping/using an inv editor/not being able to share it because it's fuck-off hard to find.
Basically it should still be available as a wealth dump (got more money than you can use? line your ship's walls with impervium blocks!) without making it useless for the apparent purpose (easing the pain of building by providing a ready source of exactly what you need through game mechanics rather than cheating).
Yeah, on the modding we could certainly use later progressions of bow...
Is Iron the last?
Steel. After that there are no more and it's useless.