How does metal, like steel, naturally occur in nature?
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> like steel
Well, that one doesn’t. Steel is a very specific form of iron, and even if you somehow randomly get a natural blast furnace, it would take some comical natural Rube Goldberg scenario to get everything together to make *stainless* steel alloy – normal steel will just corrode to rust in a few months/years.
Otherwise, most of the time metals are present as part of minerals. For example, iron tends to be present as things like Iron(III) oxide ([hematite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hematite)) or Iron(II,III) oxide ([magnetite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetite)). These are basically various forms of crystallized rust. Aluminum tends to take a bunch of forms like [gibbsite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbsite) and mix with other minerals to form [bauxite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite). You might even be lucky enough to find crystallized aluminum oxide – [corundum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corundum), which has red and blue color variants commonly known as “ruby” and “sapphire”.
You might even find elemental, pure metals! Gold likes to do that – it’s very non-reactive, so it doesn’t form oxides and such like most other metals. This is where sifting river sediment for pure gold nuggets comes in. You can also find copper like that, it makes [interesting shapes!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_copper)
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