Typically nozzles are made of brass, and these are the nozzles that ship with the printer. Brass offers excellent thermal characteristics; it heats quickly and maintains temperature well while transferring heat. This makes it efficient. It's also cheap and easy to produce. It suffers however from being very soft and wears easily, even “soft” filaments like white PLA which contains lots of pigments including titanium will wear the nozzle quickly. Still, considering how cheap brass nozzles are, given the excellent characteristics it's still often preferred to use brass nozzles even with mildly abrasive filaments and replace them after a print or three if you seldom use abrasive materials. Glass fiber filaments are capable of destroying a brass nozzle almost instantly.

All nozzles wear no matter what they are made of, the question is how hard are they compared to the extruded material and flow pressure which determines how quickly it wears.

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Anything over time will abrade what it flows through, this is how water carves through rock and mountains, and it's less abrasive than plastic. While wear is inevitable, some materials and additives are more abrasive than others.

Certain pigments are more abrasive:

• titanium used to make white
• strontium used in glow in the dark filaments

• wood
• carbon fiber
• glass fiber
• metals
• ceramics

Already discussed above.

Worse thermal characteristics than brass. Wears better (slower) than brass. Good for general use.

Worse thermal characteristics than Steel. Wears better than Steel. Good for Carbon fiber and glass fiber filled materials.