Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing, in basic terms, is the skill with which a player can make and repair weapons, shields and metal armor, he can also make cannons, cannonballs and metal kegs for distilling!

What Skills?

The easiest way is to choose the pre-made Blacksmith template when you make a new character. This gives you a useful set of skills and stats to begin with. Suggested skills are:

• Blacksmithy; obviously
• Arms Lore; gives bonuses to exceptionally made items in addition to the normal Exceptional Bonus;
• Mining; needed for recycling/salvaging items you don’t want, as well as mining the raw material you will craft with
• Tinkering; allows you to make your own tools
• Tailoring; not essential, but allows you to add leather armor to your range
• Imbuing; a relatively new skill, allows you to add magic properties to your crafted items, either in a controlled way through the imbuing skill or more randomly, but also more powerfully, through Runic Reforging.
• magery or chivalry; mostly for travelling and healing if you should run into anything hostile. Magery if you want to be able to retaliate.

What Race

• Humans get more ore (about 10% of the time will get one extra ore per dig) and a higher carrying capacity,
• Elves have a chance of getting a better ratio of colored ore to iron from colored ore veins.
• Gargoyles get neither of these bonuses, and furthermore can’t ride mounts but receive a racial bonus when imbuing. On balance most crafters seem to feel that the drawbacks outweigh this bonus, few smiths are gargoyle.

Starting Out

Begin in New Haven by buying your skills as high as you can, then take the quests from Jacob Waltz for Mining, George Hesphaestus for Blacksmithing

Since you will need resources to train your blacksmith skill it is recommended that you train mining a little before embarking on smith training. For that you should read the mining page

Next, either train tinkering to a level at which you can make tools, or buy some from a blacksmith NPC. You will need either smith hammers or tongs.
Once you have a supply of ingots and tools you can begin training. An excellent starting point, which will also earn you some gold and rewards, is to craft items for NPC’s using the Bulk Order system.

Doubleclick your hammer or tongs to bring up the smith’s menu. Item categories are listed on the left, clicking on one of those categories will fill the right side of the gump with a list of the items in that category. The arrow to the left of the item name will make the item, the box to the right of the item name opens up a page with further information and crafting options. Here you will see the skill needed to make the item, your percentage chance of succeeding and the number of ingots required for each item. Also at the bottom of this page you have the option to make a quanity.

Recipe Quests

Some items require you to have read a recipe in order to be able to make them. You can get these recipes, and still be training, from Heartwood. The best quests for training are the Bascinet quest, “Nothing Fancy”. You will be able to gain on Bascinets up to 58.3 skill, then the Broadsword quest, “Cuts Both Ways”. Gains will run up to around 85.5 You may choose to return to this quest in order to complete your set of recipes.

One other quest is desireable for blacksmiths, it allows you to make the special ‘bone machete‘ that combat characters need to enter Blighted Grove

Travelling

While it’s perfectly possible to run, or walk, everywhere you may want to go, most prefer to travel magically with the help of marked runes, usually in a rune book. Magical travel can be achieved in 3 basic ways:

• Charges in a runebook. Requires no magery skill, charges are replenished by dropping recall scrolls onto the runebook. Recall scrolls can be bought from player vendors and some NPC mage shops.
• Recall spell, cast using magery skill from about 40.00 skill
• Sacred Journey spell, cast using chivalry skill from 15.00 skill, costs ‘tithing points’

Pets

If you are travelling to Heartwood for quests you may find a pack horse or pack llama to help carry your raw materials is useful, however a popular pet is a Giant Beetle that you can both ride and use as a pack animal. When mining you might prefer to use a Fire Beetle. The Fire Beetle is the most useful pet a blacksmith/miner can own, because this strange pet has the unique property of being hot enough to smelt ore on. Simply double click the ore and target the beetle. It is also rideable, which may give an entire new slant on the idea of being ‘in the hot seat’. Here is a link to more information on pets.

Once you have completed your training, or at least reached a useful level, more complex considerations come into play:

Each weapon or piece of metal armor crafted has certain base properties that are the same for all non-exceptional iron weapons and armor. These standardized properties can be found listed here: Base Properties

Exceptionally crafted pieces of armor (excluding shields) receive additional resists, distributed randomly among the five resist types. The amount of additional resists being 15. Exceptionally crafted Samurai armor (excluding all helms except Jingasa) receives the additional property ‘mage armor’. Exceptional weapons receive a damage increase bonus of 35%

Further additional bonuses may be imparted by the Arms Lore skill.

The material used also has an effect on an item’s properties. This can be seen on the Material Bonuses page.

Dragonscale Armor

This armor is unique in that it is not crafted using ingots, but using dragon scales. For this reason it cannot be enhanced, however it can be imbued. The basic resists of dragonscale armor is found on the ‘base properties‘ page while the adjustments for the different scale types are found on the ‘material bonuses‘ page.

Runic Tools

In addition to the bonuses obtained from using higher class materials, an object may be given further bonuses if crafted by a runic crafting tool, which are available as rewards for the BOD system.

When crafting an item using a runic tool, the crafters endows the object with a number of magical properties the quantity and quality of which are randomly determined based on the runic tool used.

These bonuses are listed on the page ‘runic bonuses‘.
Runic tools also feature in the ‘runic reforging‘ ability, for which the crafter needs ‘imbuing’ skill.

From Publish 85 runic hammers can also be used to reforge the following tinker-crafted items:

• Smith Hammer
• Sledge Hammer
• Pick Axe
• Pitchfork
• Butcher Knife
• Cleaver
• Skinning Knife
• Hatchet
• Gargish Necklace
• Gargish Glasses
• Gargish Amulet
• Gargish Earrings

Enhancing an Item

Enhancing an item applies the ‘material bonuses’ to that item, however its high failure rate and potential to destroy the item means it is rarely used unless the crafter has invested in a ‘forged metal tool’ – an item purchased for cash from Origin store.

Basic Rules of Enhancing

1. Only items made from iron may be enhanced with colored metals.
2. A smith can only enhance those items that a smith can make; a tinker can enhance weapons that the tinker can make of metal.
3. Successfully enhancing an item uses the full amount of ingots, leather, or wood it requires to craft that type of item.
4. Enhancing does not use a charge on the crafting tool; the exception to this rule is when an Ancient Smithing Hammer is equipped it uses a charge from the ASH in the enhancement attempt.
5. Talismans do not add to the chance to enhance.
6. If enhancing a weapon’s elemental damage, one must have some physical damage on the weapon prior to the enhancement attempt to convert into elemental damage.
7. Artifacts and MOST other items with special abilities cannot be enhanced.

The chance to succeed during an enhancement attempt is based primarily on amount of abilities being imbued onto the item. The higher each property will be (when added to the existing properties of the item), the more likely it will fail.

There are two types of failures when attempting to enhance an item.

• A normal failure means that the enhancement was unsuccessful and the attempt consumes some of the resources but additional attempts may be made.
• A catastrophic failure destroys the item.

Some extreme examples of the blacksmith/imbuer’s art are attained by reforging plain iron items, imbuing them to add further properties and then, with the help of the purchased forged metal tool, enhancing them.

Talismans

There are multiple types of talismans, here we consider only those that provide bonuses to crafting skills.

A talisman with Blacksmithing bonuses may have one or both of the following: