Crafting
Blacksmithing
Blacksmithing is the widest crafting skill in the game: every weapon that is not a bow, every piece of platemail, and several of the fixtures that make other crafts easier. It is also the most material-hungry — a full suit of plate is a hundred ingots before a single failure, and failures happen.
Weapons
| Skill | Item | Ingots |
|---|---|---|
| No requirement | Broadsword | 6 |
| No requirement | Cutlass | 5 |
| No requirement | Katana | 5 |
| No requirement | Longsword | 6 |
| No requirement | Scimitar | 5 |
| No requirement | Viking Sword | 7 |
| No requirement | Axe | 6 |
| No requirement | Battle Axe | 9 |
| No requirement | Double Axe | 8 |
| No requirement | Executioner's Axe | 11 |
| No requirement | Large Battle Axe | 12 |
| No requirement | Two-Handed Axe | 10 |
| No requirement | Bardiche | 11 |
| No requirement | Halberd | 12 |
| No requirement | Dagger | 2 |
| No requirement | Kryss | 4 |
| No requirement | Spear | 8 |
| No requirement | Short Spear | 6 |
| No requirement | War Fork | 8 |
| No requirement | Pitchfork | 7 |
| No requirement | Hammer Pick | 7 |
| No requirement | Mace | 6 |
| No requirement | Maul | 11 |
| No requirement | Smith's Hammer | 7 |
| No requirement | War Axe | 7 |
| No requirement | War Hammer | 12 |
| No requirement | War Mace | 8 |
Armour
A full suit is every piece below — budget for it before you start.
| Skill | Item | Ingots |
|---|---|---|
| No requirement | Platemail Helm | 12 |
| No requirement | Platemail Gorget | 8 |
| No requirement | Platemail Chest | 20 |
| No requirement | Platemail Arms | 12 |
| No requirement | Platemail Gloves | 8 |
| No requirement | Platemail Legs | 20 |
| No requirement | Shield | 20 |
Structures
| Skill | Item | Ingots |
|---|---|---|
| 50.0 | Repair Bench | 1500 |
Material tiers
Rarer metal hits harder, swings truer and lasts longer, and each tier asks more Blacksmithing before you may work it at all.
| Tier | Ingot | Blacksmithing required |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Iron | — |
| 2 | Dull Copper | 65 |
| 3 | Shadow Iron | 70 |
| 4 | Copper | 75 |
| 5 | Bronze | 80 |
| 6 | Golden | 85 |
| 7 | Agapite | 90 |
| 8 | Verite | 95 |
| 9 | Valorite | 99 |
| 10 | Blackrock | 100 |
What the material buys in a fight
Added to the weapon's own base numbers (see the Weapons page for those). Damage and durability apply to armour too, on their own separate curve; hit chance and crit are weapons only.
| Ingot | Damage | Hit chance | Crit — two-handed only | Durability |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Iron | — | — | 2% | — |
| Dull Copper | +1 | +3% | 3% | +5 |
| Shadow Iron | +2 | +6% | 4% | +8 |
| Copper | +3 | +9% | 5% | +12 |
| Bronze | +4 | +12% | 6% | +15 |
| Golden | +5 | +15% | 7% | +20 |
| Agapite | +6 | +18% | 8% | +25 |
| Verite | +8 | +21% | 10% | +32 |
| Valorite | +10 | +25% | 12% | +40 |
| Blackrock | +11 | +27% | 13% | +45 |
Your own weapon skill carries you from landing 1 swing in 5 untrained to 95% at Grandmaster, and the material's bonus is added flat on top of that — with no ceiling short of never missing at all. The top tier's +27% takes an untrained fighter from 20% to 47%, more than twice as many swings connecting; and from 71 weapon skill upward it stops you missing entirely, which no amount of skill on its own will ever do. Skill alone leaves a Grandmaster whiffing 1 swing in 20 forever — the metal is the only thing that closes that last gap.
Crit chance is carried by TWO-HANDED weapons only — it is what you get back for giving up the shield slot. A crit hits for +50% damage, and every two-hander rolls for one on every landed swing, from 2% at the lowest tier to 13% at the highest. It is a separate roll from Archery's own crit and from a Virtue Binding's, so a single swing can land more than one of them.
BLACKROCK PLATE WARDS SPELLS. Every Blackrock plate piece — helm, gorget, chest, arms, gloves, legs and shield — takes 1% off every spell and breath that lands on you, so a full suit with its shield is 7%. It adds straight into Magic Resistance's own reduction: a Grandmaster resister in the full suit takes 47% less. It is flat a piece — a quality mark does not change it, a broken piece gives none until it is repaired, and no other metal carries any — nor does leather, Black Leather included.
Rares
Five yard pieces found only by working this skill. Any work at the skill can turn one up — every swing or craft, success or failure, and the hours you put in while logged out as well. Each stands in your yard or your house, carries its own story on its tooltip, and trades like any other item.
| Piece | Its story |
|---|---|
 Knight's Harness | A full harness of plate, made to measure for a knight of Serpent's Hold who was measured, the smith noted in his ledger, on a generous day. She never collected it. The Hold sent a very gracious letter about her appetite, and the smith keeps it folded inside the helm. |
 The Great Bellows | Two oak boards, a whole cow's worth of leather and an iron nozzle as long as your arm: the lungs of a Trinsic forge for ninety years. Retired when the leather split, and patched by an apprentice who could not bear to see it burned. It still wheezes when the wind is in the east. |
 Treadle Grindstone | The wheel that put an edge on every duelling blade in Jhelom for sixty years, worn down from the size of a cartwheel to the size of a dinner plate. Duellists still touch a blade to it before a bout. It does nothing for the edge, they will tell you, and not one of them has ever skipped it. |
 Wrought-Iron Weathercock | An apprentice's test piece, drawn from a single bar of Shadow Iron: a cockerel on a spindle, tail feathers and all. It has never once pointed where the wind is blowing. It points to where the weather is coming from, a day early, and the farmers of Occlo have offered a whole harvest for it. |
 The Sword That Broke | Two halves of a longsword on an oak stand, snapped clean across the fuller. It is the only blade a Minoc master ever made that failed, and she hung it where she would see it every morning for thirty years. Nothing she forged after it ever broke, and she maintained to the end that this one had it coming. |