Blacksmithing#

Blacksmithing is the forming of metallic products. One starts by repairing items within blacksmithing, gaining knowledge in the processes gradually from inquirer to apprentice when learning how to start working at a forge while rebuilding items. After successfully repairing completely destroyed items the blacksmith can now start to craft items as a journeyman. After becoming a master of blacksmithing the blacksmith can greatly increase the finished quality of an item by annealing and swagging. After becoming an artisan the blacksmith can increase the potency of slashing and piercing weapons with the use of sharpen.

Skills#

Basics#

1. Repairing

• Rebuild fixes severly damaged or broken items
• Repair fixes moderately damaged items
• Recondition fixes lightly damaged items

2. Making an item

• Melt the ore in the crucible
  • loading the crucible with an ore is done with put material
  • If the ore isn’t melting, increase the temperature of the forge with fuel fire, press bellows or reshape flame.
• Pour the ore into a mold
  • You can buy basic sand molds from your tradesguild or make them later on with form mold and a reference item to make a mold from.
  • The mold won’t finish unless there is enough molten ore in the crucible
• Release the mold
  • Once the mold has successfully been cast you can release mold to get a raw hot product
• quench the raw hot product
  • At this point the item can be considered finished, but likely has a very low craftsmanship value
  • continue with annealing and swagging to increase craftsmanship value
• anneal will slightly reduce the products craftsmanship value but increases its temperature
  • Once the item is hot you can swag the item to form it better and increase the craftsmanship if successful
  • Swagging also loses a small amount of the material on the item, losing too much material will destroy an item
    • destroyed items are not fixable like broken items and can only be resmelted.

Detailed Stages#

The blacksmithing process involves three stages: Melting of Material, Creating a Raw Product and Forming The Finished Product. Material for melting can be acquired by salvaging existing metallic equipment or items. When salvaging equipment no material is lost in the process so an item that required 15 material to blacksmith will salvage into 15 salvaged material worth of parts. The three types of salvaged parts each have different material sizes with ingots being 5, components are 2 and fragments are the most atomic salvaged metallic part of 1 unit of material. Ingots may be created through the smelting process of raw ore or processed from melted material with an ingot mold. The blacksmithing process itself occurs within either a forge or hearth where a crucible is located within a forge while a crucible is placed atop a hearth.

Melting of Material#

The first phase starts with taking a source material and processing it into a melted form so it can be casted. In order to melt the material in the crucible the forge needs to be heated up to the materials particular critical point. The forge is heated up by pressing the bellows. The hotter the forge the more fuel it consumes. When the fuel depletes the forge will gradually decrease in heat until it reaches room temperature. Over time the maximum heat of the forge decreases as fuel is consumed so occasionally the blacksmith will need to have to reshape the flame.

Creating Raw Product#

The second phase begins with the crucible being poured into a mold. Provided the required amount of melted material is available in the crucible, the raw product begins to form within the mold as it cools. Using tongs the blacksmith will pull the hot raw product from the mold and then put it into the slack tub for quenching which rapidly cools the product and allows it to be formed manually through swagging in phase 3.

Forming Finished Product#

The final phase is where the blacksmith takes the raw product and forms it with a blacksmithing hammer against an anvil with a process called swagging. Swagging reduces the heat of the raw product rapidly, so occasionally the raw product needs to be pushed into the forge briefly to heat up in a process called annealing so that it can continue to be formed with swagging.

Materials#

Items#