Guides:Smithing With Uzetaab

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Uzetaab's tips and notes

*Note* that these tips work for all smithing sub categories, and some of these principles work for imping of any kind.

• Always use a forge. Other fire types just don't cut it, because they heat things slower. However, forges do use more fuel.

• Having another forge (unlit) with any kind of container inside can be useful for cooling things down at an increased rate.

• Get the quality of the forge as high as possible, for 2 reasons.

1) it heats things up quicker

2) it burns longer.

• anymore than 20kg of fuel is wasted. (NOTE: Changes may mean this is no longer true. More research is required)

• Have as many different lump quality ranges as you can get. 0-10ql is Best for making things with. When imping, try to use a lump that is 15-20ql higher than the item you are improving.

• If you fail at something and get a scrap, wait until it is searing or less before you put it back in the forge. If it is still glowing, it won't turn into lump. If you put a scrap into a cauldron in a unlit forge, it insta-cools.
• Having a water source right next to the forge is a must if you plan long smithing sessions. It's also useful for if you forget to refill your barrel when you log off & run out of water during sleep bonus. You may want to consider a dredge, it holds more water than a barrel. 3 ways to get water next to your forge, 2 of them require a door next to your forge.

1) Try to build the forge near the water table, then dig a hole outside your door until water is revealed. The end result looks like a pond.

2) Open a mine entrance next to your forge & mine the floor until you hit water. Make sure to support the walls so you don't have to do it again. This is the least ideal way because you tend to fall in & have to climb out again. Also, you have to step into the mine to refill, ponds work from inside the house. This end result is like a well.

3) Build your forge next to one of these new magically refilling fountains. This is the best option, but having a big fountain in your house looks a little silly. This option is like a natural spring or indoor plumbing ;)

• When improving several things at once, apply lump to them all together until they all require a different item, then put the lump back in the forge and imp them all back to needing lump again. this is because lump needs to be glowing, so you want to get through it's use quickly.

• It's also useful to have 2 lumps for imping, so that you can switch if one cools.

• As a good general guideline, you can improve items to your skill +10. For example, a hammer uses blacksmithing, if you have 25 skill, you can improve the item to 35ql. However, there are some variables that can affect this. Tool Quality is the big one, theoretically, if you had 20 skill & 90ql tools, you could imp something to 40 or 50ql. The other main variable is your actual skill. It's much easier to imp something to 30ql with 20 skill than it is to imp something to 80ql with 70 skill.

• Blacksmithing is the most important smithing skill, followed by weapon smithing. This will cover all your tools and allows you to work faster and better. Blacksmithing is more important because your hammer and anvils use this and these tools need to be good to make the other smithing skills easier.

• The better the quality of your tools, the more chance you have to succeed at imping. If your tool is significantly lower quality than the tool you are imping (say 30 points lower), your chance to improve the item is very slim. You will most likely end up lowering the quality of the item though fails & repairs.

• If you want to train a particular smithing skill, the best way is to make 20 of a small item that uses this skill, then imp them all to 5, then 10, then 15, etc. Reasons:

1)Having a large number of tools to imp allows you to gain skill faster with relation to the following reasons

2)Making the item a small one means that you will use less lump on them.

3)There is a 'magic' point at which you gain skill fastest, so by hitting this point with many items at once makes your skill jump fastest. By the time you have gone through this 'magic' point in all the items, the magic point has moved ahead of you again and you get to hit it all over again.

• Use a cauldron (Backpacks work better because they do not burn in a fire & hold more than cauldrons) to keep lumps/chains/small tools in & you are able to keep more than 100 items in your forge. Note that items in containers seem to heat slightly slower than in the forge itself.

• This new imp column has been a godsend for smithing. It means you have to switch tools less often if you imp lots of things at once, so use a method like my imping everything that needs iron at once for the other tools too.

• I find the toolbelt is most useful for imping since you tend to switch tools more often when imping than when doing anything else. But I don't bother to load the lumps into it since you have to switch them too often to combat cooling. Go for food instead.

• There are a lot of people who say that using lower quality tools & no WOA raises your skill faster, & they may be right, especially when it comes to things like digging, WC & mining. But for imping, I don't believe this is the case (& I don't really believe it for the other 3 either, but that's another topic). Perhaps it's simply not true, but I suspect that my action speed & success rates (needing to repair after an imping action is a failure. You can still get skill from a failure, but it is less frequent) make up for the fact that I have a wider gap between actions that increase my skill. My proof for this is that I have managed to keep up with the best smiths in the game & have always used the best tools. But you may prefer to use lower quality tools on your smithing because it feels faster for you. This is extremely difficult because you have to balance success rates with skillgain, so simply using a 1ql tool will not work here, because as I've said in another point, the QL of the item you are imping will actually start to go backwards if there is too much of a gap, especially at high QL, but I will try to provide a guide to get you started.

This is assuming that your skill is 50. If your skill is different, you will have to adjust:

1-30ql imping, 1ql tools

31-40ql imping, 5-15ql tools

41-50ql imping, 20-30ql tools

50-60ql imping, 40-50ql tools

60-70ql imping, 55-65ql tools

70-80ql imping, 70-80ql tools

81-90ql imping, 90-99ql tools

90-99ql imping, 99ql tools

note that 60-65ql imping is hard & anything above 65 is probably impossible, but it should give you an idea for you to plan from. Interesting note, there is actually an upper limit to which the game will even let you attempt to imp something. I recently tried to imp a ~69.8ql longsword with ~61 skill & ~90ql tools & the game actually gave an error that I can not improve this item further. I was able to imp it with something like 62 skill, but when I got it to 69.97, I was actually getting improvements of less than 0.01ql. This cap is harder to come up against in blacksmithing because your skill moves so much faster, but it is still there.

• CoC & WoA, my personal preference is to have both on my tools, but you may prefer just CoC for the reasons in the last point. Regardless of which you prefer, you should have your lumps & water enchanted too. If your lucky & you have a priest who is grinding channelling, you can probably get them to enchant all your lumps, but if not, then if you have a lump that is enchanted active & combine it with another lump it will keep the enchantment. When you refill your dredge, it will keep the enchantment too, just be careful not to let either of them get completely used up.

• You can keep your items & lumps hot between sessions by logging out with them in an inventory, or giving them to a merchant (only allowed on home servers), but I personally prefer to log in an alt about 30mins (for a 50ql forge) before I start playing to light my forge. This way I don't waste sleep bonus waiting. Alternatively, you could spend your first 30 mins doing something like mining so that you don't have to rely on others for standard QL lumps. about 50 mining is a handy thing for a smith to have. The other thing you could do is ask a friend to light it for you if you have one who is usually on when you log in. Either set a time with them or contact them through other means (IRC, etc).

--Uzetaab 09:20, 14 February 2009 (CST)

• Also note, the damage on older lumps can be turned into quality loss (to avoid losing the lumps) by combining with other lumps. The qualities will be averaged as usual but the lump with decay will lose a percentage of its quality based on the damage level.