Guides:Blacksmithing and subskills guide for the resource conscious

Here we will begin our quest to building our smithing skills. This is the 2nd guide of the series of minimal waste skilling. If you have not used or reached the skill level of the 1st guide: Guides:Carpentry and subskills guide for the resource conscious, I encourage you to reach an equivalent skill and progress as that before using this guide but it is possible to use this guide without the previous if desired.

Previously we setup a safe crafting area with a 2x2 house 2 floors high and created a bed to accumulate sleep bonus. The sleep bonus will be a valuable asset for this guide since several of the smithing subskills are considerably slower and harder to grind up.

First Blacksmithing Steps

Tools

First up on our list of things to do in this guide is once again, make sure we have the necessary tools and items available. This will include hammer, file, whetstone, pelt, stone chisel, a water source, and an iron source. If you used the “Rummage” feature to get iron previously it can be used again to make the tools but I strongly encourage you to get access to an actual iron vein for this guide. You can use a campfire to make very basic versions of these tools if you don't have access to a forge yet.

Now that we have the necessary tools and resources, we need to use our previously gained carpentry skill to make a small barrel if you haven't already. Again, remember to use the crafting recipe window by pressing “N” to find one that will suit your abilities and needs. After making the barrel, we can use one of the carts we previously made to take the barrel to the water source and fill it then take it back to your crafting area. This provides a close proximity efficient area for use to do our crafting and improving, increasing the effectiveness of using sleep bonus later.

Forge

The next thing I would suggest is to make a forge. This will greatly reduce the time necessary to melt ore down into usable lumps and heat our items for creating and improving. You sill use your stone chisel to chip rock shards into stone bricks. You will also need to find some clay for making this. If you have clay nearby you can dig what is needed and easily carry it back in your backpack. If you have to travel far for clay, it would be more time effective to take a cart and fill it full and bring as much home as you can. Clay is used in many different item creations, whatever you don't use for making the forge can be stored in the bulk storage bin you created in the carpentry guide for use later. Building a forge will slowly give you masonry skill, which will eventually allow you to make stone houses or other stone or marble items.

Creating Items

Now that we have tools all made, we are going to start into the most cost-effective item first. For this you can use the rummage to find a few iron rocks (if you are still trying to find a vein) but this will be the only item that can be done this way effectively. We want to make a spear tip, and then use the carpentry skills to make a wooden staff. Improve both of these items as high as our materials and skill will allow. The higher the ql of the parts the higher the chance of successfully making them into a long spear. Once you create a long spear it's time to start improving it. This is by far the most resource friendly method of increasing our weapon smithing and parent smithing skill because it uses carpentry tools to improve and logs, which logs are a renewable resource which we previously equipped ourselves to do in the carpentry guide by using a sickle to get sprouts for replanting. This is also a good way to boost our wood cutting skill since you will be continuously using up logs and making more.