Guides:Smithing Skill Tips

Blacksmithing

To get started it's best to have a forge of decent QL and good QL tools. This ensures that your forge will remain hot for longer and heat things faster, and that you will have less of a chance of failing while imping.

What I find handy when skilling up is to make multiple copies of an item and work on them all simultaneously.

If you are also a miner or have ready access to unlimited ore, then you can work on any items you want. If you only have limited access to ore and/or are only working for skill, then your best bet is to create and improve needles. They use .001 lump to create, use hardly anything to imp, and you can fit a hundred in a bowl or jar.

Jewelry smithing

In order to practice jewelrysmithing you need the same tools as for any other smithing skill: whetstone, hammer, pelt, and water. The higher the QL of your tools, the greater the chance to succeed when improving.

To train JSing it is best to begin with making bowls for initial skill. Bowls can be made of any metal, resulting in high resource availability. As with all skills involving improving, you should endeavor to improve each bowl (and all subsequent items) to your skill plus 10 for maximum skill gain.

Eventually, presuming access to silver or gold ore, you can progress to creating bracelets. These have a relatively high creation chance for low-skill Jewelrysmiths, and are worth a pretty penny to traders.

Their downside is that since they weigh 0.30 each, they consume a lot of gold lump per imp attempt. You can endure this extra lump cost for a while if you have ready access to ore, but if not it is best to skip armrings entirely and proceed to the final item: rings. While their creation chance is initially low, they only weigh 0.05, meaning that a 0.10 lump lasts for 30 uses.

Locksmithing

To raise lock smithing, you will need to make key form by using a key on clay.

You do not need to fire the clay mold!

For optimal skill gain, make sure the key is of low ql so that your success chance is around 50%.

After 25 lock smithing, the fastest way to get skill is to get a small anvil that is the right ql to get you a 50% chance to make a lockpick.

Having CoC cast on your small anvil will increase skill gain even further.

Weapon smithing

Do not care about Blades smithing and Weapon heads smithing skills, that skills you will get while making actual weapons over time.

Best item to skill weaponsmithing to 40 are butchering knives, imping butchering knife takes only 0,06kg of iron.

First make yourself about 150-200 butchering knife blades, don't care about failures, it will pass over time.

Finish unfinished ones, do not imp blades it's a waste of time. For making blades use 1-20ql iron, anything over will be a waste.

When you make 150-200 blades also make same amount of wooden handles.

Make first batch of butchering knives, use about half blades for making knives, finish unfinished butchering knives, set yourself a target ql (your actual skill in weapon smithing + 8-10 points. For example, having 10 weaponsmithing you will be able to make weapons with quality about 20). Improve all butchering knives you got to your target quality.

After improving all butchering knives to certain ql you can check your skill again, set new target quality level, and proceed with improving them like 3 times.

After improving all the butchering knives 3 times you should make another batch of butchering knives from the rest of the blades and wooden handles.

You should notice a significant difference in success rate between two batches.

Improve the second batch of butchering knives to average quality of the first batch.

Then keep improving knives as your skill grows.

After you gain about 30 skill in ws start thinking about making other weapons, be sure to have plenty of handles.

It has been noted that improving a weapon head or blade often gives more skill than improving a full weapon.

More tips:

Use sleep bonus. Type /fsleep to freeze your sleep bonus and wait for the stuff in the forge to be glowing from heat (for 50ql forge it takes about 10-20 minutes, ql dependent factor). Type /fsleep again to unfreeze your sleep bonus.

For improving try using lumps/tools with ql at most 20ql higher than improved item!

Coc/woa tools might also be a nice boost for your skilling curve...

Alternative Weapon Smithing

That guide works great when you use all of the specifics, just one change. Butchering knives have been changed and have nearly quadrupled in iron used to make the blade. Instead of them using .30 they moved to 1.10 so to use little iron and still get good skill gain make carving knives. They take .30 kgs of iron and use only .02 kg to improve. They also use weapon smithing in every aspect from creation to improving.

This method is good for people who don't want to lose a lot of iron when grinding their skill.

Blades smithing

If you feel like improving blades smithing, create 10-20 carving or butchering knife blades, and imp the blades to your skill + 5. Once you get this to about 25, there's really no point in going beyond, and start attaching them to handles and imping the tool.

Weapon heads smithing

If you want to improve your heads smithing skill, create 10-20 small axe heads and imp the blades to your heads smithing + 5. Once you get this to about 25, there's no point in going further and start attaching them to shafts and imping the true tool. Large and medium maul heads give somewhat better skillgain but use up more lump.