Smelting

**Smelting** is one of the three tier 3 crafting skills in the Artisan branch and the single branch following the Materials Preparation skill. It allows to refine metallic raw materials such as copper, iron, silver and gold ores into more refined forms which can then be used to make a variety of useful items. Level 30 of Materials Preparation is required to learn this skill. To increase Smelting past level 30, Materials Preparation skill must be at level 60.

## Procedure

You need a smelting tool equipped, such as a Primitive crucible and stick.

* Place either Billets or Charcoal into a Furnace and light it.
* Add ore (lumps, bars or ingots) to the furnace.
* Use the bellows to increase the temperature to 1,000 for gold, silver, and copper, 1,500 for iron or steel, and 2,000 for Vostaskus.
* Maintain the temperature using Billets or Charcoal as the ore or metal begins to melt. The temperature will drop exactly 3 minutes into the process requiring the use of bellows.
* Once the source items had heated fully, smelt them into the desired item.

## Recycle

Recycle can be used to smelt down metal tools, weapons and armor into re-usable metal lumps. This is useful for smelting broken tools and weapons with 0 durability left, allowing you to get some of the metal resources back.

Most recycling will commonly only result in lumps of iron even if the object was made using steel or vostaskus.

## Smelting Tips

*Have a piece of advice for effective training? Edit this section and place it here!*

* Amount of items and stack size do not affect heating up speed or fuel consumption (however, if you add more items to the stack while the item is heating, this will lower the "completion bar" as it will account for the "cold" items), so it is efficient to smelt as much stuff as possible in one go. Bloomery is far superior for smelting due to great capacity.

* Charcoal is produced in the Kiln at a rate of 4 pieces from one Hardwood billet. They last for same time as fuel source, so Charcoal is way more efficient way to use materials. Besides, its smaller weight (1.00 against billet's 10.00) make stuffing the furnace easier.

* Heating up a full batch of ore takes exactly 10 minutes at 1,500 degrees. The temperature in the Furnace will drop one time exactly 3 minutes after ignition. Make sure to use the bellows every 3 minutes. If the temperature drops below the 1,500 mark the ore will no longer continue heating.
* The most time and charcoal efficient way to level smithing is turning raw ore into lumps, then either discard the lumps if you do not need them or the quality is too low for needs, save them to level forging later, or put the lumps back into the furnace and turn them into bars or ingots. Then use MORE raw ore and smelt lumps again. When you reach 90, if you have access to a bloomery and enough tools to recycle, the best way to get from 90-100 is recycling metal tools/weapons/armor/etc.

* Smelting ore into a lump, bar or ingot takes exactly 6 seconds, once heated. Use the previous tip, along with how many items you wish to create from your Furnace, to setup a schedule so that you can have multiple batches of ore ready to be smelted without wasting Charcoal. For example, if you want to smelt 85 Iron Ore all into Lumps you must heat the Furnace to 1,500 degrees. At 6 minutes you will have to use bellows to raise the temperature back to 1,500 again, and at 10 minutes it will be ready to smelt. Smelting 85 Iron Ore into lumps is 85 actions, which take 6 seconds each, this would require 8 minutes and 30 seconds to complete. Using this information, we can have another 85 Iron Ore sitting in a second Furnace ready to be turned on at about the 9 minute mark. This batch will be ready for smelting at 19 minutes, whereas your first batch will complete smelting at 18 minutes 30 seconds. Do note you'll need to use bellows on the second Furnace at 15 minutes, so you'll need to interrupt your work on the first Furnace quickly to do that. Use a stopwatch and you can get into a rhythm. Smelting bars or ingots would require fewer actions and therefore less time in between ignitions of the Furnaces. When mass producing lumps, two Furnaces is optimal, bars could use three and ingots four.

#### References

* Iron placed in a lit Furnace, ready to be heated
* Fully heated iron, ready to be smelted
* Options presented to form heated iron