Smelting Becomes Its Own Skill
The forge has always been two crafts wearing one coat. You melt ore into bars at the furnace; you beat bars into gear at the anvil. Different tools, different materials, different instincts — and, until today, a single shared skill.
That's now fixed. Smelting is its own profession.
What changed
- Smelting a bar trains Smelting. Forging gear or a tool trains Smithing. The two level independently, and each has its own requirements.
- Your old Smithing XP was divided evenly between them. Half seeded Smelting, half stayed in Smithing. Nothing was deleted — your total experience is exactly what it was, so the XP and Overall leaderboards haven't moved.
- Both numbers read lower than your old single Smithing level. That is the arithmetic of splitting one pool into two, not a loss. You have not gone backwards; you now hold two skills where you held one.
- You keep every recipe you could already make. Rather than locking anyone out of a bar or a gear set they were already using, each skill carries a grandfathered floor at your pre-split level. Recipes stay open while you re-earn the levels — but success rates and bonus rolls follow your real level, so there's genuine catching up to do before things get easier.
- Separate travel modes. Smelting and Smithing are now distinct choices for both live and offline work, so an overnight queue can target exactly the skill you want to raise.
- The tools are unchanged. Pickaxes, axes, tongs and hammers are all still forged at the anvil (that's Smithing), and each still serves the profession it always did — tongs remain a smelting tool.
About the XP rates
Splitting the skill meant re-measuring what the whole chain actually pays. We walked the full loop — mine the ore, smelt the bar, forge the piece — across every tier from Bronze to Shadow, and rebalanced so that each profession's reward is proportionate to the work behind it rather than an accident of how the numbers had grown.
Smithing's rate is the one we're least settled on, and it may well go up. Forging is the end of a long chain: by the time a bar reaches the anvil, someone has already mined the ore and worked the furnace. There's a fair argument that the final step should pay better than the current numbers do. We've deliberately started conservative — it is far kinder to raise a rate than to cut one people have already planned around. Expect a revision once there's real data on how the two skills level in practice.
If something looks wrong
Two levels lower in each half is expected. A missing recipe is not — if the forge refuses something you could make yesterday, tell us and we'll look at it directly.
The changelog has the full history, and the Smithing guide is being updated to cover both skills. Happy forging.