A Look at Blacksmithing and Mining

In continuing our look at the jobs of Free Realms, we've found ourselves at the first production job. Blacksmithing is a members' only job that lets you make weapons and tools with certain materials. These materials are refined ore and items bought from vendors. Blacksmithing relies heavily, if not solely, on a non-members' only job named Mining. Before you pick up the Blacksmithing job it's advisable to pick up the Mining job, too.

First, let's go pick up the jobs. Travel to Snowhill and talk to Smitty outside the Singing Crystal Mine. Smitty will unlock the blacksmith job. Inside the mines is an NPC named Therin. He will unlock the miner job and he'll set you on your path to leveling a miner and blacksmith.

If you do what the NPCs tell you, leveling Mining and Blacksmithing will be a breeze. For mining you gain stars (experience) by completing the mining mini-game and then smelting the ore. For blacksmithing, the item creation mini-game will level you. For both jobs, quests will level you the fastest.

Next, it's important to know what you need. When you begin your job as a miner, you'll be asked to acquire certain ores and gems. The table below shows which ore nodes have which gems. You can find nodes all throughout the world and there is a mine dedicated to each as well. Nodes found out in the world are usually rich nodes and have the potential to contain a rich gem. Nodes found in specific mines are common nodes and will have common gems.

To harvest ore and gems, you must complete a title based mini-game. The objective of the game is to make the ore and gem tiles fall to the bottom of the grid. You do this by matching like-colored rock inside the grid making it disappear. Eventually, the ore and gems will make their way to the bottom. Of course this mini-game is timed and you'll need to collect as much of it as you can in the allotted time.

You can find the specific mines for each type of ore by looking at your map. The rich nodes will be near the specific mines although out in the field away from the mines themselves. For example, the Singing Crystal Mines contain copper nodes and the southern portion of Snowhill contains rich copper nodes.

You can't do anything with ore if it's not smelted. This leads to the second mini-game in the mining job. Smelting ore into ingots requires you to be near a smelting furnace. The first you'll notice is right next to Smitty. Clicking on the furnace will begin the smelting mini-game. This mini-game consists of breaking up the ore, heating it, and pouring it into a mold. To begin, you'll smash the ore by clicking at the right moment. After that stage completes you heat the rock by fanning it while it sits in the furnace. This is done by rapidly moving the mouse from left to right. Next, you'll pour the liquid into a beaker of sorts. Be careful not to pour too much into the container or too little. Finally, you pour the heated ore into the mold. You have the potential to make five ingots but if you pour too fast or too slow you'll make fewer bars.

Now that you've got your ingots you're ready to start blacksmithing. You'll need other materials to forge a weapon or tool but you can find a vendor for these materials near a forge. The first forge and vendor you'll come across is, again, near Smitty. To start you click on the forge and pick which item you want to make. You can view what materials you need here and how difficult the process will be. Just pick up the vendor-sold materials nearby and you're ready to make a weapon or tool. Items created by the blacksmith job are also forged by completing a mini-game. Again, this is a tile matching game where the goal is to make a certain tile drop to the bottom. Match like tiles to make them disappear thus making the weapon tile fall to the bottom. Like all tile matching games in Free Realms certain tiles will appear with special abilities. For example, silver stars can act as any kind of tile so it can be matched with anything on the grid.

Like other mini-games the forging mini-game does have a time limit. Most likely the time limit won't affect your progress since you'll be finished well before time runs out. As you become higher in level and make more advanced weapons and tools the difficulty of the forge mini-game will increase. The grid becomes oddly shaped as you level up making it more complicated to get weapon tiles to the bottom.

With blacksmithing you will make members-only weapons that are slightly better than weapons you'll find otherwise. A blacksmith makes hammers, bonesaws, blades, bows, cudgels, wands, and more. These weapons often have slightly better stats than others to make your combat jobs a little easier.

Leveling the blacksmith job is relatively easy. After you've completed what Smitty asks of you he'll send you to other contacts that want specific weapons. Through this quest line you'll eventually end up at the next mine called Dartmoor Quarry. Where Singing Crystal Mine was full of copper the Dartmoor Quarry is full of tin. Follow the quest line and you will make deliveries to all of the mines.

It's not a complicated crafting process but it is a process. You'll need to follow certain steps in order to produce items. Keeping track of what you need to make certain weapons isn't too hard since you can view your "recipes" at any time. Bring up your inventory, the bag icon on your dock, and go to the Crafts icon. This icon is a little fork and hammer. Once clicked, two more options will appear above the icon. The one that looks like paper is for recipes.

Next time we'll look at another production job. An in-depth examination of the Chef job is up next.