A study on blacksmithy (How To Train Your Blacksmith)

That's certainly possible. Ingot/item is a big consideration. The items on my list were lowest ingot/item within the range I wanted. The biggest difference, I think, will come late in the short spear range. If it stalls out too hard it may start cycling, but they're really low on /item so it might not matter.

I have a suspicion that low STR may be beneficial for training the smith, to have lower displayed skill for the same real skill, making the same item slightly more difficult. Whether the difference would be significant enough to warrant recommending that new smiths start at 10 or old toons would drop to 25 STR for training, is beyond me. That would be an interesting parameter to consider and perhaps even test in later runs.

My guide recommends starting at 10 and locking it, but it’s not super significant, more of a min/max item

Ah, I should have looked it up before commenting. I've certainly seen your recommendation years ago already.

Would be interesting to get the numbers on the impact of 10, 25 and 100 STR for an informed decision on which route to take.

50-70 took 6k ingots, approximately the same. That's to be expected.

On Test, STR is not affecting Blacksmith skill, so I can't test it there. The old Compendium page, however, lists it as Skill 90% and STR 10% so it should have about a 11% impact on displayed skill.

That is a high level blacksmith chat!!! nice tips to my next bs!

Congrats for the chart bro and also to cap morgan for his classic guide...

I had a closer look at this; indeed it looked like STR doesn't change displayed skill, but turns it it's only because the skill gump is not updated with an STR change. If you re-set the skill level after an STR change, the displayed blacksmithy skill will change for the same Real Skill level.

I got pulled away from testing before, but back at it.

Got it. Weird that the order matters, but good to know. So, where I'm at at 94.8 real in testing, it's a .5 difference from 10 to 100 with 25 being the same as 10

I've stalled out on gains at 95.3 on short spears, so I'm lowering STR to 25. It's a 1-2% difference in short spear success, so it should help some

Apparently it works this way on Prod, too. Changing my STR didn't change my displayed skill until I changed my real skill

BTW, here's where we're at

NPC-50 = 2k ingots
50-70 = 6k ingots
70-94.8 = 27k ingots

Short spears is pretty stalled out sitting at 98.5% success rate (with 25 STR). I think this is too high for them, but I'm still letting it run.

I decided to start over with 25 STR at 50 BS. I'll post numbers later.

Are you sure about that "70-94.8 = 27k ingots"?

My 1st short spear run had 39.6k ingots at 70.0 and 23.5k at 94.8 so ~16k used
The 2nd short spear run had 18.5k ingots at 70.0 and 1.7k at 94.8 so ~16.8k used

And the switching point to gorgets may very well be a bit on the high side, my journals showed that the range 93.0-95.0 averaged ~3.6k ingots between the two short spear runs and ~3.4k between the two plate gorget runs. So performance in that area is pretty similar, but it may be warranted to lower the recommended switch-to-plate point somewhere around 93.5 to 94.0, which is also where the cross section is on the OP graph.

I'll update the recommendation in the OP to match that.

Yes. It stalled out and was chewing ingots. That’s why I started over with 25 str

I just GMd blacksmithing overnight by making rustic hunting knives out of old railroad spikes.

Now it's time to put these bad boys on Etsy and reap the reward!

OK, so I must've misread your post the first time because I was doing 95.6 for spears. I stopped correctly this time.

50-93.5 = 22k ingots

Starting gorgets

Final results 50-GM = 34,675 ingots, about 3k less than my average.

For reference, here are the figures I got:

So very much in line with your results:
* NPC to 50.0: ~2.7k
* 50 to 100.0: ~34k (spear #1 + gorget #1 ~ 34.4k, spear #2 + gorget #2 ~ 33.3k)

Edit: And if the switch point to gorgets was at 94.8

This gives ~33.0k for spear #1 + plate #1 and ~33.4k for spear #2 + plate #2. Practically the variance between runs is greater than the savings between these switch points, so it's effectively "insufficient data" on the exact switch point. Anywhere in the 93.5-94.8 range should be just fine for switching to plate gorgets.