Aye mates, 'tis me, Macro Man Randy Savage !! One of my biggest goals in UO is to get a GM Smith as soon as possible. While getting a GM Tailor and GM Carpenter was very cheap&easy, I still haven't started my Smith because it is the king of the crafting skills. Getting you Smith to GM will probably cost you more than all other crafter skills together. Since I can think of MANY ways to spend either time or money better than buying or mining ingots, I am on a mission to find the cheapest way to GM my Blacksmith. There are several conflicting guides on what to craft at which skill level. First off, there's UO Stratics archive Then we have DarkWings super list Then there's Gideon's guide And there's the rusty anvil All guides except for UO Stratics start off with Katanas at 50 skill. I assume you start with 50 skill because if you start a crafter, 50 Blacksmithy is a MUST. I assume you have 100 STR and only refer to the REAL SKILL in this guide. If you do not have 100 STR make sure you correct that before relying on this guide. I assume you have GM Mining. Otherwise you will be wasting alot more ingots. Everything crafted will be smelted. Now what did I do ? I created a Char on the UO:R test shard and set him up to be my test mule. This guy will craft the same item starting at the same skill level with the same amount of ingots over and over again. Then he will do the same thing with another item over and over again. I'm planning to do 10 passes for each item to find out which item gives you most gain out of your ingots. Since my Smith is currently at 50 Smithy, I am currently doing Katanas vs. Maul starting at level 50 REAL (55 effective) The results will be posted here. Be ready to thank me !
First results are in. Starting at 50.0 real Skill I tried three different items : Katana - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2,03 Maul - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2,06 Cutlass - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2,33 Notes : While Katana and Maul have very different skill requirements, they seem to give almost identical average gains. You fail at katanas very often and have nothing to smelt. But the gain is still very much identical to mauls where you fail very seldom and have a lot to smelt. Cutlass seems to be the sweet spot between katana and maul here. Starting at 55 real Skill I replaced the Maul with Kryss because the Maul did give less gains than the Cutlass while using the same amount of ingots and having a lower skill requirement Katana - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2,06 Kryss- Average gain from 1000 ingots 1,78 Cutlass - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2,13 Starting at 60 real Skill I attempted the same items because I felt the Kryss would give better gains with higher skill Katana - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2 Cutlass - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2 Kryss - Average gain from 1000 ingots 2,08
A big factor in this which is not mentioned yet is mining skill. Am I correct that mining skill impacts your ingot return when smelting items? Or is that just for ore piles?
I mentioned that in my assumptions. Mining does affect the return quota when smelting so all my tests are done with GM mining.
How does it impact though, do you know? I found a table somewhere that said at 75 Mining skill, you never fail to smelt iron ingots. But I have no idea what the return rate is on smelting weapons/armor. I think it might be a flat 50% return of ingots, regardless of Mining skill.
Looks like Mining skill indeed only impacts smelting ore. At 0.0 real Mining, I smelt 50% ingots of an item, every time. For my part, it looks like Short Spears may be better than plate gorgets. They only require 6 ingots, versus 10 for the gorgets. And while they do have a higher failure rate due to being higher difficulty, I think that higher difficulty will also help gains. Will try to keep track of my usage like Gideon did.
I think that is correct, that mining doesn't currently (but is supposed to) effect smelting items. I seem to recall Telamon stating that at one point in IRC. I also believe it's on "the list" to fix, but...i wouldn't think it's a high priority item. BTW, the size of the pile of ore is taken into account when smelting ore. I once tried to smelt 30,000 of the large pile of iron ore and only got something like 20,000 ingots instead of 60,000. Now, I only smelt 5,000 iron ore (large pile) at a time and never fail.
Hm well in case Mining does not affect smelting that is definitely a bug. I will keep GM Mining as a prerequisite in this Guide because I don't want to revise this guide once smelting has been fixed. I also can not imagine re-smelting will return more than 50% of the ingots at GM Miner level. It's much more likely that the ingot return will be worse at lower skill levels. Starting at 65 skill, I will take the short spear AND the plate gorget into the test list. This will show the best point to start with gorgets and short spears.
