Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing forges ore, molds, and a few vendor supplies into tools, weapons, and metal armor. Every combine happens in a forge: load the components, hit combine, and you either make the item or lose the materials trying.

The rules of the forge

• Strength, Intelligence, or Wisdom — whichever is highest — governs your chance to gain skill on a combine. Buff your best stat before a skilling session.
• The Smithy Hammer is returned on success and on failure. Buy one once and keep it.
• Components must not be stacked when combining — hold CTRL and click a stack to pull a single item.
• Both successes and failures can grant skill-ups, so keep pushing through dry spells.

Learning the trade

Train the first 21 points with your guildmaster, or skip the training points and learn by doing: buy a stack of sharpening stones and offer to sharpen rusty weapons for adventurers around the forge. Tarnished combines trivial between 18 and 26, so this alone carries you past what the guildmaster can teach — nearly for free.

The classic climb to 68 uses cheap vendor ore and a handful of molds:

Buy small pieces of ore from a vendor, churn them into bits, and keep a healthy stock of bits — everything from here up eats them. Sell finished lanterns back to a vendor to recover some of the cost.

Almost everything a smith makes starts as ore and climbs a ladder: pieces become bricks, bricks become blocks, blocks become folded sheet metal. The same ladder exists for all three ore qualities. A smithing chisel breaks bricks and blocks back down if you over-convert.

The medium-quality chain is the one that matters most: Medium Quality Folded Sheet Metal is the body of every fine plate piece. Medium quality ore and plate molds are sold in Highkeep and Qeynos, and folded MQ sheets stack, so you can bank them by the hundred.

Banded armor is the workhorse stretch: one mold sized to your race (small, medium, or large), 1–3 pieces of Sheet Metal, and a Water Flask per combine. Expect around a hundred combines to climb from 68 to 115.

• 68–90: Banded Gorget, then Bracers — the cheapest per combine.
• 90–106: Banded Gauntlets, then Helms.
• 106–115: Banded Mail (leggings can bridge the gap).

If you plan to wear the set, make each piece you need once it goes trivial rather than grinding one slot — the cheapest path and a wearable set are the same road.

Ornate chain bridges banded and fine plate. Every piece combines a Chainmail Pattern, a Silver Bar, 1–3 High Quality Metal Rings, a Water Flask, and your Smithy Hammer.

• High Quality Metal Rings: Large Brick of HQ Ore + File + Water Flask (yields 2 rings).
• HQ ore sources: goblins in Sol A, Permafrost, and Runnyeye; Greta Terrilon in Halas; player-sold bricks on Highkeep merchants.
• Silver bars: Felwithe and Neriak are reliable sellers.
• Enchanted silver bars do not work in these recipes.

The practical path is Bracelet to ~122, Coif to ~132, and Mail to ~142 — though at roughly 30–100pp per combine, many smiths alternate ornate visors with fine plate visors once both material streams are flowing.

Fine plate is the signature of a master smith: a full suit of crafted plate for the plate classes — Warrior, Cleric, Paladin, Shadow Knight, and Bard (the collar is also wearable by Rangers, Rogues, and Shamans). Every piece follows one formula in the forge:

N × Medium Quality Folded Sheet Metal + Leather Padding + Plate Mold + Water Flask + Smithy Hammer (hammer returned on success and failure)

A full visible set takes 24 MQ folded sheets (25 with both bracers) for 127 AC at 65.0 weight. The skill-up path through the set: Bracers 142→168, Helm 168→179, Breastplate 179→188.

The leather padding supply chain Needs Tailoring

Every fine plate combine needs one Leather Padding — and padding is a tailoring combine, not a smithing one: 1 low-quality pelt (cat, wolf, bear, or rockhopper) + 1 silk thread in a sewing kit (tailoring trivial 31). A full plate set needs two dozen paddings, so the padding pipeline is the fine plate grind. The veteran loop:

1. Farm spiderling silks in newbie zones (Eastern Commons tunnel area works) and spin stacks of silk thread.
2. Haul a large sewing kit, a skinning knife, and your thread to the Stonebrunt Mountains — the leopards drop low- and medium-quality cat pelts on nearly every kill.
3. Use the skinning knife to downgrade MQ pelts to LQ, then convert each pelt to leather padding on the spot — pelts don't stack, padding does, and Stonebrunt is far from every bank.

Walk in with stacks of thread, walk out with stacks of padding. Raising tailoring high enough to make your own padding pays for itself many times over.

Where to work

Set up in Highkeep or Qeynos: they sell both the plate molds and the medium-quality ore (about 20pp each), so the whole operation runs out of one city's forge and vendors.

Armor dyes work on fine plate only — no other armor accepts them. Dyeing changes the color while leaving every stat untouched, and once dyed the color is permanent. The process is a three-trade relay across the forge:

Step 1 — Make the extract Shaman Alchemy Rogue Make Poison

A shaman (Alchemy) or rogue (Make Poison) combines an empty vial — sold by dye supply merchants — with a water flask and the raw ingredient in a medicine bag or mortar and pestle (trivial 36 for both). Anyone can attempt it, but a shaman or rogue succeeds far more often. The finished extract is then usable by anyone with no skill check.

Step 2 — Make the dye Needs Pottery

Anyone can do this one — it never fails. Combine the extract in a medium clay jar with resin (both pottery-made; the jar is consumed in the combine). The resin count sets the shade:

• 1 resin + 1 extract → dark shade (e.g. Dark Green Dye)
• 2 resin + 1 extract → base shade (e.g. Green Dye)
• 3 resin + 1 extract → light shade (e.g. Light Green Dye)

Step 3 — Dye the armor (at the forge)

Place the finished fine plate piece in the forge with 1 dye, 1 jar of acid, and 1 jar of lacquer, and hit combine. This step is a skill check against your smithing — read the combine message carefully. If it fails, the armor comes back undyed but the dye, acid, and lacquer are lost. There is an in-game book, How to Dye and Stain, that covers part of the process.

The dye table

All 17 dyes at a glance

Eight raw materials, seventeen finished dyes. (Swatch colors are approximations — Murphy's in-game screenshots below will show the real thing.)

Rust dyes only come in the dark shade — there is no base or light rust. Everything else gives you the full dark / base / light trio.

Murphy is dyeing a full fine plate set in every one of the 17 colors and screenshotting the results, so the guild can see exactly what each dye looks like in game. Send a screenshot per color and it gets slotted in below.

No trade stands alone in classic EverQuest — and blacksmithing is the most tangled of them all. Fine plate alone pulls in four other tradeskills:

• Tailoring in Leather padding for every plate combine (1 LQ pelt + 1 silk thread, sewing kit, trivial 31).
• Pottery in Resin and the medium clay jar for mixing dyes.
• Alchemy in A shaman's extracts start every dye color.
• Make Poison in A rogue's extracts work just as well.

The forge gives back as much as it takes:

• Smithing out Steel boning goes into tailoring's reinforced armor; metal bits become fletched arrowheads; skewers, pots, and pans feed baking; needles and thimbles become sewing kits.
• Side chains Fishing feeds baking; brewing's heady kiola feeds tailoring's cured silk; enchanters' enchanted metals supercharge jewelcraft.

The practical lesson: befriend (or become) a tailor, a potter, and a shaman or rogue before you start a fine plate run. The full trade-by-trade web lives on the EQL Crafting hub.

Cultural armor is smithing's racial endgame: every race (and humans by city and deity) has its own armor line, forged in a racial forge with racial tempers from brewing. The pattern is the same everywhere: smithy hammer + metal components + chainmail pattern + leather piece + the race's temper. Each line comes in plain, enchanted, and imbued varieties — the imbued sets are deity-locked and carry stats.

The racial lines at a glance

Kerran: the line that isn't here yet

There is no Kerran cultural armor — the EQL wiki's Cultural Tradeskills page lists no Kerran entry and no Kerran recipe page exists. The full Kerran note (unlock, racials, and why there's no classic line to port) now lives on the Cultural Armor hub.

Worked example: Barbarian Northman Ring armor

Every Northman armor combine happens in a Northman Forge and follows one recipe shape: Smithy Hammer + N× Medium Quality Metal Rings + Large Chainmail pattern + matching Large leather piece + Frost Temper. The temper comes from the Brewing guide (Frost Temper, trivial 135).

Northman Ring Mail (chest, AC 18) — Smithy Hammer + 3× Medium Quality Metal Rings + Large Chainmail Tunic Pattern + Large Leather Tunic + Frost Temper. Trivial 162 — though the wiki lists it as "162 (130?)" and several other pieces carry the same question mark, so confirm in-game before a big run. Most pieces trivial at 120 (mask, bracer, boots, helm, mantle, sleeves, gauntlets, cloak); belt 124; gorget ≤180; leggings 155 (120?).

The imbued line adds an Imbued Ivory and is restricted to followers of The Tribunal — the wiki is explicit that Imbued Jade does not work for the Northman ring armor. Imbued pieces gain +1 STR, +2 WIS, +2 cold resist at trivials in the 140s–150s. Northman weapons follow the same idea: a Northman Long Dagger (trivial 114) becomes its imbued version with a Frost Temper and an imbued gem, deity-locked to Tribunal or Rallos Zek.

Deity restrictions are the trap in cultural smithing: the wrong deity's imbued gem is a wasted combine. Check the wiki's race page for your line before committing gems.

Sources

• EQL Wiki: Cultural Tradeskills — the per-race set and forge reference this section is built on.
• EQL Wiki: Cultural Tradeskills — Barbarian — the full Northman weapon and armor tables with trivials.
• Guild Brewing Guide — Blood, Earthen, Frost, and Moonlight Tempers (all trivial 135), the cultural smith's brewing inputs.

Recipe references

• EQL Wiki: Skill Blacksmithing — EQL-tuned trivials, leveling path, and the dye tables this guide is built on.
• EQTraders: Smithing Armor Recipes — the classic tradeskill bible's full armor listings.
• Almar's Classic Smithing Guide — the 1-to-cap climb with material lists.

For the padding pipeline

• EQTraders: Tailoring Guide — leather padding and the silk/pelt economy.
• EQL Crafting hub — the other eleven trades and how they feed each other.