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Alloys, tempers and the crucible

Ten alloys, twenty-five tempering alloys and a crucible that reserves your metal instead of eating it. The numbers, the limits and the honest costing.

What an alloy is, and what it costs

An alloy is two metals poured together at a fixed ratio. You start one by standing at an alloy-capable forge and typing /forge alloy <base> <additive> <ratio>, for example /forge alloy iron coal 0.15. The command matches your three arguments against the recipe table and refuses anything that does not line up.

Four things have to agree before a melt starts.

• The pair. Base and additive both have to match a recipe exactly. There is no fuzzy matching on ingredients.
• The ratio. Your number has to fall within 0.10 of the recipe's ratio. That tolerance exists so you do not have to memorise the third decimal, and it changes nothing else: the ratio is a key, never a dial. Whatever number you type inside the window, consumption is identical.
• The forge tier. Every recipe carries a minimum forge tier, from 1 to 5. A tier 2 forge cannot pour Nethersteel no matter how much netherite you are carrying.
• The metal. One of each input, or two of each when base and additive are the same material. Nothing else scales the cost.

Yield

Output is max(1, round(2 × yield)). Yield starts at one minus the waste chance, clamped into the range 0.1 to 1.0, and the waste chance is 0.20 by default. So a plain pour with no bonuses gives you 2 ingots for 2 inputs, and the arithmetic is deliberately unexciting.

Three things push yield up, and they are added outside the waste clamp so they genuinely reach the ingot count:

• The alloy-efficiency buff, which removes 0.05 of waste per tier. It can never push waste below zero.
• The Alloy Master profession's passive, worth up to +40% at Legend rank.
• Flux Infusion, the Alloy Master's second ability: a 30 second window at +50% yield, or 45 seconds at +75% with the Crucible mastery.

Mixing an alloy pays 25 Alloy Master XP and no coins. Every forging XP grant on the server is XP only.

The ten alloys

Ten alloys are in the shipped recipe table. The last column is the one that is invisible everywhere else in the game: the vanilla tool tier a forged item made from that metal actually gets.

Two of these read strangely until you look at the tier column. Nethersteel takes netherite as its base and lands on the diamond tier, because the alloy's tier is a property of the alloy and not of its most expensive ingredient. Ancient Composite is the tier 5 relic metal and is the reason a nether star has a use here at all.

Sulphur Steel is the only alloy that takes another alloy as its base, so it is a two-step pour: steel first, then steel plus sulfur.

Repair costs are per alloy and do not follow the base metal. Ancient Composite repairs with a netherite ingot, Voidglass with an amethyst shard, Echo Alloy with an echo shard. Everything else repairs with iron.

The crucible session

With the pour enabled, /forge alloy does not resolve instantly. It opens a melt in the crucible and hands you a screen. The single most important property of that melt is stated in the confirmation line: your metal is reserved, not taken. Nothing leaves your bags until the metal sets.

This is a deliberate departure from the hammer path. Heating a workpiece badly at the forge destroys it, and that is correct there because it risks one input. A pour holds two stacks that both carry a real market price, so an overheated melt is punished by capping the band and flooring the yield instead of by burning your metal. There is no path in the crucible that eats an ingot.

The verbs

Rhythm

A pour owes 3 beats by default. Each beat is timed against the hammer's own strike window, the same function that classifies a hammer strike and the same one that paints the strike bar, so what you learned on the anvil transfers directly. There is no RNG anywhere in the forging system, and none was added for the crucible.

Your raw score is the sum of the terms divided by the beats owed, and that fraction reads off the same quality ladder a forged item uses: Crude below 0.20, Common to 0.40, Fine to 0.60, Superior to 0.75, Masterwork to 0.88, Legendary to 0.97, Ancient Resonant above that.

Heat and skim

Heat is a gate, never a bonus. The band runs from 55 to 85. Inside it the pour is judged on its beats alone. Below it the melt is cold; above it the melt is scorched. Both failures cap the band at the floor, and scorching additionally floors the yield to a single ingot. Neither destroys anything.

The skim is the last thing you choose before the metal sets:

The ladder is applied in one order and the order is the rule: beats, then the heat cap, then the skim. A Deep skim applied before the cap would let a scorched pour climb back out, which is the one thing the cap exists to prevent.

A skim moves classification and yield through two separate paths, and the yield half never reaches price. How many ingots a careful skim shook out of the same two inputs is a fact about you, not about the metal, so it cannot make the same metal worth more.

What the band buys

The band a pour reaches is not decoration. It decides which kind of ingot comes out, and each kind is a separate item with its own identity and its own price.

Ore mined in a Terralith region carries a stamp naming that region. An alloy inherits the stamps of its inputs, and the number of stamped inputs a recipe can have is its seam count. Four outcomes exist:

A pour that lands below Crude is a Blend whatever went into it. That gate is evaluated first and cannot be argued with.

Of the ten alloys, nine can reach Pure, two can reach Bonded and one has no origin at all. Only Steel and Bronze take two inputs that can both carry a region, which is why the bond table has 8 rows and every one of them is scoped to Steel or Bronze. Voidglass is the alloy with no origin: end stone and echo shard are both outside the stampable set, so it has zero seams and exactly one variant.

A bond is a real pairing of two regions with a name of its own. Emberbloom Steel, for instance, is volcanic iron quenched through sakura coal, and it carries its own durability, heat resistance, flexibility and weight numbers instead of the average two blended seams would produce.

The Alloy Master's Seam Reading perk gates only the bond hints on the crucible screen. Every number you need to judge a pour stays visible to everyone. Perfect Pour and Flux Infusion touch yield only; Seam Reading touches classification only.

Tempers: what /forge reforge does

/forge reforge applies an additive temper to a forged item you already own. It does not reroll stats, and it never will. Two of the five stat inputs, the edge and the regional ore profile, are not recorded on the item, so for an item that already exists the forge's own range is unknowable. A recompute would silently strip every forged item on the server of its full profile bonus. Addition reads none of that and can only move a number one way.

The mechanism:

• Stand at a reforge-capable forge, hold the forged item in your main hand and a temper alloy in your off hand.
• The temper alloy is consumed with the application. The coin cost is charged first, and the temper lands after the charge.
• An item may carry 3 tempers in total. At the cap the command refuses and takes nothing.
• The cost is 100 coins times the item's quality tier, from 1 for Crude to 7 for Ancient Resonant. The per-reforge growth multiplier ships at 1.0, so repeated reforges are flat rather than escalating.
• Player enchantments survive a reforge. The handler only mutates existing item metadata.

Temper alloys are separated from ordinary metal in both directions. A temper alloy is refused at the normal mixer, and a non-temper alloy is refused at the reforge. If a temper could be obtained through ordinary alloying it would be a second, ungated source of the same bonus, and then the coin cost and the per-item cap would bound nothing.

/forge tempers lists every temper the server knows, in chat. It is derived from the config, so a new one appears there for free.

The ten temper effects

Ten effects exist. The figures below are one application at Standard grade. The total on an item is the per-application figure times the number of applications times the grade multiplier, with applications capped at 3.

Thrifty is the one effect on this page whose payout is a chance rather than a flat number, and it sits outside forging altogether: it fires while you are using a finished tool, not while you are making one. Nothing on the forging path rolls a die. The invariant the forge protects is that a forged item's quality is explainable from its inputs; durability spend is not a quality input, is not recorded on the item and cannot change what the item is. A tool that never wears out would be a different item, which is why the ceiling is 0.60 rather than 1.00.

The twenty-five temper alloys

Twenty-five temper alloys carry those ten effects across four grades. The grade is a property of the alloy row, not of the effect, so the same effect can arrive at four different strengths.

Only Sharper, Durable and Swift have all four rungs. Attuned stops at Greater, Sturdy jumps from Standard straight to Master, and Buoyant and Luminous exist at Standard only. The gaps are deliberate: the ladder is where the effect deserves one.

Seventeen of the twenty-five are built on Steel and eight on Bronze, so a working reforge supply chain starts with a steady steel pour rather than with anything exotic.

A worked example. Three applications of paragon_temper, which is Sharper at Master grade, give 0.75 times 3 times 2.75, or +6.19 attack damage. That is the item's whole temper budget spent on one line, since the cap is 3 tempers in total and not 3 of each.

The codex, and the honest costing

/forge alloys is an in-game reference for everything above. It prints in chat first and opens as a screen on request, and it stays readable even when forging is switched off on the server.

The design rule behind the codex is that every number on a card is read from the same code that mixes the alloy or prices the good. The recipe and ratio come from the mixer's own table. The tolerance text is the same constant the matcher filters on. The forged tier is read from the method the item builder itself calls. The per-category stats are read back out of real probe items built for the purpose. Where a number could not be derived, the card says so rather than printing a guess.

The reason that matters is the price card, which tells you something you may not want to hear.

The codex will not recite that sentence on faith. It checks the arithmetic numerically before printing it, and if a change to the waste key ever moves the output count off two, the sentence stops appearing rather than becoming a lie. The card also names the dearest and cheapest input outright, and flags the recipe as diluting whenever the dearest input is worth more per unit than the alloy it goes into.

A craft premium exists and can lift an alloy's reference above the sum of its inputs, but it is capped by the narrowest bank spread on the server. Where that spread is zero, the premium is zero too and every alloy prices at exactly its input cost.