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Forging

Thirteen multiblock forges, six heat bands, seven quality tiers and no dice anywhere: every number on a forged item traces back to what you did.

How a session runs

A forge is a structure you build out of ordinary blocks, not an item you carry. You stand at one, run /forge start <type> with the metal in your inventory, and the plugin opens a session on you. Every session then walks the same three phases: HEATING, REFINING, QUENCHING.

1. Detect. The structure is read live out of the world when you interact with it. Nothing is written into the blocks, so a forge survives a restart by construction, and it stops existing the moment you take the pattern apart.
2. Heat. Feed coal or charcoal until the workpiece sits in a forgeable band. /forge heat does the same thing as right-clicking the forge with fuel in hand.
3. Strike. Hit the forge with a Forge Hammer against a moving timing bar. Eight strikes complete the shaping; three more complete the refining.
4. Quench. Pick one of five media and finish the item.

A session lives on your player, not on the anvil, and it is held only in memory. It times out after five minutes of being carried around unfinished. Every ending that is not a quench returns your inputs through the same refund path: /forge session cancel, the timeout, a disconnect, a server stop. There is exactly one way to lose the metal, and that is melting it (see Heat).

The verbs you will actually use

The rest of the tree belongs to the systems that sit on top of the forge: /forge alloy, /forge gem, /forge rune, /forge repair, /forge reforge, /forge relic and /forge enchant. Those have their own articles; this one stays with the session itself.

The thirteen structures

Thirteen patterns are registered in code, spread over five tiers. Each is a handful of vanilla blocks around a centre block, and each is matched in any of the four horizontal rotations, so it does not matter which way your forge faces. Two numbers hang off every pattern: a heat multiplier, which scales how fast heat comes and goes, and a quality bonus, which is added to your starting score before you have swung anything.

Tier is not decoration. It is a capability list, and each tier keeps everything below it:

• Tier 1 forges and repairs.
• Tier 2 adds alloy mixing.
• Tier 3 adds reforging.
• Tier 4 adds rune engraving.
• Tier 5 adds relic forging.

Tier also caps the quality you can reach, which is the hardest limit in the whole system. That cap is described in the quality section below.

The Rift Enchanter is the odd row. It sits in the same registry but carries only the enchanting capability and no forging one at all, so it can never be used as a forge and never shadows a real forge you happen to be standing beside. It has its own article.

Heat

Fuel is coal or charcoal, and nothing else. Forge Oil, despite the name and despite being made from coal, is a quench medium rather than a fuel; that mix-up is the single most common thing new smiths get wrong.

Heat runs from 0 to 100 across six bands. Only three of them are forgeable.

Heat decays continuously at a base of 5 points per second, scaled by the structure's heat multiplier, and every strike costs heat on top of that. It decays at full rate during the quenching phase too: there is no grace period at the end. Entering that phase at around 90 percent leaves you roughly ten seconds before the cold line, which is where the next section's warning comes from.

The hammer, and how a strike is judged

You strike with a Forge Hammer, a shaped recipe of iron ingots and a stick. A cursor sweeps a 1.6 second cycle and the ideal instant sits at the halfway point, 800 milliseconds in. How wide the window around that point is depends on the metal: a conductive material gives you a wider window than a stubborn one, and a Forging skill node can widen it further, up to forty percent, without ever making the miss band unreachable.

Your distance from the centre against that window decides the band, and the band decides four things at once.

A miss is the expensive one: it costs the most heat, damages structural integrity and does not advance your strike count, so it is pure loss in three currencies. A weak strike still moves you forward.

Shaping completes at 8 counted strikes, and the session tells you so with a title. Three more counted strikes complete refining, at which point the hammer's work is done and the forge asks you to quench. That gives a normal session 11 strikes end to end.

Every Good or Perfect strike also pays 15 smithing job XP to whichever smith profession matches what you are making. Weak strikes and misses pay nothing.

The five event cards

Something can happen to a session while you are working it, and it is worth being precise about what that something is. There is no random number generator anywhere in the forge. When a session opens, a seed is drawn once from the session's own id, before any scoring, and a deck is dealt from it as a pure function. Two cards land on two distinct strikes somewhere in the eleven-strike run, roughly one every five swings.

You cannot predict your deal, because you do not read the seed before you start. It is still not random: /forge session prints the seed and the event step, and the same seed always deals the same cards onto the same strikes. Hidden and random are not the same thing, and the forge is only the first.

Two of these are answerable in the moment. A Flaw is closed by a Perfect strike and by nothing else, so the card is a skill test rather than a tax. A Resonance deliberately pays the strike after the one it lands on, so you see it on the action bar and have a swing to time it.

Cold Snap is the only card that costs progress rather than quality, and a floor stops it driving your heat below ten percent. Each card in a deal fires exactly once: the deck is keyed on how many strike attempts you have made, hit or miss, and that counter only ever goes up. A deck always runs out.

The quench

There are five media. Water, lava and powder snow need a source near you, cauldrons included. Dragon's Breath and Forge Oil are consumed out of your inventory instead. Each medium adds a flat quality term, a second term scaled by a property of the metal, and in three cases a side effect.

Two things catch people out. First, auto-quench: if there is water within five blocks and you move during the quenching phase, you quench in water, which pre-empts the oil or Dragon's Breath quench you were walking towards. Second, a medium name the parser does not recognise is now refused and the refusal lists all five. It used to quench you silently in water.

The anvil you can watch

A session is not only numbers on your action bar. When you start one, a small diorama of armour stands is placed on the structure itself, and it follows the work.

• The workpiece stand holds what you are making, and it changes shape twice: the raw ingot you handed in, a rough blank when shaping completes, then the finished item.
• The tools stand holds the hammer, but only while you are actually swinging it. It is raised on the first frame of a strike and put down on the last, so a smith who is heating or reading the bar does not have a hammer hanging in the air beside them.
• When refining completes and the forge wants a quench, the hammer is swapped for a water bucket, which stays visible for the whole phase.

A strike plays a six-frame arc, down fast and up slow, with one impact frame that carries the sparks and the anvil sound. The glow on the workpiece reads the same heat band the action bar reads, so the picture and the number can never disagree about one session.

The stage is built from armour stands on purpose. Display entities are invisible on Bedrock, and armour-stand poses are translated by Geyser, so the animation is the same feature on both clients rather than a Java-only extra. Particle counts are halved for a Bedrock viewer.

The stage anchors on the structure, not on you, and snaps to one of four cardinal headings, because a stage stands on a block and a block has four faces. It is decorative in the strict sense: if it cannot be placed, the session runs without it and nothing about your item changes.

Quality, and where the stats come from

Everything above accumulates into a single score between 0 and 1. At the end that score is read against seven bands, and the band is the quality on the item.

You do not start at zero. A session opens at 0.35, plus the structure's quality bonus, plus a faction forge bonus if your faction has one, plus whatever the Forging skill tree has given you. From there the strikes, the cards and the quench move it.

Then the ceiling applies. The structure's tier hard-caps the band, and the quench tells you when it has bitten. Tier 1 stops at Common, tier 2 at Fine, tier 3 at Superior, tier 4 at Masterwork, tier 5 at Legendary. That leaves Ancient Resonant above the ceiling of every buildable forge: the Forging node Tier Reach lifts the ceiling by exactly one band, and that is the only route to the seventh tier.

No randomness, anywhere

Every stat a forged item carries is a pure function of five inputs: the item type, the material, the quality you just earned, the edge your strikes accumulated, and the ore origin stamped on the metal. There is no roll on the quality path, no roll on the stat path, and no salvage roll on failure. Two smiths with the same inputs get the same item.

This is also why /forge reforge does not reroll stats and never will: there is nothing to reroll, and two of those five inputs are not recorded on the finished item, so recomputing them would quietly rob every existing forged item of its ore bonus. What reforge does instead is apply an additive temper from a tempering alloy held in your off hand, at a tier-3 or better structure.

Ore origin

Ore you mine is stamped with the biome it came from, and that stamp survives smelting into an ingot. The forge reads it, so where the metal was dug feeds damage, reach, armour, toughness, durability and mobility on the finished item. There is a separate article on ore regions.

Which vanilla item you end up holding

The base item is chosen by the forge material: copper gives copper gear, gold gives golden, diamond gives diamond, netherite gives netherite, and everything else, iron and steel and bronze included, gives iron. The custom model is currently shipped for the iron tier only, so a copper or netherite forge falls back to the vanilla look while keeping all of its real stats.

Smithing XP, the professions, and where to read next

Forging feeds five of the fifteen professions. All five pay XP only, no coins, which is unusual on this server and deliberate: the forge is a sink rather than a faucet.

Each of the five carries a passive that scales with level, two active abilities on a cooldown, and at Master rank a choice between two masteries. Ten masteries in total, two per profession.

Temper Strike is worth knowing about early: a guaranteed Perfect on demand is also a guaranteed answer to a Flaw card.

Learning it in the game

/forge tutorial opens ten tracks over nineteen steps, each one a real thing to do rather than a page to read. The first, Your first forge, walks the whole loop in four steps: start a session, heat past 40, strike until shaping completes, quench before the heat falls back below 40. The others cover the strike bar, the quench media, alloys, gems, runes, repair, the Rift Enchanter, moving an enchantment, and forged bows and crossbows. Finishing a track pays 25 vanilla XP, and steps are checked against what you actually did: quenching in water does not tick off the step that asks for a different medium.

/forge help is the reference companion, fifteen topics written as what, why and how, with the exact command on each page. Both work even when forging is switched off.

Where to read next

• Ore regions for the biome stamp that feeds your stats.
• Jobs for how the five smith professions rank up alongside the other ten.

Alloys and tempers, gems and runes, the catalogue of what the forge can make, and the Rift Enchanter each have their own article.