For the last couple of years, TW has struggled to balance the smithing skill. It started off with Javelins that would craft for a single piece of wrought iron and sell for well over 100k Denars, then 2H swords and polearms that could sell for even more, eventually they nerfed it by cutting sale prices of crafted items by half or more. 1.8.0 has added yet another balance change, but is it enough to stop the exploitation of the crafting system? *Arnold – Negative.
Let’s start with the biggest difference in 1.8.0 – crafting unlocks. Prior patches you would unlock parts at random – both in the tier of the part and the weapon category. It was possible to unlock a high tier part right off the bat, securing your economy right away. But now part unlocks are tied to the weapon category that is being crafted or smelted and all lower tier parts must be unlocked before unlocking the next tier. As always, I did an unhealthy amount of testing and data collection here trying to figure out the exact formula they use now. I started off with 2H axe since it’s a weapon that provides decent XP and sell prices, but also has less parts than most other categories which would allow us to get to the top tier parts faster. There are 92 parts in total, which is broken down into 5 tiers with tier 1 having 12 part, tier 2 having 16 and so on. We won’t spend a ton of time on the database this time audience disappointment sound – I know I know, sorry to disappoint. These are all of the available 2H axes in the game at the start and their buying price as a level 1 trade character. I tested to see how many of each needed to be smelted in order to unlock all parts of a specific level and then computed the average unlocking cost if we were to buy those items to smelt. I stopped testing after tier 3 parts using the tier 2 axe because I now have arthritis in my right pointer finger. TW please give us a bulk option for smithing! My mouse will love you for it! Looking at the part unlock cost at each tier, you’ll notice an increasing trend, such that each unlocked part makes the subsequent part more expensive to unlock. Taking the tier 2 axe as an example, the first part unlocks after 12 smelts and the 2nd part after 15 smelts. If my estimates are correct, it would take 2,152 tier 2 axes smelted to unlock all 2H axe parts. Fortunately there are other ways of increasing the speed of unlocking as well – you can craft and smelt higher tier parts as they unlock, or buy higher tier weapons from a town -for example we could buy 32 heavy executioner axes for 1.7M denars and unlock everything. Sounds like pay to win if you ask me, I like it! I did the same for 2H swords and polearms and here are the results: Polarm has 99 unlocks and would cost 43 war razors at 44.4k each or 1.9M denars and 2H swords have a whopping 254 parts, which would require 131 Tier 6 swords to be smelted at 57.7k each or a staggering 7.5M denars! And the final method for unlocking, which is my favorite, is completing crafting orders. Buying high end weapons to smelt isn’t an option at the start of the game, so let’s look at the other two in closer detail.
I’m going to show you my favorite opener for a smithing playthrough – starting with a Battanian character with high endurance. We immediately make our way to Seonon to the north east and sell all of our clothes, horse armor and any non-smeltable weapons. We will hang onto the others for crafting materials. Buy up all of the wood you can, a sumpter horse and some food. Now we refine the hardwood into charcoal, taking care to stop at level 25 smithing to take the better charcoal conversion perk. Once all of the hardwood is refined, we should be around level 75 smithing and have a few thousand denars from selling extra charcoal.
At this point we can decide which unlocking route we wish to take: let’s start with the craft-smelt method. I personally find 2H swords to be the easiest category to make money with and a good place to begin. We max out each part and craft as many as we can, then smelt them back down and repeat. As crafting materials run low, be sure to sell off a weapon or two so you can buy more cheap weapons from town and smelt them down. I find the daggers and throwing knives to be particularly good deals and generally buy them up. For crude iron, blacksmith hammers are a great value, or don’t hesitate to refine wrought iron to regular iron to pick up the crude. Once in a while the town you’re in will get sieged, so be sure to not be greedy and stay overburdened. The curious smelter and curious smith perks are great picks for our main character, speeding up unlocks by quite a bit. By the end, it took us 8 days to unlock all tier 1 parts. We crafted 30 weapons, smelted 22 and sold 8. Our character reached level 87 and had a balance of 7555 denars. Not bad, but let’s compare this to completing crafting orders.
We reload the save from earlier, but now travel from town to town looking for 2H sword orders to complete. Try to not stress as much over passing the order, the XP and unlock amount is roughly the same regardless of the outcome and only the denar reward is reduced. Looking at a quick test, we see a pass give 34,829 base XP but a fail on the exact same order give only 1,707 base XP less or about 5%. The nice thing about this method is you can fight bandits along the way, compete in tournaments and get Neretzes Folley quest out of the way at the same time. It’s difficult to say how long this will take since orders are RNG but you can expect roughly 50% of towns to have a 2H sword quest to do. We visited 18 towns and crafted 8 orders to unlock all tier 1 parts, of which we passed 5 and failed 3. C’s get degrees, am I right? Our main character ended up at level 96 smithing and our bank balance at 22,600 denars.
As you can tell, crafting orders still give an absurd amount of XP and unlocks. The only bottlenecks are their availability and traveling time between towns.
The next section, is sort of a recap and sort of a collection of interesting things and bugs I discovered along the way that should be useful to you.
Unlocks are now limited to the weapon type you are crafting or smelting. All tier 1 parts must unlock first before any tier 2 parts unlock and so forth up to tier 5. Unlocks are not tied to the skill XP – if you have 12.5x learning rate you will unlock parts at the same rate as a character with 0x learning rate. Parts that you start with still need to be unlocked – so sometimes you will get the pop up saying you learned a new part only to find the same number of parts known. This also includes the pommel known as “None”. Yes, you need to learn none before you can move on! Sometimes if you unlock a new part, it will not show as unlocked until you exit the smithy and reenter it. Crafting orders still give a massive XP and part unlock boost. On the low end for a huge XP weapon craft it gave 9.4x more XP and for a low XP weapon it can be upwards of 33x! Weapons that are labeled as both 1H and 2H compatible such as a bastard sword will unlock parts as if it were a 2H weapon. The XP for crafting a weapon is the same as the XP for smelting it, but smelting unlocks anywhere from 60 – 300% faster! I’m not sure why it’s such a huge range, perhaps a little bit of TW maths going on here. Curious smith is supposed to unlock at a 100% faster rate, but the data showed anywhere from 110 – 120% faster so it’s a great perk. In the previous patch, there were 2H maces in the game but it was only 2 wooden mallet heads. Now, there is a fully fleshed 2H mace category to pick from. There are over 80 weapon parts to pick from and this little creation is my favorite. I call it “The Dentist” and I think you can imagine why. Also I have been testing out the RBM and it’s a completely different experience! Combat is a lot more difficult, but also more reward. Watch as we extract these 2 looter’s teeth for free! There is a fun little exploit I came across when trying to save my finger from clicking so much – After you craft a weapon, press enter a few times and you will cycle the combat log popup as well as click off the of the crafted item pop up. If you press it a couple more times, it will oddly bring up the crafted item popup again, but notice that some of your resources were taken and an item was crafted from it. If you have stamina, it uses it – but if you run out of stamina, you can keep using this to craft! And just like that, you now have access to infinite crafting stamina.
I have a couple final thoughts I wanted to share – I’ve always loved the crafting system in Bannerlord. It’s definitely been unbalanced from the start, but I just really enjoy customizing weapons for myself and my companions. It seems the changes they made recently are aimed at slowing down the overall progression of smithing, which I think they were successful at to a certain extent, but overall I still feel like smithing is unbalanced. Unlocking all of the 2H sword parts wasn’t that hard to do and making millions in a short amount of time is still possible. I feel like the biggest issue with balancing crafting is the pugio and tribesman daggers which both give high tier crafting parts for only a couple hundred denars purchase. If they can force the player to refine more and take those perks on a companion, it would slow down the progression into late game even further and make it more rewarding.
Don’t forget to use the dentist on the like button and i’ll see you on the next one!
