In this video, we’re going to earn 1 million denars in less than 1 year using only mechanics a brand new player could handle. Let’s jump right into it – beginning with Battanian culture. The starting location is extremely important and the forest movement speed bonus can come in handy when trying to avoid fights. For the character build, we want to choose Smiths for the family option, your skill with horses for early childhood, Gathered herbs in the wild for adolescence, trained with the hearth guard for youth and you had a famous escapade in town for young adult. If you’re playing in sandbox mode, you can pick whatever age you want with older giving more point to boost up our character but also giving us less time to live. If you’re playing campaign, then you’ll have a 6th option and will be stuck at 20 years old. The biggest issue with campaign mode is your starting location will be near Poros, so be prepared to ride north up to Battanian lands. And for all the doubters, we’re playing on Bannerlord difficulty. In sandbox mode we start out near Marunath, but for campaign mode you’ll need to ride north a couple days to get here. First order of business is to spend our focus points – which we dump everything into smithing and another attribute into endurance.
Next we head to the shops to sell our gear. All clothing and armor is sold, weapons are moved to the inventory so we can smelt them down. Don’t forget about the civilian gear too! Next we go to the trade goods screen, scroll to the bottom and buy all the hogs. In this case, 38 of them. Now we need to exit the shop and go back in, which will allow us the option to slaughter them. With the pigs converted into trade goods, we sell everything and are now sitting on 4k denars, not a bad start! Next we need to head north up to Seonon where we’ll be spending several days. First order of business is to buy all the hard wood available. It’s barely 1k for all this hardwood, noice! Next we check the tavern for a companion. We don’t care what kind, we just need someone with a pulse. They get the same treatment – strip and sell everything but the weapons, which we will smelt down.
Now we need to buy some starting weapons to smelt down for crafting materials. As a rule of thumb, buy any weapon that costs 200 denars or less. We want the crappy ones that give crafting materials we can actually use since we only have crappy crafting parts for now. Don’t forget to check the bottom of the shield and ranged weapon tab, snap up all those juicy throwing daggers!
So we have a ton of weapons to smelt and hardwood to refine and a companion to help us accomplish this task. Each time we take any smithing action, it will cost our character some endurance points. Endurance can only be recovered by resting inside a town, castle or bandit hideout. Traveling on the map does not regenerate stamina. To regenerate from 0 stamina back to 100% we need to wait 75% of a day. So to start, we need to convert all the hardwood into charcoal, but be sure to look out for level 25 smithing and stop. We take the efficient charcoal maker perk allowing us to get 3 charcoal per 2 hardwood instead of only 1 charcoal, it’s a huge difference! Next we need to smelt down all the weapons we purchased. With everything smelted, we can now craft our first weapon! Click the free build button in the top right, click forge at the top middle, select two handed swords in the bottom right and we will now select our weapon parts. Easily enough we have only 1 part unlocked for each of the 4 categories, but we do want to increase the part size to the max for each. We can only afford to make 2 for now, but it’s not a problem. Now we go back to the smelt screen and smelt these weapons back down. A couple things are happening here. It cost 4 wrought iron and 2 crude iron to craft this weapon, but we get back 3 wrought and 3 crude iron back when we smelt. We lose 1 of the highest tier crafting materials and get 1 extra of the 2nd highest crafting materials back, so there is some loss when crafting and smelting. After a short rest we are ready to repeat, but this time we check the parts list to see if anything better unlocked. The globe pommel has a huge increase in damage, which generally gives more XP and faster part unlocks so we swap the pommel out. While we are resting, it can help to check the shop for new weapons to purchase – each day that goes by will add more items back to the shop as well as replenish the town’s denar balance. We purchase a few more cheap weapons and sell one of our crafts to make sure we don’t go bankrupt. After a few cycles of craft smelting, we’ve now got our second blade unlocked. Now we will do what’s called the AB test. We will craft 2 weapons that have identical parts except the blades. This is important because we can’t memorize all the parts in the game and we need an efficient way to find out which parts are best for unlocking. In this case, one of the blades sells for more than double – and since XP directly related to selling price, we will want to stick with this blade moving forward until we unlock more. You won’t know which blades will unlock first within each tier, so it’s good to know how to find what’s best at each level. Now we go back to spamming the new recipe, smelting them back down and repeat.
We’ve reached level 50 smithing on our main – we want to take curious smelter for now because it’s incredibly important to unlocking parts faster. The basic formula for smithing unlocks is this – if crafting a weapon gives 10xp, then smelting that same weapon would give 20xp and adding this perk would give 40xp. As you can see, the majority of XP is earned from smelting and having this perk is key! A few more days have passed and we’ve finally gotten through unlocking all tier 1 parts an the first tier 2 part has showed up. We add it to the weapon and craft away. Now we’ve unlocked 2 tier 2 blades and it’s time to AB test to see which one we should spam out. They both sell for within 100 denars of each so either would be acceptable. Don’t forget to swap out the other component to tier 2 as soon as they start to unlock as well – it all adds up.
It won’t be too long before we start to run out crafting materials, so be sure visit the shop to buy more weapons and sell a couple crafted ones to stay afloat. Our companion now has the 25 charcoal perk as well, which will free up our main character to do more important tasks. A couple things to note here – buying wooden hammers and pitchforks will yield much more charcoal that is used to smelt them, so if a town doesn’t have hardwood, these two items can be bought to supplement our hardwood supply. This will come in handy later once we leave Battania.
We’ve reach level 75 smithing on our main, and again we take the perk that increases unlock rate – this time for crafting. It’s not as good as the smelting perk, but it will help. While I don’t want to give specific weapon parts to look for when it comes to lower tier crafts, I do want to point out on thing about the blades – these curves swords sell for significantly more than the straight edge ones for some reason, so be on the lookout for anything curved. You can AB test them to confirm if you don’t believe me.
And now things start to go a lot faster – we’ve reached 100 smithing on the main and take the experienced smith perk for extra bonus rolls. These weapons will sell for more and be more useful in combat and we can take the other perk later on a companion. Once again we’ve unlocked the first couple of parts for the tier 3 weapons. They do require higher end crafting materials so we are limited with now many we can make for now. We also have no more need for the lower tier crafting materials and have a nice stockpile of charcoal, so we can refine the crude iron into wrought iron. We’ve got our first tier 3 blade and repeat the same process. Fortunately it just gets easier from here, it’s rinse and repeat! One thing we should be doing at each town we stop at is competing in tournaments. They are free if we don’t wager and we need the renown since we don’t earn any from being a smith. It’s time to head to the empire towns, but first we stop at the village nearby to top up on hardwood.
Epicrotea is the closest so we head there. Once again we buy hardwood, all the daggers they have and get back to crafting and smelting. We need to buy nicer daggers which cost more so be sure to sell a few crafter weapons from time to time. Epicrotea has been drained, time to move to Diathma next. Now we can start buying Pugio as well as Tribeman daggers. These both smelt down to very high end crafting materials even though they cost only a couple hundred denars each! Don’t forget to check the tavern at each town for more companions, the more the merrier!
With these handful of strategies – buying shop weapons to smelt, the AB test, the craft smelt cycle and selling a few crafts, we have everything we need to unlock every 2H sword part in the game! We simply need to travel to each empire town to buy up the daggers and hardwood and continue the process. Oh before I forget, the curved blades are also better for the Tier 3 blades, so try to use those. One cool tip – if we pick up a companion that has a crappy perk, we can go to any tournament master and talk to him to reset their perks. It costs some denars, but we have infinite money at this point. The companion didn’t have the efficient charcoal perk, so we reset and pick the correct one. Once our companions reach 50 and 75, we’ll want to take the steel maker perks in order to have the option to refine materials into the one we need most. So we’ve picked up our 4th companion, went to several empire towns to buy all the available daggers and made our way back to Seonon for the hardwood stockpiles. We have more than enough materials here to make 2 – 3 million, although we’ll be stopping at 1M for this guide. We spend a few days refining hardwood and smelting everything down.
One thing I forgot to mention before – be sure each companion has a mount to ride and a spare pack animal to increase the party movement speed and carry capacity respectively. That means with 4 people in the party, we should have exactly 4 pack animals. It’s easy to become overburdened so don’t hesitate to hire some spare troops and give them mounts as well if you need to.
We’ve finally done it – we’ve struck gold! This tier 4 pointed falchion blade is the main target we are looking for. Once you unlock this bad boy, stop everything and switch into spam money printer mode. Because we bought all the daggers in each town, we have over 250 wrought iron and regular iron and we pick parts that use only these materials, meaning we can make nearly 100 of these things. We won’t be smelting anymore, so hang onto them! Notice each one sells for roughly 8k denars, but we can craft 2 for every 3 crappy daggers we buy at a cost of 600 denars or so. If we add in a couple denars for the charcoal cost, it’s essentially a 8 to 1 return on our investment, which should probably be illegal. Now put on our best business suit and travel to each town, selling our overpriced weapons and take every last denar they have. This process is repeated, stopping only when we run low of inventory and craft up another batch. We reach Jalmarys on the 16th of Winter, 1084 which is just under 60 days. We sell the final batch of weapons and reach the 1M denar goal we set out to achieve! For reference, 1 year in Bannerlord is 84 days, so we smashed our goal by a wide margin and 2 – 3 M can easily be achieved within 1 full year. We still have tons of inventory to sell and craft, our main character each level 10 and almost 180 smithing. At this point we could easily spend our focus points on whatever the next stage of the campaign will be, such as combat, trading or leading an army. The world if our oyster!
If this guide was a bit too fast for your liking, click this video here to see a full walk through guide where I discuss in great detail everything we covered here and then some. Thanks as always to the lovely channel members and patreon supporters who help me survive financial hardships like squirrels eating my internet cable. You all rock!
