You know several weapons making smiths? I do. Respectfully, you are incorrect in this matter.
Well, partially - I haven’t heard of any furniture being scavenged to make good tool steel - the requirements of furniture don’t seem to require that grade of material so it’s simply not used. I could be wrong on this matter, though, I just haven’t heard of it.
Cars on the other hand have all kinds of usable steel in them and I’ve seen the results. Leaf springs, axles, bake disks - all good steel because it has to be. Other parts I’m sure, too, but these I know off hand work just fine. Oh, shocks, too.
There’s all kinds of good steels that can be used. Those are examples that can be used but are certainly not exhaustive. You need a hardenable steel that can flex when tempered properly. Lots of different steels fit the bill.
“fit the bill” would be acceptable if the game was able to assign different stats and durability to the end result based on material and tool quality. But it is not, and player-crafted weapons are supposedly very good “by the book” weapons, so following a recipe is expected.
While the in-game recipes will accept any kind of iron or steel as ingredient, it’s been already said they are not in an ideal state right now.
I’m not saying the player should not be able to craft some crude sword with poor or average stats. But the development of war grade weapons should take years of experimentation, at least.
Fits the bill means a quality weapon that I’d be comfortable trusting my life to. All these steels are that. Think about the forces these parts get subjected to day after day, year after year without breaking for the most part. Snapping an axle takes some doing. That quality of steel makes for an excellent weapon.
Now, you mention iron - is that in the game, because that would absolutely not be ideal. I’d also be all for different grades of material in general. for right now you are correct - only one kind of steel, but from my experience smiths have a pretty good idea which of those scrap pieces could be used. It’s just part of learning to be one.
In terms of years of experience - granted. When that gets implemented smithing is exactly the sort of thing that takes years to get good at and differing qualities of items produced should totally be part of it.
This is, however, a different discussion. One worth having, but this thread is not about that.
Thing is, the player never gets good at smithing, he gets good at fabrication - which is just a general skill to make whatever the hell he happens to need.
Since its an extremely broad skill, whatever happens to require specific knowledge will need a book recipe to craft.
If there was a smithing-specific skill, that would make sense. But as it is now the player would be able to jump from deconstructing furniture to forging a sword without having ever touched an anvil - all on his own.
The player is currently able to do that. All they have to have is a book nearby. I agree the whole way that skills are learned needs attention and I’m fairly certain it’s on the to do list if not being worked on right now.
See, I’d love for smithing to be broken out as it’s own skill, but right now all tasks that would be smithing fall under it’s auspices and considering all the other, more complicated things you auto learn a sword should be right there in the middle. Provided, of course, that you are familiar with them.
Now, I said earlier that I’d see the results of smiths making swords out of found materials but I failed to mention I’ve seen them from both those who know how to use them and from smiths who didn’t. The ones who didn’t made beautiful pieces - that were usually 2 or 3 times as heavy as historical examples with a balance point somewhere near the middle of the blade. In other words, not terribly useful. The smiths that also knew how to use them (often getting into smithing because of the martial art) made nice weapons. I mean really nice, and functional.
So they specifically set out to learn how to forge blades, which presumably means most of the instruction they received and most of the research they did while learning to smith would of been geared towards that goal. Your survivor that starts with Medieval swordsmanship doesn’t have that benefit, they don’t (generally) have someone instructing them and if they were researching that area they would have say… a book on historical weapon smithing.
In what way? The ones who don’t know how to use a sword can’t make one - at least not a functional one. The smith has got to know what they want to make and without the experience of using them, they simply don’t.
Yes, you separated it, put it first then quoted the other part so that at a cursory glance it looks like I said something I didn’t.
BTW, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a book on medieval sword smithing. I’ve seen a number on blacksmithing, but not the specific instructions on making a sword. I have my doubts as to whether such a thing exists. The best you get is a detailed description but usually it’s “here’s a bunch of pretty pictures!”
The best swordsmiths have gone to museums and gotten the “white glove” treatment but most haven’t.
They just rigged up a forge - usually with help from a blacksmith or farrier - if they’re really lucky a knifemaker - and then they start banging on metal. Very little book learning at all, but the basic blacksmithing techniques work just fine. The instruction they got was just that - here’s how you shape things now go and do it until you can make what you want.
There is no book that says 90 hammerstrokes to the left now 90 to the right.
The book was refering to the in game book, you also completely ignored the main point, I’m doubting people just learn on the fly. Most the articles I’ve read suggest that learning from someone that already knows what they are doing is the best way otherwise you will be in for a lot of trial and error. Since the game doesn’t simulate that the logical conclusion is that you simply can’t make one without instructions.
Here are a couple of examples from a quick search, there are a lot more:
"Like most things with blacksmithing, forging a sword requires patience, loads of practice and a lot of trial and error. Yes, it looks very easy in the movies but it’s a bit more complicated than that in real life and it takes a lot more hard work than what we see in the movies.
Forging: First, you must make a forge. Go with your preference; it could be coal in a drum or a DIY propane forge, it’s up to you really. Now take a bar of your desired metal(s) and heat it up in the forge. After it is heated up, you begin the hammering process, which may take a long time because you have to hammer it in sections; hammer repeatedly, heat again, repeat the process until the sword takes the shape you want. After the hammering process, you heat the sword and allow to cool.
Annealing: This is an easy step. This part involves preparing the sword to be worked on by different tools. Annealing is done to soften up the metal after all the forging. This is done by heating the sword up – until it loses all magnetic attraction – and allowing it to cool very slowly. Heating it is up is a fairly simple process but cooling it down slowly and evenly can get more complex. You can wrap up the sword in an insulating material, as this will slow down the cooling. Or you can take the sword and bury it in sand. The cooling process can take the whole day.
Grinding: This part involves a lot of work. It is at this point, you create the edge and point of the sword. A good idea will be to start with the big power tools. If you have a 6” belt sander, start with it as it will do most of the work for you. Afterward, you can use a 1” belt sander to file. This whole process will take around 3-7 hours depending on the size of your sword. It is also at this point that you can add any engravings or designs.
Hardening: At this point, the sword is still very soft and needs to be hardened. So, heat the sword to the point of austenization. As soon as the blade is removed from the forge, you must immediately place it into a quench tank. Placing in the quench tank allows the blade to cool evenly and quickly. It is important for the blade to cool evenly to prevent warps or fractures. This entire process hardens the metal.
Tempering: This step is important because after the hardening process, the steel is very brittle and can shatter or crack if used to strike an object, at this point, therefore it needs to be given some flexibility. This process involves heating and monitoring the color of the steel. You want the edges to be a wheat color (not too soft) and a plum color for the centerline of the sword (soft enough for soft flexibility and durability). Quench afterwards and then clean with a coarse emory paper.
Final Grinding, Polishing and Completion: Now it’s time to grind, grind, grind. You might want to use different grits; but start from around 220 and work your way up to 600. This will give your sword a nice and polished look. If you want it even shinier, you can continue with finer grinds or use a polishing wheel. Viola! Your sword blade is complete. Now you can add the additional parts like the pommel, the guard and the hilt.
Don’t be discouraged if your sword is not as you would like, because it will eventually take you months and even years to master this craft. Your first sword won’t be your best but with patience and practice, you won’t be too far from it."
The other seems to be the same.
Seems to me you might need more than that. More over, I don’t see a single thing that you wouldn’t learn from blacksmithing in general.
That’s a better description, but really not instructive in the actual making of one - by that I mean you wouldn’t be able to read that and then forge a sword if you didn’t already know the dimensions you wanted.
I have just realized that this is irrelevant, though.
My contention is that if you have practiced the martial art for long enough that it makes a real difference in reality then you would know the dimensions you wanted. Everything else is just blacksmithing. Nothing new there. You would have the design you needed - in game terms the recipe. What you would not have is the skill.
One could also learn from very exact books if you could find them or better yet having an exemplar to measure (something you can’t do in game) but this doesn’t change the fact that there are other ways like long handling of said weapons.
I didn’t post it because I thought it was an instruction manual and we are going around in circles on this. Fab doesn’t automatically grant you all knowledge of all blacksmithing, knowing a martial art doesn’t give you indepth knowledge of how to craft the equipment that goes with it.
The bronze age was the highlight of knowledge and expertise at the time. Then there was drought and raids, and who knows exactly what else, and three empires fell. Those who remained after were unable to create bronze or better for centuries, until someone discovered how make a fire hot enough to smelt iron, and society was able to work on rebuilding society to higher levels than had been achieved before.
It is very likely the knowledge came from outside the Mediterranean area by those with the knowledge, rather than discovered locally.
If the entire Mediterranean+ region couldn’t figure out how to do decent smithing for 100s of years without someone else to show them how, even when some had to have known it used to be a thing, then it is absolutely ridiculous that your character will know how to make a samurai sword with folds etc… just because they held one a bunch, or learned a martial art that normally involves holding one.
The devs do not like the current system, and have repeatedly expressed desire to work it in the opposite direction you are pushing. The current state is mildly irksome, but it is something of an in between state, while they continuously work towards more fully fleshed system piece by piece.
Right, so they didn’t know how to forge. That’s not a problem here - you can learn fabrication. These techniques are not closely guarded secrets like they were in ancient times.
As to the folding of metal for Japanese sword - it was done for a reason and that reason is to make the steel they needed.
Japan had a combination of very poor steel and very clever smiths. What they had was low quality iron with lots of slag in it. Every bit of slag is weak point where the sword can break and the low carbon meant that the steel was not really hardenable.
So what did they do? Well, they knew that if they case hardened a bar of steel they made a thin skin of better steel on the outside (we know today that what happened was they introduced carbon). They then figured out that if you folded the bar and forge welded it into a solid bar you have some good steel in the middle. Then you streached it out to bar shape and repeated. Every time you did this you also quite literally pounded the slag out. This was the only way of doing it at that time. So, harden, fold, weld, stretch, repeat. Do that enough times and you have a high carbon steel that has only microscopic bit of slag and these are not a problem. Not only did the smith make the sword, they made the steel that went into the sword.
I have enormous respect for those ancient smiths.
But that process is not necessary today. Most katanas today are simply pounded out of piece of steel that comes from the foundry already good for use. You could in fact make a decent one out of any good piece of steel provided you knew the balance, shape and what not and were a competent smith. I wouldn’t be able to - I haven’t handled one enough at all but someone who knew Iaido would, if they could smith. They have to know their sword very well.
As long as your folding carbon into it it makes any iron better not just bad quality iron
because it is unnecessary if you have advanced alloys and the like that perform better, or the requirements don’t involve being beaten against other metals of similar strength; like sitting on a shelf looking like a pretty sword