Blacksmithing

This skill can actually be started very early and cheaply - if you can get your hands on sharpening stones. You can get this skill up into the 20s (enough for the RV quest) simply by sharpening rusty weapons. Any weapons will work until skill level 22, then sharpening ones worth over 1gp will get you up to 26 before they go trivial too. As you start to pick up rusty weapons round about level 3 this is when you can start. If you want to be a smith, never sell a rusty weapon until you've sharpened it! The price for a tarnished weapon is exactly the same as a rusty one but you've had a chance to practice your skill first. In addition if you fail at sharpening you don't lose the weapon, only the stone, so you can try again until you succeed.

Sharpening Stones. This is the big drawback to starting early. For some reason sharpening stones are very hard to come by. If you start in Freeport you're fine as you can buy them in Groflah's Forge in north Freeport. I've also read that you can get them in Neriak, Grobb and Ogguk - fine if you're an evil race newbie. For anyone else there's a problem. The only other places I've been able to find them is off a miner just past the bank in High Keep and at the windmills in Steamfont Mountains. Young gnomes might make the windmills relatively safely but they're not exactly in newbie territory so there's a bit of risk. But that's nothing compared to what the Halas, Qeynos and Erudin starters have to do getting to High Keep!

What I've taken to doing is a naked run at 3rd level - 4th/5th level at most. If you go naked before 6th level you won't lose xp if you die on the way and you won't have to bother with the corpse retrieval if you don't want to. Disadvantage of leaving it till 4th is that you won't get your newbie food and weapon back if you don't recover. Basically, bank everything except your newbie food and weapon and head off for High Keep. Make sure you've got enough money in the bank to buy the stones and a couple of containers to store them in. Stones cost about 4c each and you need around 150/160 total to get your skill up to trivial levels on sharpening. I usually pick up around 200 stones to be on the safe side. That's 8 gold and 10 container slots needed from the bank. The beauty of High Keep is that the miner is right by the bank, so you do the run, go to bank for money and containers, buy stones, bank stones and change safely. At that point you have the choice of trying to run back or just stepping in front of a wandering gnoll in High Pass and committing suicide! Your stones should be safely stashed in the bank when you respawn at your bind point.

Two words of warning here. 1. Getting through High Pass is dangerous - always go during peak times when there are a lot of players around so that the gnoll and orc spawn points at each end should be well camped. When you zone into the pass just run like crazy for the keep and don't stop till you're past the guards! 2. The point where the miner stands is the entrance to the High Keep basement dungeon. Although this is usually fairly safe it is possible that someone could train something nasty up from down below so keep your ears peeled while buying!

Halflings in Rivervale have a choice of trying for High Keep or Freeport - as both have a bank the tactics are the same. As High Keep is nearer and I know my way through the pass fairly well I usually go this way. Freeport is a longer run but probably a little bit safer if you keep your eyes open for Giants and Griffons and stick to zone walls.

Elves and Dwarves (wouldn't you think Kaladim would sell the stones?!) in Faydwyr have it a little tougher as there is no bank close to the buying point. You have to at least be able to get safely to and from Ak'Anon with money and containers or else you have to carry them all the way. This could mean that you might have to do a corpse recovery if you get killed at the wrong point. Following the zone walls from Felwithe through Greater and Lesser Faydark should be safe enough, but there's a lot of wandering Kobolds up by those windmills, so be careful! Alternatively, if you have the time and patience you could hop the boat to Freeport.

I actually stopped smithing for a while here as I had enough skill to do the druid quest, and went on to developing my tailoring. At this point most guides will tell you to move on to making files, lanterns or skewers or something, but as my main interest was the studs for tailoring and those studs are non stacking items, I figured I'd have to wait until I needed them before making them as I didn't have the storage space. So, if your goal is the same go tailor until raw silk has become trivial to you and then come back.

To do the next bit I relocated myself to North Freeport as it has a forge, components and a bank for easy access to the medium quality pelts I'd stored for the tailoring side. Okay, to make studs you need metal bits - LOTS of metal bits! Buy a bunch of the small stackable ores and prepare to be bored! You will also need a file for making the studs themselves. This you can make yourself but I usually find that you can buy one in the same place as the ore. It is not a standard merchant item but often players that have been making them sell them back to the nearby merchant. It is not used up in the process so only 1 is needed. At this level of skill metal bits are already trivial, but the failure rate in making them still seems pretty high. After getting pretty frustrated at the failures I found that the following method seems to be the most efficient.

Make up 3 metal bits. Doing this isn't going to raise your skill any. Once you have 3 make up a stud. This will raise your skill eventually. Alternating between the metal bits and studs gets your skill up as you make the bits and I found that once my skill got up into the 30s the failure rate on the bits dropped significantly. It's more of a pain changing recipes like this, but it is definitely more cost efficient on making the bits. Once you've filled your backpacks up with studs, go get your pelts and patterns from the bank and make up some studded masks (the only item to only need 1 stud!) to improve your tailoring. Once you've cleared your packs of studs, return to the forge and repeat. It gets tedious, but it does get both the smithing and tailoring skills up nicely.

Currently I'm still at this stage as I need to get motivated to pick up some more MQ pelts for the tailoring side! The next stage should be making steel boning for reinforced leather tailoring, however the ore vendors in Freeport seemed to be selling this while I was there. I have yet to confirm whether this is part of their normal inventory or just odd bits sold by PCs as it doesn't stack and I don't want to load myself up with a bunch of it until I'm ready to use it. If I find it's part of normal inventory I may well take the easy option and just buy it (it seems to cost about 1s less to buy than make!), which could mean my smithing days are over when I trivial tailoring on studded leather!

Note: steel boning is not normal on this merchant's list unless it has been sold to her by a player that made it. Always worth checking though if you're looking for some!

Okay, I have to admit that I wussed out at this point! Having got tailoring trivial on studded leather I couldn't face the aggravation of finding more cat pelts and working steel boning to make reinforced so I switched to heady kiolas and made cured silk instead! In order to increase the smithing skill I switched to making lanterns to skill 68, skewers to 115 and pots to 122 skill. None of these items are stackable but they all recoup a reasonable amount of money when you sell them back to the merchant which gives you funds to buy the next bunch of components. Unfortunately, all these things require metal bits so it's a bit punishing on the wrist! Once you reach 122 you can move on to sewing kits to progress to 135, but after trying a few I concluded that these were just too much effort. The recipe produces only a small sewing kit so not a huge return on the outlay when selling them back, but the real problem is that this is a container so you need to have a free main slot in inventory and need to constantly make, sell, make, sell etc.. I just didn't have the patience and moved on to banded at around 124 skill.

Banded armour is the reason most people take up smithing. You probably won't make a fortune selling this to players anymore, except perhaps on one of the fairly young servers, but banded is still one of the best options for armour for lower level players so you'll be very popular with your friends and guildmates if you can make this for their new characters!

I stopped actively working the smithing skill around 124 and just continued to make pieces of banded for friends as needed. Skill has increased to 128 doing this and I have found that I can usually make what I need with only a small amount of failures so making the time to practice hasn't been a priority. Obviously if you want to get your failures down to a minimum you need to continue practising until all pieces have gone trivial. Also, there is a whole bunch of new armour currently on the test server that smiths are going to be able to make. So far this looks like it's going to be good stuff, so the time has come to get that smithing skill maxed out in anticipation!

The following is a table of the trivial levels and costs for making each banded piece.

Costs are listed in copper pieces and are for a charisma value of 107 - the best prices you should get. Total cost includes the mold, the relevant number of sheets at 1050 cp and a flask of water at 10cp. Table is sorted by trivial level first, total cost of the piece second. And notice the odd pricing on the boot mold - this actually makes doing masks with 2 sheets of metal a cheaper option than making boots with 1 sheet in order to get the skill to the 135 mark. (And has anyone got the trivial value for the sleeves so that I can put them into the right place in the table?)

So, the cheapest options to max your skill on banded are as follows:
If you can stand making metal bits:
skewers 115, pots 122, mask 135, gauntlets 168, cloak 175.
Avoiding the metal bits tedium:
gorget 102, bracer 105, mask 135, gauntlets 168, cloak 175.