Metallurgy Guide

Vintage Story: Complete Metallurgy Guide

Metallurgy is the key to technological progression in Vintage Story. This guide covers ore prospecting, smelting techniques, alloy creation, and the path from copper tools to steel production.

Metal Age Progression

Ore Prospecting

Prospecting Pick Usage

Essential tool for finding ore deposits:

1. Craft Prospecting Pick: smith a prospecting pick head on the anvil or cast one in a tool mold, then combine it with a stick
2. Take a density reading: sample three rock blocks within 16 blocks of each other. The result belongs to that position: it is not a reading for a radius or for the chunk you are standing in.
3. Read Results: "Miniscule" through "Very Poor", "Poor", "Decent", "High", "Very High" to "Ultra High", reported per ore as a probability in parts per thousand
4. Survey, then switch modes: several density readings show you which part of the world generates an ore well. They do not point at a vein; that is what Node Search mode is for, once you are digging.

Because each reading belongs to a position rather than an area, a set of readings is worth far more than any one of them. Our prospector atlas maps a group's readings, ranks the strongest places to dig per ore, and shows where one more reading would remove the most uncertainty. The prospecting guide covers both pick modes in full.

Ore Density Readings

Smelting Basics

Firepit Smelting (Early Game)

First method for processing ores: a fired clay crucible sitting in a firepit.

• Setup: place the crucible in the firepit, put ore nuggets in its 4 slots and heat it with charcoal. Hold tongs in your off hand to handle the hot crucible.
• Heat: charcoal burns at 1300 °C, coke at 1340 °C and firewood only at 700 °C, so a wood fire cannot melt copper.
• Efficiency: 20 nuggets of any ore make one ingot's worth of metal (100 units, 5 per nugget).
• What melts here: copper (native copper and malachite, 1084 °C), gold (1063), silver (961), zinc (sphalerite, 419), lead (galena, 327), bismuth (bismuthinite, 271) and tin (cassiterite, 232). Nickel (pentlandite, 1325) needs coke.
• Limitation: iron ores (1482 °C), quartz and meteoric iron need the bloomery; chromium, titanium and platinum ores melt hotter still.

Bloomery (Mid Game)

Advanced smelting for iron:

• Construction: a bloomery base from 8 fired fire bricks, with a bloomery chimney (4 more fire bricks) on top; it will not light without the chimney.
• Fuel: up to 6 charcoal or other fuel; the bloomery runs between 1000 and 1500 °C.
• Capacity: 20 ore nuggets per piece of fuel, so up to 120 nuggets with 6 fuel; it will not light with more ore than that ratio.
• Output: one iron bloom per 20 iron ore nuggets (limonite, hematite or magnetite), which then needs working on the anvil or by a helve hammer.
• Time: 10 in-game hours per firing, about 20 real minutes at the default day length.

Crucible Smelting (Late Game)

Precision alloy creation:

• Material: a crucible made by clay forming and fired in a pit kiln
• Capacity: 4 slots of up to 128 nuggets each, 512 nuggets or 2560 units in all; the more you put in, the longer it takes
• Precision: each alloy accepts a range of ratios, listed below
• Casting: most tool molds and the ingot mold take 100 units; pour, then wait until the cast item is below 200 °C before taking it out

Alloy Recipes

Every Alloy, and Its Real Tolerance

Vintage Story does not ask for an exact ratio. The crucible checks whether your proportions fall inside a RANGE, and that is the single most useful thing to know when you are standing at a crucible with an awkward number of nuggets. The nine alloys below, and the ranges, are read straight out of the shipped 1.22.7 game files:

Two corrections worth stating plainly, because the fixed percentages that circulate for these will fail you at the crucible. There is no alloy called simply "bronze": the copper-and-tin one is tin bronze, and it takes anything from 88 to 92 percent copper rather than a flat 90 or 92. Bismuth bronze is not 50/30/20 either; it accepts copper anywhere from 50 to 70 percent, zinc 20 to 30 and bismuth 10 to 20, which is a far more forgiving recipe than the usual write-up suggests.

The other five, brass, cupronickel, electrum, lead solder, silver solder and molybdochalkos, are rarely documented at all, and two of them are the cheapest alloys in the game: molybdochalkos is 88 to 92 percent lead.

Steel Production

Most advanced metal in the game:

1. Smelt Iron Ore: create iron blooms in the bloomery.
2. Work Bloom: refine each bloom into an iron ingot on the anvil (a helve hammer can do this).
3. Build a cementation furnace: around 65 refractory bricks, 6 refractory brick gratings, an iron door, and two stone coffin sections with lids of granite, andesite, basalt or peridotite on a 3x2 grating floor.
4. Cementation: fill the stone coffin with 16 iron ingots and charcoal or coke, light two coal piles two blocks below the coffin sections and refuel them about once a day. Firing takes about one in-game week and produces blister steel.
5. Refine: work the blister steel into steel on an iron anvil, which you make from two halves smithed on a bronze anvil and joined with flux. A helve hammer can hammer blister steel into ingots too.

Smithing Mechanics

Anvil Working

Voxel-based metalworking system:

• Heat Metal: heat the ingot in the forge until it is hot enough to work; a cold piece shows Too cold to work
• Place on Anvil: right click the anvil with the heated ingot
• Hammer Voxels: shape the metal voxel by voxel
• Follow Recipe: Match target shape exactly
• Quench (optional, 1.22): iron, meteoric iron and steel tool and weapon heads can be quenched in water from the temperature range shown in their tooltip. With a fire clay coating it raises durability, without it raises power; each quench adds a chance to shatter (losing the piece), and tempering lowers that chance again. Other metals gain nothing from it

Smithing Tools

Ore Locations by Type

Ore in Vintage Story is tied to the rock it forms in, and its height is set relative to the surface or to sea level rather than as a fixed Y range. Check the rock under your feet before you prospect.

Copper Ores

There is no chalcopyrite in Vintage Story; native copper and malachite are the copper ores.

Tin & Bronze Component Ores

• Cassiterite (Tin): mostly at middle depths, rarely near the surface or deep; in andesite, granite, basalt, peridotite, phyllite and slate
• Sphalerite (Zinc): any depth, in almost every rock type
• Bismuthinite (Bismuth): most depths, in andesite, granite, basalt, peridotite, phyllite and slate
• Galena (Lead, sometimes with silver): any depth and common, in sedimentary rock: claystone, sandstone, shale, chalk, limestone, chert and conglomerate

Iron Ores

• Limonite: in basalt, shale and chert
• Hematite: in granite, peridotite, limestone and phyllite
• Magnetite: in andesite, claystone, chalk, conglomerate and slate

All three sit between near sea level and deep below it, and all need a tier 3 (bronze) pickaxe.

Advanced Metallurgy

Charcoal Production

Essential fuel for bloomery and forge:

1. Build Charcoal Pit: dig a pit of any size up to 11x11x11 (2x2x2 is enough to start) lined with airtight, non-combustible blocks.
2. Fill it: fill it completely with full stacks of firewood. Any air pocket burns and turns the wood to ash.
3. Cover it: cover the pit with non-combustible blocks, leaving the top of one firewood stack open.
4. Light Fire: build a firepit from dry grass and 4 more firewood on that open stack, light it, and seal it within 30 in-game minutes.
5. Harvest: if it smokes quietly, the charcoal is ready in less than an in-game day; burning sounds mean a leak, so open it and put the fire out.

Tool Durability Comparison

Common Metallurgy Mistakes

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