Vintage Story: Comprehensive Smithing & Metallurgy
Checked on 13 October 2026 against the Vintage Story 1.22.7 game files and its in-game handbook.
In Vintage Story, smithing is a tactile, skill-based art form. Unlike other games where metalworking is a simple menu interaction, here you must manually heat ingots and use a hammer to push individual voxels of hot metal into a ghost-shape on an anvil.
1. Hammer Modes
Press F with a hammer while looking at an anvil to pick a mode. There are six: Heavy Hit, four Upset modes (up, right, down, left) that push metal in one direction, and Split, which cuts metal away. There is no light hit mode.
2. Anvil Progression
There is no stone anvil: the first one is a copper anvil cast in an anvil mold. A copper anvil works copper and the bronzes, a bronze anvil works iron and iron blooms, and steel needs an iron anvil; each tier of metal requires the previous tier's anvil. A weak anvil refuses with Working this metal needs a tier N anvil.
3. Heat Management
Metal can be worked while it is at least half its melting point: about 540 °C for copper, 475 for tin bronze, 770 for iron. Below that the anvil shows Too cold to work and the hammer does nothing until you reheat the piece; cold hits do not damage it.
The Smelting Pipeline
Before you hit the anvil, you must transition nuggets into ingots using a Crucible and Molds.
- Place a clay crucible in a firepit.
- Add nuggets to the crucible's 4 slots, up to 128 per slot (mix copper and tin for bronze). 20 nuggets make one ingot.
- Fuel with Charcoal (1300 °C) or Coke (1340 °C); firewood only reaches 700 °C, too cool to melt copper at 1084 °C.
- Once molten, hold Tongs in your off hand, take the crucible out and pour the metal into an Ingot Mold (100 units).
- Let the ingot cool, then reheat it in the forge to begin smithing.
Metallurgy: Bronze Alloy Recipes
| Alloy | Composition | Primary Use |
|---|---|---|
| Copper | 100% Copper | Early game tools (Pickaxe, Knife). |
| Tin Bronze | 88% Copper + 12% Tin (copper may be 88 to 92%) | Standard mid-game tools. Pickaxe: 450 uses, mining speed 6. |
| Bismuth Bronze | 70% Copper + 20% Zinc + 10% Bismuth (copper 50 to 70%, zinc 20 to 30%, bismuth 10 to 20%) | Slightly more durable, slightly slower. Pickaxe: 500 uses, mining speed 5.5. |
| Black Bronze | 70% Copper + 15% Silver + 15% Gold (copper 68 to 84%, silver and gold 8 to 16% each) | Best of the bronzes. Pickaxe: 550 uses, mining speed 6.5. |
Advanced Voxel Smithing Tips
- Fill the Ghost-Shape: the piece finishes only when the metal matches the highlighted shape exactly: every highlighted voxel filled and nothing outside it, so split off any extra metal.
- Iron Blooms: Unlike Copper, Iron doesn't melt in a regular crucible. You must create an Iron Bloom in a Bloomery and then hammer it hot on a bronze or better anvil to remove slag; a helve hammer can do this work.
Warning: the one way to lose a finished piece is quenching. Since 1.22, iron, meteoric iron and steel tool and weapon heads can be quenched in water from the temperature shown in their tooltip for extra durability (with a fire clay coating) or power (without), but every quench adds a chance that the next one shatters the piece and all its metal. Tempering lowers that chance. Cold hits, by contrast, simply do nothing.
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