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Behold, the Artisan’s Workshop. Or, in other words, the wanna-be Smithing Guild. Trust me, it would’ve been a more appreciative name, because the Artisans workshop practically IS the smithing guild. Originates in Falador nearby the dwarven mines, throw in a ton of ores, and you’ve got several methods on using the ores to quickly, if not effectively train smithing in a non-profit manner.

That’s right. Smithing usually allows you to somewhat profit, by means of creating armor and weapons. However, in the Artisan’s Workshop, all the ores you use are sacrificed for naught but experience. You will not be reimbursed, except to gain respect percentage. However, you only get 1% for every 100 or so iron/coal ores worth of steel ingots that you use up (haven’t tried any other metals yet), so it’s all a matter of how far you’re willing to take the skill and how much money you’re willing to spend.

That’s not to say the workshop is no good. Ah, far from it. Smithing items in the artisan workshop doesn’t have any monetary return, but the experience you get from it is some of the fastest in Runescape: if done correctly, perhaps even faster than goldsmelting (perhaps as cheap, too, despite the non-profit angle).

In a nutshell, smithing is now practically a non-profit skill thanks to the Smithing Guil- err, I mean Artisan’s Workshop. So, let’s get started with the features!

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RAILROAD TO VICTORY
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Here’s a first. Free smithing training. Training that you can do without spending any real money, like chopping wood or mining ores. Just need a hammer, and even that you can get for free from Diango, or on a spawn point in Lumbridge. … somewhere …

I dunno. Kill a goblin, grab his coin, and buy one from the general store. There. Hammer. Have fun.

This is a very simple activity. There are 5 different pieces of a track you can make. All 5 pieces are combined into one after they are made. Then you stick them in these caves to quickly empty your inventory.

There’s two ways to do this. Either grab an inventory of 25 ingots of your choice of metal, and make 5 of each part – pairing them up after creation. Otherwise, wield your golden hammer with an empty inventory and grab 14 (otherwise, half your free space) of ingots and make the first icon. Then fill the rest of your inventory, make the second one, and them use a piece on the anvil to join them together. Sill your inventory again of ingots, make the third part, and repeat until the tracks are fully complete.

Sure, you can drop the parts, but you get much more (being a relative term, of course) if you make the full tracks. Plus, it’s faster, as you don’t have to drop them when you simply run to lay them.

I haven’t tested it yet, but if I had to guess, I’d say you get 1% respect for every 15 or so tracks you lay. That would make sense.

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ARMOR ARE MORE FUN *groan*
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If you’re a budding smother with lots of ore available (or a little, doesn’t matter), and you like to mine all your stuff, then this is the most experience you can get per bar in Runescape. It uses relatively little material if necessary, works faster then running back and forth (as the ingots are withdrawn and deposited in an instant), and you can even adjust the rate of training by using different ingots. The only thing is that you need to keep aware of what the dwarf is teaching – then you get bonus experience. And trust me, you want it.

When you start making armor, you’ll notice you don’t make it immediately. It takes about 4 whacks of the hammer to smith the item, turning this into a considerably slow method of training. Compared to hammering out plate-mails, anyways. However, you do get more experience per ingot then regular bars, so consider this something like using oak planks to train construction instead of mahogany. Cheaper, but takes longer, and depending on how you make your money, you might have a preference.

Once you see the dwarf shout “Make ——-“, click the anvil, as it’s got a handy “smith” left-click option, and simply (but quickly) choose the specified item. You can usually craft 6 of the items (if your timing is good, you may even get a 7th) before the dwarf tells you to switch. This is good training if you want to, say, watch a movie or do some homework as your character smiths, as it’s about as menial as making cannonballs. With the exception of a quick glance and two-click in 30 second intervals, but even if you don’t catch the dwarf, you still get a good worthwhile set of experience.

I haven’t tested it yet, but I think you get 1% respect for about every 20 or so pieces of armor you make, depending on the level of ingot.

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CANNONEERS DELIGHT
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Ooh, man, this was the first workshop I rushed to when this update came out. The benefit for this one is that you only use steel ingots, which in my eyes, means maximum experience value for steel. That was my hope, anyways. Turns out, it is indeed a good source of experience for you mid-level dudes out there. But, with one minor drawback.

You need your full attention for this one. You cannot multi-task any more than you can when training firemaking. That, and there’s a lot of running around and memorizing a step-by-step procedure, which is simple in its own right, but nevertheless tedious.

Again, only use this method if you want to train smithing as cheaply as possible. you won’t get any profit for doing this save for some respect points, but you will get considerably good experience compared to the number of ingots you’ll be using (though really, why use specially refined steel to make cannon ammo?).

The steps are like this. There are the four cannon parts on some nearby tables. In the same order as you set them up, you collect them one by one, fix them up with different steps each time, and then stick them on the spot in the middle of the room designated for a cannon to be.

First, clear your inventory. Grab about 10 steel ingots from the nearby conveyor belt after having filled it with iron and coal. If you top it off, you can stay down here for a considerably long time. Next, grab the tools from the nearby tool table. Just grab them all. There should be a cannonball, cog, and pipe mould in the mix, as well as a hammer, but if you’re using the goldie, then drop the hammer and continue.

You start by grabbing the base. Get the piece in your inventory, and click it to extract the cogs. There will be 10 of them. Inventory should be pretty full now, but don’t worry; this is the fullest you will get it. Rush over to the anvil and use a broken cog on it to fix them.

Unfortunately, you will break a few. When this happens, you must sacrifice a steel ingot to smelt a new one in the nearby furnace and cog mould (don’t worry, you get 37.5 experience if you have to do this). Altogether, get 10 fixed cogs by combination of both of these methods. Click on the base again to add the cogs, and stick the base in the middle of the room.

Next is the stand. Grab it from the table, and click it to get 3 broken pipes. With a pipe mould in your inventory, stick them in the furnace. You will not need steel ingots for this one. After the pipes are fixed, click the stand, and add it to the base.

Now the barrel. Grab it from the table. Now use it on the anvil.

… now use it on the anvil again.

… now use it on the anvil … again …

Once it’s finally fixed, add it to the stand.

Finally, the furnace. Grab it and click it to extract the fuse box and flint. Fix them both on the anvil. Now, in the room nearby, there are a bunch of gunpowder barrels. Click on them to fill the fuse box. After they are both fixed and the fuse box filled, click the furnace and add it to the cannon.

Lastly, the testing stage. With 2 steel ingots and the cannonball mould, make 8 cannonballs. Now click the cannon.

The cannon will spin, firing the shots. If it gets stuck, just click it to give it a few whacks with the hammer, and it’ll continue. Once it makes the full round, it is ready. You get a bonus 1700+ experience, and 0.333% respect. The cannon is removed, and everything is reset for the next cannon!

On average, you’ll use about 7 steel II ingots – 2 for the cannon ammo, and around 3-8 for the cogs. Of course, it is possible you fix them all or none at all, but it’s uncommon. That’s about 3500 experience for a full inventory of steel bars. Worth it? You tell yourself.

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CEREMONIAL SWORDS N’ STUFF
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Now THIS is smithing training, right here. For about 3 minutes of strategizing luck-based precision, you get, on average, twice the experience you’d get for a normal steel bar … for 40 of them!

Like cannon-fixing, this method of training involves your constant attention. However, unlike cannon-fixing, this is a fast method of experience, rivalling even gold-smelting. Plus, it’s comparatively cheap, seeing as you only need iron and coal en-masse instead of expensive gold ores. And this is with steel. Start using mithril and adamantite, and you’ve got some real training going on. Also, like gold smelting, it’s non-profit, and a little more fun in my opinion.

The other methods are very straightforward, but this one, however, is a little more on the complicated side. For this, I am going to make a guide for you all.

First, get the sword prepared. Next to the section here with the anvils and furnaces for ceremonial sword-making, grab a hammer and tongs, withdraw a good inventory of ingot IVs of your metal of choice (I prefer steel, as it’s comparatively cheap).

Now melt them all in the furnace. Once they’re melted, you can drop the tongs. You’ll need the inventory space anyways. If, for whatever reason, you wish to return the ingots to normal, use them on that pool of water nearby.

With the melted ingots in the inventory, right-click the nearby dwarf for some plans. Use the plans on an anvil.

Now, you enter the making zone.

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CEREMONIAL SWORD GUIDE!
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This is how it works. The top design is the sword you want to create. The bottom one is the thing you have right now. The number in the top-left shows how many times you can click a hammer button. The meter on the bottom left is how hard you hit the metal. It starts at 0, and by hitting it, the numbers for each part increase. They cannot decrease.

The scoring system works like this: If you are 1 off a target, be it above or below, you lose 1-2% for the tip and 3-4% anywhere else. If you’re 2 off, you lose 6% (this is adding 2% for the one off + double that for being 2 off). If you’re three off, then you lose 2 + 4 + 8 = 14%. Trust me, you want to get it as precise as possible, avoiding wasting shots on getting 1-off exact until you get rid of the 2+ offs.

For example, I had three spaces where it was 1 too deep, but everywhere else was perfect, including the tip. That hit me with -12%. So 4% per one too deep.

Of course, this is based off my experiences with it. It may not be totally accurate, but it should give you a fair idea.

Now, making these swords is a gamble. Maybe you’ll get lucky and strike a perfect sword, giving you a huge expo harvest. Or, you might accidentally break the sword and get NO experience, losing the bar and all the ores in the process (though I don’t know why you can’t just remelt it …). You break a sword by exceeding 8 at the rightmost tip area, or exceeding 6 anywhere else.

So, it’s not as safe as smelting gold, but once you get into a rhythm, you’ll find it’s really not all that bad. Of course, I had already bought 40k gold ores for my own smithing level, so I’ll let y’all be your own judges.

When you want to hit a part of the sword, you first need to set the power. Here’s a meter of the numbers you get with each hit:

HARD: You can hit a 0 to 5. The most common is 3.
MEDIUM: You can hit 0 to 3. Most common is 2.
SOFT: You can hit 0 to 2. Most common is 1.
CAREFUL: Careful is unique. In exchange for taking up 2 hits instead of 1, you are guaranteed a 1.

The reason why the gamble is there is because you need to make almost every hit count. Either you risk a hit too hard, or you risk running out of remaining hits.

Of course, I’ve done this a few times, so here’s a few tips I can give you.

– Hitting a 1 with soft happens much more frequently then hitting 2 with medium, which is more frequent then hitting 3 with hard. With a good smithing level, you can avoid using careful entirely, unless you have 2 shots left and only 1 place to go.
– You’re better off trying for a 3 with hard then medium, as it’s more likely. However, there is the risk of going overboard with hard, where medium will most likely cause you to take 2 hits to get the 3, so judge your remaining hits carefully.
– If it’s 4 or 5 away, whack it with a hard one. Given. Be careful, though, if hitting a 5 will make you pass the mark.
– If it’s 3 away, and you don’t have many shots left, you can risk a hard shot. 5s are fairly uncommon, and hitting a 4 accidentally will only make you lose 2% rather than 14%.
– If it’s 2 away, give it a medium shot. You’re much more likely to get a 2 with medium then a 2 with soft, though it runs a minor risk of hitting a 3.
– If there’s a bunch of 3s, I advise you use medium on them all instead of hard, because it should take only about 2 shots to get the three mark, and you can spare them if there are so many 3s.
– Go for the tip first, hitting both sides hard. If they turn up 3, hit another hard one. The tip is the hardest part, as it’s always at the maximum. However, if you get it to 6 or 7, then you can leave it for last, as its weight on your score isn’t as heavy as the rest.
– Focus on the pieces that are the furthest away from the ideal point, saving the “one-aways” for last. They can easily be touched up with soft hits, and should you run out of hits, you only lose 2% as opposed to 6+.
– The higher your smithing level, the more frequently you’ll hit the common amount. Nevertheless, hitting it “hard” will still always be sporadic, so be careful.
– Always be aware of the number of hits remaining as well as the number of spots needed to be touched up. If you’ve got fewer hits then remaining spots, leave the ones only one away and focus on them last.

Best way to learn how to do it is with practice. Grab an inventory of iron ingots IVs and just wail away at them, and after a few sets, you’ll get a good, general grasp on the concept.

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OVERALL SUMMARY
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This is an update that simply gives you a variety of activities to train smithing with, just to keep things interesting if you really don’t like to grind very much. There are activities that give you more experience for your dollar, and there are activities that are faster, but may cost more. It’s really meant to be an option rather than “the” method to train; I daresay that lots of smithers will continue their regular methods after giving the place a quick try.

Of course, each department has their own unique benefit. Building tracks is very slow experience compared to other methods, but it is free experience. Making armor is slow, but menially easy and worthwhile. Building cannons can get a bit hectic with all the running around, but it is, in fact, a cheap and effective method of getting respect percentage and some smithing experience to boot.

As for ceremonial swords, it can be indeed faster than conventional methods if you work it right. However, hammering out adamantite platebodies and smelting gold are, by far, the more easier methods of training. You can multi-task with them, because it only requires minimal clicking on your part (thanks to the well-deserved make-x option). Ceremonial swords, however, you can’t do anything else unless you simply listen to music or an audio documentary, or are capable of some extreme arm control.

Myself, you’ll find me making ceremonial swords and fixing cannons out of steel for one reason and one reason only.

That Royale Cannon.

Ooh, it will be mine, just you wait! Sure, it’s merely cosmetic, but I delivered Awowegi 25 ice chimps and sacrificed thousands of ice barrage runes just for a “cosmetic” upgrade that nobody else will even see.

This, however, is something that I can show off. And this is something I most definitely will.

Cheers, cannoneers!