Welcome to Elderfield Forging Guide

Last updated: 2026-09-27 · 11 min read

The Forge is not one system. It is three, and the game lets you find that out the hard way: the Forge itself makes your gear, a separate Forge Upgrade (t2) unlocks the entire top half of the recipe list, and a Lapidary Table is the only place gems can be fitted. Most "why can't I craft this" questions come down to which of the three you have not done yet.

Three Systems, Not One

That split explains a lot of confusion. If a recipe is greyed out with a t2 note, it is the middle row. If you have gems and nothing to do with them, it is the bottom row.

The Weapon Ladder

Every weapon line is a chain: each tier consumes the previous weapon plus new bars. That means upgrading never wastes the old weapon — it is an ingredient — but it also means you cannot skip a rung.

Two structural notes. The Darkness weapons are a side branch — they do not require t2 and they do not feed the ladder, so an Iron Shortsword + Gold + Void Crystal Bar investment is a parallel choice rather than a step. And the Platinum tier costs rare organs (Void Sphere, Beating Heart, Staring Orb, Sign of Death), not just bars — those come from the deep areas, so the top of the ladder is content-gated as much as material-gated.

The Armor Ladder

Armor follows the same consume-the-previous-piece logic across four slots (helmet, chest, legs, boots).

Plague Doctor is not an upgrade of Platinum — it is a separate set built from rare organs plus Spiritwood, and it is the reason to keep those organs rather than sell them. Note also that Leather is the quiet bottleneck: the top two tiers want 8–12 Leather per piece, which across four slots is dozens of Leather for one set. Start accumulating it long before you need it.

Materials: Mine or Buy

Every material the Forge consumes has both a mined and a bought source, and the trade is time versus gold.

The practical strategy: gather Copper and Iron before quests ask for them. The upgrade ladder consumes them in large multiples — a single Sturdy Watering Can wants 8 Copper Bar and 8 Iron Bar — and the Forge Shop's ore stock is capped at 15 and 10, so you cannot simply buy your way past the requirement in one visit. Coal at 20g is cheap enough that buying it is almost always better than mining it.

The Forge Upgrade (t2) Gate

This is the single most important unlock on the page, and it is easy to miss because nothing about the Verdite recipes looks different from the Iron ones until you try.

The t2 upgrade is an upgrade to the Forge itself rather than a recipe, which is why players looking for "where do I craft Verdite" do not find an answer in the recipe list. If your Verdite recipes will not produce, the Forge is the thing to go and improve — and do that before you spend a session mining Verdite Bar you cannot use yet.

Gems and the Lapidary Table

Gems do not go into the Forge. The game's own wording is direct about it: "in order to add gems to weapons and armor, you need a Lapidary Table."

So the third system exists purely to socket gems, and it is separate from both crafting and upgrading. If you have been holding Assorted Gems or Green Crystals expecting a Forge option, that is the missing piece. Note the distinction between the two uses of crystals:

• Green Crystal is a crafting ingredient — required in Verdite, Platinum and Plague Doctor recipes as a material.
• Gems (Assorted Gems and similar) are what the Lapidary Table fits into finished gear.

The practical order is therefore: craft the gear at the Forge, upgrade the Forge to reach the top tiers, and socket gems last at the Lapidary Table.

Combine Recipes and Necklaces

The Forge also has a Combine category for items that are built from other items rather than from raw materials. A short list is worth planning around:

The pattern is worth noting: the endgame accessories are built by combining two pendants or necklaces. That means the individual pendant drops are ingredients rather than equipment to discard, and losing one to a sale is expensive. The Holy Bludgeon is the exception that proves the rule — it is available without t2, requires a Ritual Blade (a ritual skill item), and its +25% Defence chance on basic attacks makes it a defensive option that does not compete with the damage ladder.

Tool Upgrades

Farm tools are forged at the Forge as well, and they follow the same material ladder as your gear — which is why mining pays for farming. Each tool has three forged tiers above its bought starting version.

The Watering Can is the one to do first, because watering is the daily action you cannot skip: 1 tile to 3 tiles per use cuts the worst chore in the game to a third. The rest of the farming tool detail is on the farming guide.

Note the Steel Bar / Gold Plate / Bone Ingot materials at the top tier — those are not the same materials as the weapon ladder, so a Superior tool is a separate supply chain from a Platinum sword.

Two Gear Rules That Cost You Resources

1. A stronger weapon raises the MP cost of your attacks and your heals. This is a genuine trap: equipping your best weapon makes healing more expensive too. The workaround is to swap to a cheap weapon before healing, heal at the low cost, then swap back. It costs a moment of inventory management and saves a lot of mana over a long run.
2. Never sell an item that appears in a Forge recipe. Because every shop buys at roughly half its selling price, selling a rare organ or pendant and later needing it is a double loss. Staring Orbs, Beating Hearts, Void Spheres and Signs of Death are all inputs to the Plague Doctor set; pendants are inputs to the endgame necklaces.

Troubleshooting

Most of these come down to a Forge that has not been upgraded yet, or a resource you are short of.

Images on this page are from the Welcome to Elderfield Wiki, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

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