artisan skill

Smithing

Smelts ores into bars at a furnace and hammers bars into weapons, tools and armour at an anvil across six metal tiers, up to godswords and spirit shields.

120 Level cap

22 Entries listed

1 First at level

90 Last at level

Smithing is the other half of Mining: you smelt ore into bars at a furnace, then hammer bars into gear at an anvil. It makes every melee weapon and armour set from bronze to rune, plus the crossbow limbs, arrow heads and unfinished bolts that Fletching needs, cannonballs, godswords, the dragonfire shield and the sigil spirit shields. Nothing else turns raw ore into equipment, so if you mine, you smith.

How you train it

Level 1 to 120

Bronze to 15, then let quests carry you: The Knight's Sword alone is 12,725 experience. Steel from 30, mithril from 50, adamant from 70 and rune from 85 to 120. Bars are the bottleneck, not levels, so mine coal in bulk and always hammer the heaviest item your level allows, because an anvil action takes the same time whether it eats one bar or five.

Auto smithing, which works a full inventory of bars

Bronze bars and bronze gear 1 to 15

One copper ore and one tin ore make a bronze bar for 9 experience in a second at any furnace, and each bar you then hammer pays 9 again. Lumbridge and Varrock both keep furnaces and anvils within a short walk of each other. Al Kharid has furnaces but no anvil.
Quest experience 1 to 30

The Knight's Sword is 12,725 smithing experience for a redberry pie, two iron bars and one blurite ore mined in the Ice Dungeon. The Lumbridge Blacksmith, Marriage Bestman and Lumbridge's Stripped Guard add exactly 3,200 more between them, though the Stripped Guard wants 15 Smithing and a full set of iron plate armour.
The side bars: iron, silver and gold 15 to 40

Iron bars often fail to form unless you wear a ring of forging, so they are a poor grind on their own. Silver at 20 and gold at 40 are worth smelting for Crafting rather than for levels: gold becomes rings, necklaces and amulets, silver makes hoes, shears and an apprentice wand.
Steel 30 to 50

One iron ore and two coal make a steel bar for 42 experience, then 42 again per bar at the anvil. Daggers, hatchets and pickaxes at 30 are one bar each, the three-bar shields, battleaxes and chain bodies open in the late thirties for 126, platelegs at 45 pay 168 and the platebody at 47 is five bars for 210. Cannonballs open at 35 if you have finished Dwarf Cannon and carry the ammo mould: one steel bar makes four.
Mithril 50 to 70

One mithril ore and four coal, 104 experience per bar smelted and 104 per bar smithed. Until 65 the heaviest thing you can hammer is a three-bar item for 312, a shield at 57 or a chain body at 60. Platelegs land at 65 for 416 and the platebody at 67 for 520, which is the action to repeat once you can reach it.
Adamant 70 to 85

One adamant ore and six coal, or a single graphite ore in place of all that coal. A bar is 176 experience. The shield at 77 and the chain body at 80 are 528 a swing, platelegs at 85 are 704 and the platebody at 87 is 880. Adamant is also the last bar a smithing cape can double, so get that out of it before you move on.
Rune 85 to 120

One runite ore and eight coal, or one graphite. A bar is 239 experience. The one-bar items pay 239 from 85, the three-bar shields and bodies pay 717 from 91 up, platelegs are 956 at 98 and the platebody is 1,195 at 99, the biggest single anvil action in the skill and the one you repeat all the way to 120.

Furnace and anvil

Click a furnace for the smelting list and an anvil for the smithing list, then pick a recipe and it repeats until the materials run out or you walk away. Sneak and click an anvil to go straight back to the last thing you made.

Every anvil action takes the same time no matter what it costs, so the best experience is always the item that swallows the most bars: platebody at five, platelegs at four, then the three-bar shields, chain bodies, chain legs, battleaxes, two-handed swords, spears and plate boots. Bolts and arrow heads come out fifteen at a time from a single bar and throwing knives five at a time, which makes them supply for Fletching and Ranged rather than experience.

Graphite instead of coal

From adamant upward, one graphite ore replaces the entire coal cost of a bar, six coal for adamant and eight for rune. You take less experience for it, 128 instead of 176 on an adamant bar and 157 instead of 239 on a rune bar, but you carry a fraction of the weight and get far more bars per trip. The furnace only reaches for graphite when you are short of the coal, so bring one or the other rather than both. Graphite comes from graphite blocks at 65 Mining, and Dagannoth Rex drops it in noted stacks.

The things bars cannot make

At 80 you can forge a godsword: three shards and a hammer clicked on an anvil make the blade for 500 experience, then a god hilt on the anvil with the blade in your pack finishes the sword for 1,250. At 90 an anti-dragonfire shield and a draconic visage become a dragonfire shield, and with 90 Prayer alongside it a sigil binds to a blessed spirit shield for 5,000 experience. None of these need bars, so they are one-off milestones rather than a training method.

Worth knowing

Enchant a ruby ring at 49 Magic for a ring of forging and iron bars stop failing entirely.
Superheat at 43 Magic smelts a bar anywhere for four fire runes and a nature rune, and pays 18 magic experience on top of the smithing experience.
A 99 Smithing cape sometimes hands you a second bar off the furnace on anything up to adamant, and it halves the cost of repairing Barrows gear.
Blurite smelts at level 1 for 11 experience, so the ore you fetch for The Knight's Sword is not wasted.

Everything it unlocks