Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord lets you choose how to specialize your character as you venture across Calradia. If you’re not looking to go down the warrior’s path or would simply prefer providing weapons for yourself and other characters, the smithing skill can prove to be a great pick.
Mount and Blade 2: Bannerlord’s smithing skill is governed (or bound to) the Endurance stat. Increasing it makes it easier to become a master of the forge while also increasing your character’s learning limit. Even if you don’t want to go all-in, spending some points in a skill’s associated stat makes the process of improving said skill more efficient.
Whenever you feel an itch to craft some weapons, you’ll want to head to your nearest smithy (usually found inside Calradia’s cities). Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord’s smithing relies on the following 9 materials:
- Iron Ore
- Crude Iron
- Wrought Iron
- Iron
- Steel
- Fine Steel
- Thamaskene Steel
- Hardwood
- Charcoal
You can obtain these materials in a number of different ways. While exploring the world, you can purchase them from traders or towns that produce them. If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, raiding caravans can also yield them.
While inside a smithy, you can smelt weapons you no longer need or refine lower-tier resources into higher-tier ones. Incidentally, these are two major parts of Bannerlord’s whole smithing system.
Smelting is fairly self-explanatory. As long as you have eligible weapons, you can break them down into materials. On the right side of the menu, you’ll see the exact amount of resources you get by smelting each eligible weapon.
To actually go through with the process, you need Charcoal, that you cannot directly purchase from merchants. Luckily, you can buy hardwood, which you then refine into charcoal.
Refining is also fairly simple to grasp since it allows you to turn low-tier resources into high-tier ones. Like with smelting, you get a detailed breakdown of what you spend and what you obtain before going through with the whole process, so you can plan accordingly.
All this manipulation of material quantities is done for a single purpose: forging, which happens to be the most important aspect of Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord’s smithing system.
From this menu, you can check any orders that others in the city might have placed. If you’re skilled enough, crafting these requested weapons is one good way to add some extra denarii to your pouch.
The meat of the system is the free build tab, which lets you select from the following craftable types of weapons:
- Dagger
- Javelin
- Mace
- One Handed Axe
- One Handed Sword
- Pike
- Throwing Axe
- Throwing Knife
- Two Handed Axe
- Two Handed Mace
- Two Handed Polearm
- Two Handed Sword
Each icon also informs you how many parts you have unlocked for that weapon type. Selecting any weapon type then lets you piece one together from a large selection of individual parts, including blades, guards, grips, pommels, braces, and more.
Each part belongs to a tier, which determines the resources needed to craft the weapon, the stats it provides, as well as the difficulty of crafting your weapon.
The bigger the difference between a weapon’s difficulty and your smithing skill, the more likely you are for the result to be sub-par. Conversely, if your skill is higher than a weapon’s difficulty, you can end up crafting a better weapon.
New parts are randomly unlocked as you interact with Bannerlord’s smithing system. Do keep in mind that your character has a limited amount of stamina that decreases with each action.
You’ll need to rest for it to recover, but one way to give you more to work with early on is having a companion – who’s preferably not bad at smithing – join you.
Each character has their own stamina pool and you can select the active crafter using the portrait on the lower left side of the screen.
Naturally, the more you smith, the more experience you get, which increases your skill. This lets you unlock mutually exclusive perks that halve the stamina spent while smithing, increase the chance to discover new parts, or help you refine items more efficiently.
That’s how smithing works in Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord. For more help with the game, check out our articles on console commands and mods.
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