The biggest obstacle on the way from a simple tribe to an advanced dwarven empire is the industrial breakthrough in Dwarf Fortress. To create an industrially advanced colony, you must be able to melt and process metals at high temperatures and create new items. Especially if you have dwarves with the Dwarf Fortress metal crafter skill, your job is even easier.
Dwarves with the Metalcrafting skill can craft most items made of iron. In addition, they become masters of workshops related to blacksmithing or steelmaking, like Smelter. If you’re just starting out with the game, it’s probably going to be quite complicated for you. Don’t worry though, because we explain everything you need to know about metalsmithing in our guide.
In the meantime, if you need a guide on the other pillar of industrialized power generation, you might want to check out our Dwarf Fortress millstone article.
How to Use Dwarf Fortress Metal Crafter?
Most players spend the initial phase of the game with wood and chipped stones. Very powerful mines such as iron, silver, or steel are now needed to advance to the next level. But is having a dwarf with the title of Dwarf Fortress Metal Crafter enough to accomplish all this? No, unfortunately not.
First of all, you need to create a special area for Metalsmithing in your colony. Because you will use more than one dwarf for these works with more than one workshop. If you want, let’s take a closer look at how we can set up the setup you need for Metalcrafting.
- First of all, you need the “Anvil” to build the Metalsmith workshop, which is the focus of all your operations. For now, there are only three ways to get the Anvil in the game. The first of these is to add Anvil to the items while you determine your world and dwarves before you start the game. The second is to buy Anvil from an outside trade caravan. The third is by trying to produce Anvil directly with 3 metal bars. If you’re new to the game, you’ll probably prefer 1st and 2nd way. We generally recommend the 1st way for beginners.
- If you have at least one Anvil, you can now press “B” to build a “Metalsmith” from workshops. It is useful to build it in a large area.
- Another important point is to produce fuel, which is the basic need of Dwarf Fortress Metal Crafter dwarves. You must cut a lot of wood in fuel and build a “Wood Furnace” from the workshop.
- The last and most important detail is to build a “Smelter” that turns ores into processed bars.
Now that everything is done, you need to make some systematic adjustments to make it easier for your dwarves to work.
Storage Settings
Now you need to build a storage system in the space you designed for your Dwarf Fortress metal crafter dwarfs. You can follow the steps down below for this.
Wood Furnace
First of all, set a stockpile area of 4 tiles at the front of the section where you build the Wood Furnace. Then click on this stockpiles area and select just “Wood” from the “Custom” page.
In short, you need to store some wood you’ve acquired from the trees in front of the Wood Furnace. And you must convert these woods from Wood Furnace to charcoal. To do this, you can place orders for the production of charcoal from the “Work Orders” section.
As you can see, we managed to produce fuel in a simple way. Now let’s take a look at Smelter.
Smelter
The smelter is a workshop where iron bars are produced for the Dwarf Fortress Metal Crafter dwarfs. As you just did in Wood Furnace, you need to set a stockpiles zone in an area of 4 tiles. Then enter this stockpiles area, click “Custom“, then “Stone” and mark only “Metal Ores” to store.
Now that you’ve handled the storage problem, we can move on to the production phase. First, click on Smelter and select which raw material you want to produce from the “Add new task“. For example, if you want to produce iron bars, you need to select the “Smelt hematite ore” task.
Your dwarves with the Metalcrafting skill will immediately start working to produce smelt hematite ore. First, collect the charcoal from the area you set, and then take the ores you need from the ores area. When all this is over, you will have plenty of iron bars as in the picture below.
Metalsmith’s Forge
Your fuel and iron bars are ready and now you can craft items from iron. Before that, you need to set a stockpile area next to or in front of the Metalsmith workshop. You should only allow “Bars/Block” to be stored in Stockpiles.
You can now task your Dwarf Fortress Metal Crafter dwarves to craft items. For the tasks, you have to click on the Metalsmith workshop and open the menu which item you want to produce. For example, if we want to make iron weapons for our dwarves, we click “Weapons and Ammunition“, select “iron” and create the “Forge iron battle axe” task. In just a few minutes, your dwarves with the metal crafter skill will craft the battle ax.
As you can see, it is now possible to produce any equipment from iron or from different bars. Also, if you appoint professional dwarfs to all workshops as workers, the result will be much more spectacular. By the way, if you want to see the final version of the area we designed for metal crafting, you can look at the picture below.
