The Blacksmith Life is one of six crafting Lives in Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, a vocation that turns raw materials into finished products. In the case of the Blacksmith, it may well be the most important Life in the game, as you’ll need it to craft many weapons, shields, Life Tools and armor. If you want to get the most out of other Lives dependant upon metal gear, mastering the Blacksmith Life is necessary, and this page will help you get started, covering how crafting as the Blacksmith works, what skills you should invest in, and more!
Page Breakdown¶
| Quick Search |
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| How to Unlock the Blacksmith Life |
| Tips for Playing the Blacksmith |
| Best Blacksmith Skills |
Blacksmithing - like all crafting Lives - revolves around the crafting minigame.
What sets Blacksmithing apart is how useful its creations are, which includes Life Tools for many other Lives!
How to Unlock the Blacksmith Life¶
The Blacksmith is one of the game’s many starting Lives, unlocked near the beginning of the game during the main quest 
Talk to the King. Just head to the Guild Office and talk to 
Auntie Anne to switch to this Life and complete (or skip) the Novice quest Big Bang Bash!, after which you’ll be able to progress it normally. That said, we do not recommend you start as a Blacksmith - the Blacksmith, like all crafting Lives, is useless in battle and you’re better served picking a combat Life (Paladin, Mercenary, 
Hunter or Magician) and playing through the main questline to get access to better gear and materials before bothering with any of the crafting Lives.
Tips for Playing the Blacksmith¶
As mentioned before, the Blacksmith is something of a dead-end as a starter Life, as you’ll need to switch to a more combat-capable Life to make any expedient, meaningful advancement in the main questline. Once you reach Ginormosia, however, things open up, as you can explore this optional world and increase Area Ranks to get access to gear and materials earlier than you would otherwise be able to in the main story. This isn’t a substitute for main questline progression, but it can provide some shortcuts to previously ignored Lives, like the crafting Lives, as you can potentially get higher-quality Life Tools as drops from chests and enemies, recruit new buddies that can give you passive boosts to your Crafting Stats, and generally just make it less of a grind to complete Blacksmith Life quests.
(1 of 3) To make strides in Smithing (or any crafting Life, for that matter) revert Strangelings and have your new buddies assist you in crafting.
The substance of the Blacksmith Life is its crafting minigame, which is largely shared by every other crafting Life, albeit with different icons. The mechanics are the same between all six crafting Lives - you see a row of icons at the top of the screen and you move your character to the indicated station and perform the correct action, which is either pressing, holding or mashing a button at said station. Complete the actions indicated by these icons at the top of the screen and you’ll make progress towards crafting - the faster you do it, the better. Reach 100% completion before you run out of commands to input and you’ll create the item. Check out the Crafting Minigame Explained page for more details. If this seems complicated, just know that your actual performance at this minigame is somewhat perfunctory - failing to complete inputs in time can cause you to fail to create the intended item, and your performance does influence the quality, somewhat, but the major determining factor here is your crafting ability score. In the case of the Blacksmith Life, this is their Smithing score, and it’s almost entirely determined by three factors: 1) What hammer you have equipped, 2) what buddies you have helping you (and to a large degree, what hammers they have equipped) and 3) what skills you’ve purchased. We’ll get to the skills in a bit, but it should be clear that having good hammers is going to provide a lot of your Smithing score, and how do you get better hammers? By crafting them… using your Smithing score…
The trick is to climb the ladder by getting buddies via reverting Strangelings and assigning them to help you during crafting, which will get you a bonus to your overall Smithing ability score equal to half the first buddy’s score and 1/4 the second buddy’s score. Assuming you equip your buddies with similar Life Tools as your protagonist, that’s effectively a +75% boost to your overall Smithing ability, which will let you craft better hammers, which will let you equip your protagonist and their buddies with these better hammers, which will let you craft better hammers… you can see how this goes. That said, a fair bit of Ginormosia exploration is going to be required to get this virtuous cycle, as well as some RNG during crafting - you want the “Metal Tool Crafter” ability on a hammer to improve your ability to craft better Life Tools - like hammers! Check out the page Perfect Endgame Crafting for more in-depth details on how this all works.
This sounds tedious, but really you just need the materials to craft three hammer upgrades for your protagonist and buddies every time you get the materials and recipes to make significant gains by doing so, and the stats on early and midgame hammers mean you’re better off just crafting, say, a notable 
Bronze Hammer before waiting until you can reliably craft perfect-quality 
Gold Hammers or 
Crystal Hammers, after which you’ll be ready to make the jump to endgame hammers. Your recipes will be gated by your Blacksmith Life rank, and you’ll need to push the main storyline to unlock the new areas and materials to complete the Blacksmith Life quests required to rank up, so honestly the Blacksmith Life (and every crafting Life, really) is best ignored until around the time you reach Swolean Island, at which point you can engage in a flurry of crafting to get everything up to snuff. Just be sure to start with Blacksmith so you can just create high-quality Life Tools for the Tailor, 
Cook, 
Farmer and Miner Lives, which will ensure they are trivial to level, as well. This will also be the point in the game where being able to craft perfect-quality weapons and armor will yield massive benefits over just finding or buying new gear.
All in all, a very, very useful - nigh essential - Life, but one that can paradoxically be ignored until later in the game.
The Weaponsmithing skill will improve your ability to craft high-quality weapons and Life Tools.
Best Blacksmith Skills¶
When you do get around to leveling up Blacksmith, the matter of skill allocation needs to be addressed. Blacksmith, as noted above, revolves entirely around its crafting minigame, and this functionally means the skill tree will be a matter of incremental gains… mostly. There are many skills that give you more time during the minigame or makes certain inputs easier, but these are hard to appreciate with a single skill purchase, but numerous skills stacking benefits do have a noticeable effect… in the long term. Raw bonuses to Smithing are always nice, as well, but again, you probably won’t notice this in small amounts. You’ll have to get them, however, just to unlock enough skills to progress in the skill tree, but if there’s any greater goal you should have in mind, it’s to work your way down to the Weaponsmithing skill, which “Improves ability to smith Metal Weapons and Life Tools”. This has a fairly large effect on the outcome of crafting, and eventually you’re going to want perfect-quality Life Tools, weapons and armor. Armorsmithing is a good secondary goal, for the same reason as Weaponsmithing.
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