OSRS 1–99 Smithing Guide

There are only two actions in the whole skill, and understanding both is what makes every later decision obvious. Smelting happens at a furnace: you use ore on the furnace and it becomes a bar. Forging happens at an anvil: with a hammer in your inventory you use a bar on the anvil, and a menu appears letting you choose which item to make. Some items need one bar, others need several — a dagger is one bar, a platebody is five.

The detail that drives everything is timing. Each anvil action takes a fixed 5 game ticks (about 3 seconds) no matter what you are making, and each item gives experience based on how many bars it consumes. Put those two facts together and the rule writes itself: to forge fast, make the item that uses the most bars per action. That is why a 5-bar platebody is always the fastest experience for any given tier of bar, and why you should ignore daggers, swords and other low-bar items when you are training for levels rather than for a specific product. The Smiths' Uniform can shave that 5-tick action down to 4 ticks, which is where its experience boost comes from.

Smelting has its own quirk. Most metals smelt with a 100% success rate, so the only variable is how fast you can click between the bank and the furnace. The one stubborn exception is iron: smelting iron ore has a flat 50% chance to fail regardless of your Smithing level, and a failed attempt destroys the ore for nothing — no bar, no experience. Three things remove that penalty entirely and guarantee a bar every time: wearing a ring of forging, casting the Superheat Item spell, or using the Blast Furnace. Forgetting this is the most common early-game Smithing mistake, so if your iron keeps vanishing, that 50% is why.

It also helps to picture where each method lives on the map, because Smithing is unusually location-dependent. Smelting happens at furnaces — the Edgeville furnace is the closest to a bank in free-to-play, while the dedicated Blast Furnace in Keldagrim is the members hub for serious bar production. Forging happens at anvils, and the one south of the west Varrock bank is the workhorse for free players, with the Prifddinas anvil being the fastest-banking option for those who have completed Song of the Elves. Because Smithing is a processing skill, you should always price your inputs before you start — the same level can cost a few thousand coins or a few million depending entirely on which metal you choose to push through, and the gap between a smart material choice and a careless one is measured in millions over a full 99.

Smithing has fewer tools than most skills, but the ones it does have completely reshape your rates, so it is worth getting them early rather than grinding around them. Forging always needs a hammer in your inventory; the upgrade is the imcando hammer from the Camdozaal area, which works while it is simply in your toolbelt and frees the inventory slot a normal hammer would occupy — a small but permanent quality-of-life win.

Two pairs of gloves sit at the heart of the meta. The goldsmith gauntlets, a reward from the Family Crest quest, raise the experience from smelting a gold bar from 22.5 to 56.2 — about two and a half times as much. Almost the entire fast-experience route in this guide depends on them, so if you intend to use the Blast Furnace, getting these is not optional. The ice gloves are the other half of that combo: they let you grab freshly-smelted bars straight from the Blast Furnace dispenser without waiting for the bars to cool, which is what keeps the gold-bar loop tight.

For smelting iron without the Blast Furnace, the ring of forging guarantees a successful bar every time, though it only lasts 140 charges before it crumbles to dust and has to be re-enchanted. A coal bag is essential the moment you start steel or any higher bar — it holds 27 extra coal per trip, roughly doubling how much metal you can process between bank visits. The Smithing skilling outfit is the Smiths' Uniform, bought for 15,000 Foundry Reputation at the Giants' Foundry reward shop rather than dropped while training. Its four pieces — Smiths tunic, Smiths trousers, Smiths gloves and Smiths boots — each give a 20% chance to speed an anvil action by one tick, reaching a 100% chance with the full set, which lifts experience per hour at the Foundry by roughly 20%. Note this is a speed bonus at the anvil and Foundry, not a flat global experience multiplier like Woodcutting's Lumberjack outfit, so it matters most for anvil-forging and Giants' Foundry sessions. You can read about it alongside every other skilling set in our Skilling Outfits guide.

Smithing has more low-level quest experience available than almost any other skill, and using it is by a wide margin the smartest way to start an account. The early levels are slow and lose gold on every action, so anything that skips them is pure value. The headline is The Knight's Sword, a free-to-play quest that grants 12,725 Smithing experience — enough to leap straight from level 1 to 29 — with no skill requirements at all and a completion time under ten minutes. There is genuinely no faster way to gain those first levels in the entire game.

Stack it with the other Smithing-rewarding quests and the early grind disappears entirely. Sleeping Giants gives 6,000 experience and unlocks the Giants' Foundry. Elemental Workshop I gives 5,000 and Elemental Workshop II another 7,500. The Giant Dwarf gives 2,500 and, just as importantly, opens up Keldagrim and the Blast Furnace. Heroes' Quest and the Freeing Pirate Pete subquest of Recipe for Disaster chip in more. Completed together, these bundle to roughly 36,982 experience — enough to reach level 39 without smelting a single bar for experience.

From level 39 you only need to forge a couple of iron platebodies to tick over to 40, which is exactly where the Blast Furnace gold-bar route becomes available. A few of these quests are worth singling out. The Knight's Sword is the standout because it is free-to-play, requirement-free and absurdly fast for the experience it gives — there is simply nothing else like it. The Giant Dwarf and Sleeping Giants pull double duty by unlocking the two most important members training venues at the same time as handing over experience, so doing them early clears two jobs at once. Elemental Workshop I and II together give 12,500 experience and chain into each other, making them an efficient pair to knock out back to back.

The takeaway is simple: do the quests first. Even players who normally ignore questing should make an exception for Smithing, because the time saved versus grinding those levels manually is enormous and the quests themselves come with other rewards and area unlocks. Our wider guides hub covers each of these quests individually if you want a walkthrough, and the Smithing calculator will show you exactly which level a given experience total puts you at.

If for some reason you have skipped the quests, or you simply want to fill the gap to level 40, the fastest non-quest approach is to forge the highest-level item you can at the anvil just south of the west Varrock bank. That anvil is the closest one to a bank in the early game, which keeps your banking trips short and your experience per hour high. Because higher-tier items use more bars per action, they level you faster even though each one costs slightly more — the per-action experience scales with the bars consumed, so a platebody beats a dagger every time. Expect a small overall loss on the way to 40, but since this stretch takes well under an hour, the gold cost is trivial in the grand scheme.

For the cheapest possible route that also feeds you Mining experience if you gather your own ore, smelt and forge progressively: bronze bars from level 1, made by smelting one copper ore with one tin ore for around 30,000 experience per hour as shown in the table; iron bars from level 15 (remember the 50% iron fail rate without a ring of forging); and start forging bronze platebodies at level 18 once you have the bars to spare. From level 30 you can move to steel, which becomes the backbone of several later methods.

Whatever you choose, treat the entire 1–40 band as a means to an end. The real Smithing grind — and the methods that actually matter for your account — begin at level 40 with gold bars at the Blast Furnace. Every minute you spend dawdling in the low levels is a minute not spent on the fast route, so push through to 40 as directly as you can and do not agonise over optimising a stretch that is over in under an hour.

From level 40, smelting gold bars at the Blast Furnace while wearing goldsmith gauntlets is the fastest viable Smithing experience in the game, and it stays the fastest all the way to 99. With the gauntlets equipped, each gold bar gives 56.2 experience instead of the usual 22.5, and a smooth, well-practised run produces around 350,000 experience per hour as reflected in the method table below. The trade-off is that gold bars are a pure money sink — you sell the bars for less than the ore costs, so you are quite literally buying experience — and at high Grand Exchange gold-ore prices a session can run into the millions. This is the method that turns Smithing into a budgeted purchase.

The loop itself is a rhythm. Deposit an inventory of gold ore onto the ore conveyor belt, wait for the bars to finish smelting (so the gauntlet experience actually lands), then swap to your ice gloves, run to the bar dispenser and grab the bars before they would normally cool, bank them at the chest, withdraw more ore, re-equip the goldsmith gauntlets, and repeat. Stamina potions keep your run energy up, and weight-reducing gear like the Graceful outfit, the boots of lightness, and a charged ring of endurance reduce how much energy each lap burns. To reach the Furnace at all you must have started The Giant Dwarf for access to Keldagrim; from there the minigame teleport or the Grand Exchange minecart get you there quickly, and you should use one of the official Blast Furnace worlds where dwarves keep the furnace running for an hourly fee.

There is a higher ceiling for players willing to micro-manage their clicks. A technique called 0-tick banking — depositing bars, withdrawing ore, and starting to run back all on the same game tick — pushes the rate toward 390,000 experience per hour, or about 420,000 when wearing the Smithing cape. That is the absolute top end and demands constant, precise input. For a normal player the headline figure of roughly 350,000 xp/hr is the sustainable rate, and it is still comfortably the fastest in the skill — chasing the 0-tick ceiling is an option, not a requirement.

The Blast Furnace is not just for gold. Its real magic is that it halves the coal every higher-tier bar normally needs, which makes it the only sensible place to smelt steel and above in bulk. The progression runs steel (level 30) → mithril (50) → adamantite (70) → runite (85), and the experience climbs into the 100,000–150,000 experience per hour band shown in the method table. These rates sit below gold bars, but they come with a decisive advantage gold lacks.

That advantage is profit. Unlike gold bars, steel, mithril, adamantite and runite bars all sell on the Grand Exchange for more than the ore and coal that go into them, so smelting them earns gold while you train rather than burning it. Steel bars alone already make solid money at roughly 100,000 experience per hour, and the higher bars scale up from there — runite is the most profitable single bar. For players who want both experience and income, this is the sweet spot of the skill.

The advanced version is a hybrid, which blends the speed of gold with the income of the harder bars. You alternate inventories of a profitable bar — mithril, adamantite or runite — carrying a full coal bag, with runs of gold ore that conveniently also top up your coal. A rune-and-gold hybrid is the headline example: it can bring in close to 1 million gp per hour while still giving 250,000 or more experience per hour, an exceptional combination that few skills can match. The downside is that hybrids demand sharper attention than plain gold bars, since you are juggling two metals and a coal bag at once. Whatever you smelt, always use the official Blast Furnace worlds and carry a coal bag, and price the bars first in our GE Price Tracker since the profit on each metal shifts with the market.

Unlocked at level 15 after completing Sleeping Giants, the Giants' Foundry is a lower-effort, cheaper alternative to grinding bars at the Blast Furnace, and it is a favourite for players who find the gold-bar loop too click-intensive. The activity works like a short crafting puzzle: you take a commission from Kovac, set a sword mould in the jig, fill a crucible with a mix of two metals, then pour the molten metal in and refine the resulting sword using the trip hammer, grindstone and polishing wheel — each at the correct temperature — to push the sword's quality toward 100% before handing it back. You are rewarded with Smithing experience, coins, and Foundry Reputation.

For the best all-round results, use a mithril-adamantite metal mix. It strikes the best balance of cost and speed, generally turns a profit, and asks for noticeably less attention than the Blast Furnace because run energy refills with every completed sword (so the Graceful outfit is not needed here). An 18-to-10 metal ratio is a common optimisation that hits high sword quality with less fuss. Adamantite-runite swords forge slightly faster but cost far more, so they are only worth it if you are specifically chasing the unique rewards as quickly as possible.

Rates start around 150,000 experience per hour at lower levels and climb toward 200,000 or more as you level up and buy the improved moulds, which raise sword quality and effectively lower your material cost per point of experience. The reward shop is where the Smiths' Uniform comes from (buy it early if you plan to spend real time here), along with the double ammo mould that doubles cannonball output and the Colossal blade. The recommended order is improved moulds first, then the uniform. Overall the Foundry is the method to pick when you want fast experience that does not require perfect, constant clicking.

If you would rather train Smithing in the background while you do something else, the classic choice is cannonballs from level 35. You turn steel bars into cannonballs — four per bar — at a furnace using an ammo mould, and it is one of the most genuinely AFK methods in the entire game: a full inventory takes around 160 seconds to process, so you can click once and look away for over two minutes. The experience is slow, roughly 16,000 experience per hour as the method table shows, but it usually makes a small profit and produces cannonballs you can actually fire from a dwarf multicannon. A double ammo mould smelts two steel bars at once, doubling your rate and roughly halving the attention needed per ball.

Even more hands-off are dart tips and nails, both forged at an anvil. Dart tips become available from level 19 once you have completed The Tourist Trap, and one bar yields ten dart tips; nails are forged in a similar way. Both give very slow experience but barely break even or turn a tiny profit thanks to steady, reliable demand — fletchers always need dart tips and builders always need nails. The appeal here is not speed but freedom: these methods ask for almost no clicks, so they suit a second monitor, a phone session, or any situation where you cannot give the game your full attention.

Be clear-eyed about the trade. Every AFK method sacrifices a large amount of experience per hour in exchange for the ability to do something else — the gap between cannonballs at 16k/hr and gold bars at 350k/hr is more than twentyfold. Pick AFK methods when your alternative is not training at all, not when you can sit down and focus. For most players the right answer is a mix: tryhard the Blast Furnace when you can concentrate, and fall back to cannonballs when you cannot.

Smithing is fully trainable to 99 in free-to-play, and the path is refreshingly simple: forge platebodies at the Varrock anvil, always making the highest tier your level allows. Start by completing The Knight's Sword for 12,725 experience, which carries you from level 1 to 29 in minutes. Then climb the platebody ladder — bronze platebodies to level 33, iron from 33 to 48, steel from 48 to 68, mithril from 68 to 88, adamant from 88 to 98, and rune from 98 to 99. Each platebody consumes five bars, which is exactly why this route is so much faster than smelting: stacking bars per anvil action multiplies your experience.

Because of that bar-stacking, the anvil-forging rates here run well above the smelting rates you will see in the free-to-play method table — roughly 50,000 experience per hour on bronze platebodies, scaling up to around 240,000 per hour on adamant when you sprint constantly between the bank and anvil. To sprint without stopping at level 1 Agility, keep two inventory slots free for energy potions and sip them as your run energy drains; the small added cost per bar is easily worth the higher experience rate. The anvil south of the west Varrock bank remains the best free-to-play location throughout.

This whole route loses gold, since platebodies sell for less than the bars used to make them, so think of free-to-play Smithing as paying for the fastest free experience available. There are two ways to soften the cost. At level 43 Magic the Superheat Item spell becomes a strong smelting option that makes any bar from your inventory, smelts iron at 100% with no ring of forging, casts faster than a furnace, and gives Magic experience on the side. And at 55 Magic you can High Level Alchemy your finished platebodies to recover some of their value. The members-only tools — the Blast Furnace, goldsmith gauntlets, the Giants' Foundry and the Smiths' Uniform — are all locked in free-to-play, so both the very fastest route (gold bars) and the lowest-effort routes require a membership.

Most Smithing methods cost money, but a meaningful handful pay you while you train, and knowing which is which lets you offset the expense of the levels you actually care about. The best income comes from the Blast Furnace: steel, mithril, adamantite and runite bars all sell for more than their inputs, with runite the strongest single earner and the rune-gold hybrid clearing close to a million gp per hour. Cannonballs turn a steady, low-effort profit and double as usable ammunition. And at the very top of the skill, rune platebodies, platelegs and 2h swords — forgeable at level 99, or from 95 with a Kovac's grog boost or 98 with a dwarven stout — are made for profit, especially when you High Level Alchemy the products to push the margin further.

The honest framing matters here, though. Even the best profitable Smithing methods are out-earned per hour by dedicated money-making activities elsewhere in the game, so almost nobody trains Smithing purely for the gold. The realistic use is to reduce the net cost of your levels: by choosing profitable bars over gold bars where you can stomach the slower experience, you turn a method that would bleed millions into one that roughly breaks even or earns a little, which over a full 99 grind adds up to a large swing in your bank.

One firm caveat: Smithing margins are unusually sensitive to the market because both the ore inputs and the bar outputs trade in huge volume. A method that profits comfortably today can flip to a loss next week if bar prices dip or ore prices spike. Always check the live numbers in our GE Price Tracker immediately before a long session, and re-check if you are buying ore in bulk — the prices you assume are the prices that decide whether you make money or lose it.

Beyond the big lumps of early experience, several quests and unlocks make the whole skill smoother and faster, and they are worth doing before you settle into a long grind. Family Crest is effectively mandatory, because it is the only source of the goldsmith gauntlets that power the entire fast gold-bar route — without them, gold bars give less than half the experience and the meta falls apart. The Giant Dwarf opens up Keldagrim and the Blast Furnace itself, so it is required before any furnace method. Sleeping Giants unlocks the Giants' Foundry and its reward shop, which is the only place to buy the Smiths' Uniform.

A few smaller unlocks round things out. The ice gloves come from killing the Ice Queen deep in White Wolf Mountain (you need level 50 Mining to reach her chamber), and they are what let you grab Blast Furnace bars without waiting for them to cool. The imcando hammer, repaired during the Below Ice Mountain quest's Camdozaal content, forges without taking up an inventory slot once it is on your toolbelt. There is no large late-game lump of quest experience the way there is at low levels, so past level 40 your road to 99 is almost entirely method-based rather than quest-based.

It is also worth seeing Smithing in the context of the skills around it. It pairs naturally with Mining: an ironman who mines their own ore turns the two skills into a self-sufficient gear pipeline, smelting and forging everything they dig up, while a main account usually buys ore and simply pays for the Smithing levels with gold. Whichever you are, planning the route in advance saves a surprising amount of money — map it out in our Smithing calculator before you start. The calculator is especially useful for ironmen, who need to know how much coal and ore each tier of bar demands so they can stockpile before a session rather than running dry halfway through a grind.

A handful of habits compound over a long grind and separate an efficient Smithing account from a wasteful one. First and most important: do the quests before anything else — The Knight's Sword and its companions erase the slowest, most loss-making levels in a matter of minutes, and skipping them is the most expensive mistake a new smith can make. Second, when forging for levels, always make the highest-bar item available, which is almost always a platebody — ignore the tempting low-bar weapons, because experience scales with bars used per action, not with the item's prestige.

At the furnace, carry a coal bag on every steel-or-higher Blast Furnace trip so you are not wasting laps on fuel, and practise the ice-gloves swap on gold bars until it is automatic before you ever attempt the harder 0-tick banking. If you plan to spend serious time at the Giants' Foundry, buy the improved moulds and then the Smiths' Uniform early, since the speed bonus pays for itself many times over across a full grind. And above all, price your inputs before each session in the GE Price Tracker — Smithing is a purchase, and the difference between a good buy and a bad one is just a few seconds of checking the market.

One thing to know up front so you are not chasing something that does not exist: Smithing is one of the very few skills with no dedicated skilling pet. There is no Smithing equivalent of Woodcutting's Beaver, Mining's Rock golem or Fishing's Heron, so unlike those skills there is no companion to roll for while you train. What you are working toward instead is the levels themselves — the gear pipeline they unlock, the gold the profitable methods save, and the trimmable Smithing cape that marks 99. Plan the path with our Smithing calculator and browse the rest of the toolkit from the guides hub, and the long road to a hammer-swinging 99 becomes a budgeted, predictable project rather than a slog.