Smelting

Smelting is the step between mining ore and forging it into something useful. It requires no skill, but does take some knowledge. You must have access to a furnace, which is generally available in large towns.

After forging, you will have bars of ore. These will start out at 4 pounds, but can be combined into larger bars by continued use of the furnace, or cut into smaller ones with a bar cutter.

Steps

• Find a furnace (available at the blacksmith) and put the ore in it. Note: if you combined types of ore that do not turn into alloys, you will end up with slag-lumps.
• pull bellows.
• Wait until the furnace has cooled down and retrieve your bars.
• Bars of different metal types can be combined to create new alloys, such as bronze, pewter, brass and steel.
• Bars of the same metal can be combined to create large bars needed in Blacksmithing to create certain types of weapons and armor.

Metallurgy

• Combining common metals in the furnace can create new alloys not found naturally.
• Specific recipes can be discovered.

Notes

You can smelt things other than ore - like iron lockboxes. But it takes more than one lockbox to make a bar, and if you don't provide enough raw material, you will lose the inputs.

You can put multiple chunks of ore into the furnace at the same time.