Blacksmith Starter Guide

Learn how to unlock the Blacksmith Life in FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time. Get tips on playing as a Blacksmith and the best skills to use, plus how to progress.

Blacksmithing, like all crafting Lives, revolves around a crafting minigame. What sets Blacksmithing apart is how useful its creations are, including 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. 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!. It is not recommended to start as a Blacksmith, as it is useless in battle. It's better to pick a combat Life (Paladin, Mercenary, Hunter, or Magician) and play through the main questline to get access to better gear and materials before focusing on crafting Lives.

Tips for Playing the Blacksmith

The Blacksmith is a dead-end as a starter Life. You’ll need to switch to a more combat-capable Life for expedient advancement in the main questline. Once you reach Ginormosia, you can explore this optional world and increase Area Ranks to get access to gear and materials earlier. This can provide shortcuts to crafting Lives, as you might get higher-quality Life Tools from chests and enemies, recruit new buddies for passive boosts to Crafting Stats, and make completing Blacksmith Life quests less of a grind.

To make strides in Smithing (or any crafting Life), revert Strangelings and have your new buddies assist you in crafting.

The core of the Blacksmith Life is its crafting minigame, shared by other crafting Lives with different icons. The mechanics are the same: move your character to the indicated station and perform the correct action (pressing, holding, or mashing a button). Complete the actions indicated by icons at the top of the screen to progress. Faster completion leads to better results. Reach 100% completion before running out of commands to input to create the item. Your performance influences the quality, but the major determining factor is your crafting ability score. For Blacksmith, this is the Smithing score, determined by your equipped hammer, your buddies' assistance (and their equipped hammers), and your purchased skills. Good hammers provide a lot of your Smithing score, and you get better hammers by crafting them using your Smithing score.

Climb the ladder by getting buddies via reverting Strangelings and assigning them to help during crafting. This grants a bonus to your overall Smithing ability score equal to half the first buddy’s score and 1/4 the second buddy’s score. Equipping buddies with similar Life Tools as your protagonist effectively provides a +75% boost to your overall Smithing ability, allowing you to craft better hammers, which lets you equip yourself and your buddies with these better hammers, creating a virtuous cycle. A fair bit of Ginormosia exploration is required for this, as well as RNG during crafting. You want the “Metal Tool Crafter” ability on a hammer to improve your ability to craft better Life Tools, like hammers.

This sounds tedious, but you just need materials to craft three hammer upgrades for your protagonist and buddies whenever you get the materials and recipes for significant gains. Early and midgame hammers mean it’s better to craft a notable Bronze Hammer before waiting until you can reliably craft perfect-quality Gold Hammers or Crystal Hammers. Your recipes are gated by your Blacksmith Life rank, and you need to push the main storyline to unlock new areas and materials to complete Blacksmith Life quests required to rank up. The Blacksmith Life is best ignored until around Swolean Island, at which point you can engage in a flurry of crafting to get everything up to snuff. Start with Blacksmith so you can create high-quality Life Tools for the Tailor, Cook, Farmer, and Miner Lives, making them trivial to level. This is also when crafting perfect-quality weapons and armor will yield massive benefits over finding or buying new gear.