Notes on Advanced and Cultural Smithing

~By Niami DenMother, with thanks to all the folks on the message board for sparking this document with their questions and comments

There has been a lot of excitement, and even more confusion, over cultural smithing. Hopefully this guide will help to clarify some of the more commonly asked questions.

What is cultural smithing? Cultural smithing is race-specific smithing. It must be performed at a specific cultural forge, by a smith of that same race. Enchanters cannot fool cultural forges by using illusion. (Cultural smithing recipes can be found here.)

I heard someone mention dyes - can I dye my banded/cultural/etc. armor? Currently, only fine steel plate armor (shortened to "fine steel" by many) can be dyed. Some of the cultural armors have colors of their own, but this is not done by dyeing process. Dye making for fine steel is a multi-step process that adds significant time and expense to the smithing process. (More information on dyes can be found here. Recipes for fine steel plate can be found here.)

What about this imbue and enchant thing? Any race that has cultural smithing also have some "normal" cultural recipes, and then either imbued versions of the recipes OR enchanted and enchanted/imbued versions of the recipes.

Imbuing is the process of calling the blessings of a specific god down upon an item, limiting it to use by followers of only that deity. While we originally thought that there would be imbued armor for pretty much every race/deity combination, this is not turning out to be the case. Imbuing is performed by a cleric/shaman/druid on the specific gem for that deity. (See the imbued gems list for information on the gem for each deity.) The imbued gem can then be used by a smith of any religious background, provided that the recipe in question accepts that gem as a valid recipe. The end result will only be able to be worn by a person who meets the race/class AND deity restrictions of the end result. (Exception to the above info is the Solusek Ro imbue, which is performed by wizards of Solusek Ro.) Races that have non-enchanted imbued items include: barbarians, iksar, ogres and wood elves, plus some Freeport human recipes. These groups have no enchanted versions of their armor/weapons.

Enchanting is the process of granting magical bonuses to an item without deity restrictions. Several races have enchanted versions of their armor and sometimes weapons. These items can often also be imbued, though, again, seem to have some odd limits to what gems will work, leaving many gaps in that race's armor for different valid deities. Each enchanted ore requires a level 49 enchanter to cast the spell as well as a large brick of the proper type of ore. If an enchanted folded sheet is needed, then all three large bricks that go into the making of the block must be enchanted.

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