⚒️ Metal
Charcoal, bellows, and a clay furnace pull metal out of rock — the hardest and most rewarding climb in the book.
Find metal in rocks
Learn the heavy, oddly colored rocks — green-stained copper, rusty red iron, black stream sand — and where they hide.
Make bellows
Sew a leather-and-wood air pump, because metal-melting fire must breathe harder than lungs can blow.
Build a smelting furnace
Stack a clay chimney-furnace that holds charcoal and ore while the bellows drive the heat higher than any campfire.
Smelt and cast copper
Roast green-stained ore with charcoal until beads of shining metal form, then pour melted copper into clay molds.
Smelt iron in a bloomery
Feed ore and charcoal into the furnace for hours of pumping to win a glowing spongy lump of real iron.
Hammer hot iron
With an anvil stone, tongs, and a hammer, glowing iron moves like stiff clay under your blows.
Forge nails, hooks, hinges, and a knife
Hammer out the small everyday iron things that make every other job in this book easier.
Harden and temper a blade
Heat, quench, and gently re-warm iron so an edge stays sharp without snapping.