Blacksmith Master 1.0 — what changes on 19 November, and how the smithy runs today

Blacksmith Master is a medieval workshop management game: you buy ore, smelt it, forge it into something a footman or an innkeeper will pay for, and sell it either on the merchant road or across your own counter. It has been in Early Access since 15 May 2025, and it leaves Early Access on 19 November 2026 — thirteen days after this page was written.

That timing is the whole reason this page exists in this shape. The current build is fully playable and its numbers are stable, but the developer has already published the 1.0 feature list, and some of it deliberately reworks progression. So this is a 1.0 preview plus the current build's operating numbers, with a clear line between the two — and the section below that tells you whether to start now or wait.

The short version

Start now, or wait thirteen days?

Three honest answers, depending on what you want:

• If you want to play the finished progression, wait. 1.0 adds item tiers (Common through Mythic) and states outright that this "makes progression in the mastery tree much more strategic". Anything you learn about mastery spending before 19 November is subject to that rework, and the developer also says 1.0 has a new pathfinding system and new animations — a launch-week build is the one to learn on.
• If you want to learn the machines, start now. Smelting ratios, anvil times, worker skills, the merchant-offer cadence and the shop's quality-versus-price trade-off are all structural. Item tiers change what a blueprint is worth, not how a bloomery works.
• If you are buying for the price, note there is no announced launch discount. The game has been repeatedly discounted 50% during Hooded Horse publisher sales (the last one in October 2026), so the cheapest entry is a sale, not launch week.

The one thing that does not change: your save. Nothing in the 1.0 announcement says saves break, and Hooded Horse's Early Access policy on the store page commits to the full version being the Early Access version plus content.

What 1.0 actually adds

Straight from the developer's 21 September announcement, in the order it affects a run:

• Master workers. One hireable of each type, and each unlocks a system rather than just better stats.
• Siege machines. Merchant offers that ask for a machine of over 100 pieces. Completing one awards mystery blueprints.
• Set items. 12 new sets of 3 items each, unlocked by completing siege machines.
• Item tiers, Common to Mythic. The headline change for progression: rarity becomes a property of the item, not just of the blueprint quality.
• Random events. Positive and negative, moving numbers around while you play.
• New pathfinding. Agents move at any angle instead of 45-degree increments — a throughput change disguised as a technical one.
• Customer-only doors, so customers stop wandering through the forge.
• Ultra game speed at 6× time scale.
• New animations for tool unlocks and item upgrades.

The master workers are the part worth planning around, because each one gates a different shortage:

Read as a set, those six are the developer's answer to the game's four bottlenecks: smelting throughput (tier 3 smelters), blueprint quality ceiling (5th upgrade), gem supply, wood storage, and the shop queue. If you are mid-run on 19 November, hiring the Master Assistant and Master Scholar first is the reading that changes the most numbers at once.

The loop the current build runs on

1. Resource gathering is unlocked through the Mastery Tree, not bought. Camps and mines are nodes. Workers there have a stamina bar; when it empties they finish the task and sleep, recovering 10 stamina every 3 seconds, and everything gathered is delivered to the warehouse the next day — so a day's mining pays tomorrow, not tonight.
2. Smelt ore into ingots. Smelters come in three sizes producing 1, 2 or 3 ingots per cycle, and the ore ladder is unusual: iron ore yields iron ingot in the small smelter, steel ingot in the medium one, and large steel ingot in the large one. Iron ore and iron ingot can also simply be bought; every other ore and ingot has to be mined or traded for.
3. Forge to a blueprint. Complex items run a multi-step chain — heat the ingot, hammer it on the anvil, temper, assemble parts, sharpen on the grinding wheel. Simple items skip steps: faster, cheaper, smaller margin, less reputation.
4. Sell, two ways. Merchant offers are the only income at the start. Selling across your own counter is unlocked later by the Store node, and needs displays, a checkout counter, cashiers, an item chest and assistants.
5. Spend Mastery points. Every item a blacksmith finishes earns points scaled by the quality of the craft. Points buy nodes: new stations, staff, storage, map areas, upgrades.
6. Clear the day. Ending the day makes every blacksmith and assistant finish the blueprint or carry they are on, then stop. There is a warning if anyone is still working when you press it.

Merchant offers, with the numbers

• 5 offers a day and 3 accepted-offer slots at the start. Refreshing the offer list costs 200 gold; both the slot count and the number of offers can be raised in the Mastery Tree (Extra Cart adds a slot, More Offers takes the pool to 7).
• Priority can be set on an accepted offer, which overrides the workers' own preference settings — the fix for a blacksmith who keeps doing the cheap job.
• From day 8, timed offers appear. Finish inside 24 hours for +10% gold; miss it and the payout drops 20%. Timed offers are the first real scheduling decision in the game, and they are why a stocked ore buffer matters early.
• Every 20 completed merchant offers awards an elite worker. That is the reliable route to good staff, independent of the hiring pool.
• Some offers pay less gold and instead give blueprint points, design points, Mastery points, decorations, or ore — and the ore rewards only appear once the matching mine is unlocked.

Selling across the counter

Selling is not just "put it on a shelf":

• The chance a customer buys rises with blueprint quality and falls with price. Quality is a five-level ladder starting at Common; upgrading it requires the Blueprint Upgrades node and the Design Table.
• Customers are drawn by decoration. Roughly 500 gold of decoration or lighting per displayed item is the figure for maximum footfall — so a five-display shop wants about 2,500 gold in décor before it converts properly.
• The shop is expandable to 5 floors plus a basement, gated behind Mastery nodes. Walls cost gold; changing their appearance is free, and the shop can be renamed at any time.
• Items already in the shop's inventory can be sold back for 70% of purchase price — the escape hatch when you over-buy a display.

The Mastery Tree: what the early points buy

Nodes observed on the official community wiki, with their point costs. Treat the costs as current-build, not 1.0:

The shape is the useful part: Store at 125 is the pivot from contract work to retail, Smelting at 150 is the pivot from buying ingots to making them, and the two discount nodes are the cheapest permanent margin you can buy.

Staff: wages, skills and mood

Numbers from the official community wiki, all current build:

Mood is the fifth system, added in Update #13, and it is a five-factor dial rather than a hidden stat: working hours (longer is more revenue and less happiness), salary bonus, job security (firing people scares the rest), seating (better benches for rest time) and food and drink (costs money, makes the hours tolerable). Low mood risks workers walking out, and in the worst case disables their positive trait; good mood levels them faster and can disable a negative trait. It is the one system where the correct play is spending money to make money.

What 1.0 will invalidate on this page

Stated plainly, so you can weigh it:

• Item tiers (Common to Mythic) rework what a blueprint is worth, and the developer says it makes mastery-tree progression "much more strategic". Every mastery recommendation above is a current-build recommendation.
• 1.0 is a rebalance window. Untitled Studio has already rebalanced mid- and late-game progression twice (Update #13 changed worker happiness and progression, Update #14 explicitly made late-game progress easier), and a launch patch on top of item tiers is where prices move.
• New pathfinding at any angle changes throughput. Any layout advice that assumed 45-degree movement is stale as of 19 November.

What this page does not know

1. The 1.0 mastery-tree costs, which item tiers will almost certainly change.
2. How item tiers interact with the existing five blueprint quality levels — whether they are the same ladder renamed or a second axis.
3. Siege machine recipe requirements — 100+ pieces is all the developer has said.
4. What the 12 item sets actually grant, and whether they are worth chasing before the main campaign is done.
5. The customer price-versus-quality curve. The wiki gives the direction, not the function.
6. Whether Early Access saves carry into 1.0 cleanly — not stated anywhere I could read.
7. The full mastery tree. The community wiki documents a subset of nodes; the tree is bigger than the table above.

How this page was made, and what it does not claim

This is a compiled guide, not a played-through walkthrough. It was built on 6 November 2026 from: the developer's 21 September 1.0 announcement (the master-worker, siege machine, set and item-tier list), the Early Access updates #12–#15 (staff menu, happiness system, progression rebalances), the store page and its Early Access FAQ, and the official community wiki for the loop, smelting ladder, merchant-offer rules, shop mechanics and worker numbers. The 84%-positive figure is SteamSpy's, not Steam's own page.

The site's rule is that a page names its sources and its gaps. This one has not been played through, and it is deliberately published before the version it is about. Everything in the 1.0 section comes from the developer's own announcement; everything in the systems sections comes from the community wiki the publisher endorses; and the seven gaps above are named rather than filled. The page gets a changelog entry on 19 November when the launch build lands and the numbers move.