I decided to make a GM Blacksmith and read through this entire thread to identify the best process and try to consolidate the information in one centralized "best practices" post (from my point of view anyway)
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I GM'd mining before working on blacksmithy, because a GM miner will smelt more effectively, thus reducing the number of ingots needed to GM blacksmithy. IMO it is much better to have GM mining on your blacksmith, before you start working on blacksmithing, for this reason.
In the course of GM'ing mining, I was able to collect a little over 17k of iron ingots (and thousands of other color ingots that I didn't use to level up blacksmithing), giving me a great starting base (it took 17,997 ingots to level from 31 to 90). The 17k ingots I farmed while GM'ing mining saved me around 100k in gold since I didn't have to purchase those ingots. The remaining ingots that I needed I bought for 6.9 gold per ingot from a well-stocked vendor, which is a little over standard market price of 6 gold per ingot.
While working on blacksmithy, I smelted every weapon I created to recycle ingots. I hid before smithing/smelting to avoid any PKs that might want to kill me in my house.
Because I started with a character that was already semi-developed (had some advanced magery/hiding/etc.), and I don't have any additional character slots, I bought blacksmithy up to 31. Ideally though you'd want to start a character with 50 blacksmithy and skip the leveling between 31 and 50.
Note: all references to skill level are REAL skill level.
I made daggers from 31 to 35, since they were the only available weapon at that skill level.
From 35-65, I made cutlasses
From 65-85, I made short spears
From 85-98.9, I made regular spears
From 99-100, I made breast plate (plate tunic)
Here is the data on ingots used while leveling:
31-50 required 4,267 ingots (daggers and cutlasses)
50.1-60 required 2,520 ingots (cutlasses)
60.1-70 required 2,845 ingots (cutlasses and short spears)
70.1-80 required 3,429 ingots (short spears)
80.1-90 required 4,936 ingots (short spears and regular spears)
90.1-98.9 required 5,536 ingots (regular spears)
99.0-GM required 4,012 ingots (breast plate/tunic)
Total ingots from 31-GM 27,545
Total ingots from 50-GM 23,278
Further thoughts/observations:
1) Gains from making spears appeared to stop at 98.9 REAL skill, at which point I switched to breast plate. I'm not sure you can't GM just by making spears.
2) Looking back, it might have been more effective to make cutlasses up to around 70 skill instead of switching to short spears at 65. I was still gaining at a pretty good clip on cutlasses up to 65, and my success rate in making a cutlass vs. making a short spear between 65 and 70 would have been much higher. Not to mention that I was making cutlasses using 8 ingots and smelting them for between 6 and 8 ingots, so it was very efficient, using very few ingots between gains while making cutlasses. For similar reasons, it may have been effective to make short spears up to around 90, before switching to regular spears.
3) I didn't gather much data on recycling efficiency, but can confirm that at around 94 skill, I was recycling 86-87% of ingots while making spears, and that efficiency improved as my skill continued to increase and failures declined. At around 96 skill, I was recycling 90% of the ingots; at 97, around 93%; by the time I hit 99 it was around 96%.
4) Expect pretty slow skill gain at higher levels. It took me 2.5 hours to move from 96 to 97, 3 hours to move from 97 to 98, but then 98 to 99 took only about 30 minutes, and 99 to 100 took a little over an hour. Go figure.
5) In case it's not clear elsewhere, you can gain in mining by smelting INGOTS, and you can gain in blacksmithy by smelting ITEMS (weapons/armor). You will get a few random gains from smelting but not a lot, especially at higher levels.
6) I bought my tools (smith hammers) in town instead of making them myself (in town they cost 30-34 per hammer). I didn't keep track of how many hammers I used, but estimate I spent around 10k on hammers.
7) Total cost was around 70k I had to spend on around 10,000 ingots (I could have mined these to save some money) and about 10k worth of hammers (which I could have made myself), so around 80k total out of pocket. If you mine all your own ingots and make all your own tools, you can GM a smith for free
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