There are tons of ways to make money when it comes to playing Runescape. Quests, buying items, selling items, monster hunting, and minigames. One of these minigames is the Blast Furnace, which is able to simultaneously get you some RS gold and some smithing XP. Plus, the level requirement to play this mini-game is pretty low.
This guide is going to take you through what the Blast Furnace can do for you, what level you need to be, and everything else you need to know to take full advantage of the game. Now the one thing you do need to know before we start this Blast Furnace OSRS smithing guide is that accessing this minigame requires you to be a member of the OSRS community. This is about 10 dollars a month or 30 for three months.
What Is The Blast Furnace?
You can find the Blast Furnace in the city of Keldagrim, the city of the dwarves, and is a furnace used for smelting ores. Typically, smelting ores like gold ore into bars is a resource-intensive process, and one of the benefits of using the blast furnace is that it only requires half as much coal while smelting bars for everything. If you are running through your coal reserves while trying to make the perfect bars, this place is the perfect area to smelt without worry. With it, you’ll be able to smelt an iron bar, steel bar, mithril bar, and so on with ease.
In order to get to the Blast Furnace, you first need to complete the quest ‘The Giant Dwarf’ to gain access to the city. You need either a level 60 smithing skill or a 2,500 OSRS gold fee to work the furnace for 10 minutes. Other items you will need (if you don’t want to use the ones available at the forge) are a bucket of water/ice gloves, a coal bag, and ore.
The fee can also be lowered to 1,250 every ten minutes if you follow the proper dialogue with the head dwarf and wear the Ring of Charos.
Additionally, to make the most of your time and crafting abilities, you can wear weight-reducing clothing to save run energy and allow you to carry heavy ores and bars around. Also, unlike other forges, the blast furnace is run by 5 dwarves who do most of the labor, and all you need to do is move the ore to the smelter and then cool off the bars when they come out.
Where To Get Ore?
Ore is sold by Ordan, and he has his shop close to the Blast Furnace. The shop is called the Ore Seller, and the shop is restocked every few minutes by dwarves that deliver 30 pieces of one type of ore to the shop. Other ore shops are available as well, but since the Ore Seller is so close to the Blast Furnace, you won’t have to go too far to get your supplies.
Additionally, you can find ore on your own in mines and other locations with a lot of rocks. Each rock is a different color, which corresponds to different ore. All you need is a pickaxe, and depending on the ore type it takes a certain amount of swings to get the ore out.
How To Play The Minigame
This minigame is actually pretty easy as it is a lot of pointing, clicking, and running around. You just need to place your ore on the conveyor belt, run down to collect the smelted bars, cool the bars off, bank them, and repeat. The various steps will be dependent on two things, the level of your smithing skill, and how you cool the bars off.
If you have a smithing skill of 60 or above, then you will not need to pay an entry fee every ten minutes. The majority of your time can be spent smelting the ore and running back and forth. If you have a coal bag that holds coal, then that saves some inventory space. You can top off your run energy with a stamina potion.
If your smithing level is below 60, then every 10 real-time minutes you will need to pay the blast furnace foreman before you can keep using the forge. It’s 2,500 gold for every 10 minutes and that can add up quickly, even with the profits you make from selling the finished bars.
Now, once the bars come out of the smelter they will be very hot. You can either dunk them in a bucket of water (either one brought by you or the one supplied at the forge) or you can skip that step by using ice gloves. These gloves are received from the defeat of the Ice Queen, and allow you to pick up the heated bars by simply touching them. This makes everything much faster and saves inventory space.
Finally, you can use the Goldsmith gauntlets to further increase the experience level that you get from smithing gold bars. Using the blast furnace gets you around 320-240K experience per hour, and the Goldsmith gauntlets can give you a 2.5 times experience boost. You can get these from the Family Crest Quest as a reward, and all you need are steel gauntlets from the Al Kharid Mine and need to be level 40.
What Does This Do For You?
Aside from the coal requirement being halved for each bar, the Blast Furnace also has some extra benefits for gold and for experience gain. Now, you can get some good smithing experience for using the bars, and here is a breakdown of the experience you can gain per hour using the Blast Furnace.
- Bronze bars – 16-19K EXP per hour
- Iron bars – 70-75K EXP per hour
- Steel bars – 90-95K EXP per hour
- Silver bars – 75-80K EXP per hour
- Gold bars (with goldsmith gauntlets) – 320-340K EXP per hour
- Gold bars (without goldsmith gauntlets) – 125-130K EXP per hour
- Mithril bars – 99-105K EXP per hour
- Adamantite bars – 90-100K EXP per hour
- Runite bars – 92-105K EXP per hour
Also, here are the prices that you can get per hour smithing the bars:
- Iron bars – ~103-105K per hour
- Steel bars – ~930K per hour
- Mithril bars – ~620K per hour
- Adamantite bars – ~1.4M per hour
- Runite bars – ~1.8M per hour
These prices are subject to change, but they assume you have a coal bag, ice gloves, and 72,000 coins per hour to use the furnace. If not, then you will get some different prices, especially if you are smithing level 60 and don’t need to pay the dwarves for the use of the forge.
How To Make The Most Profit
If you want to make the most profit with the Blast Furnace, you need to be level 60 or higher. This waives the typical 2,500 every ten minutes price you would otherwise need to pay, and helps increase the gold you are taking home. However, if you are okay spending some extra cash to help grind your smithing skill, then you need to focus on these things.
First, speed. You will be running from the conveyor belt to the furnace, and the faster you can make that trip the faster you can turn the ore into bars. Things like Graceful armor are perfect armors to have because they reduce your weight and allow you to move quickly without reducing your run energy. If you don’t have Graceful armor then the lightest set that you have will do nicely. Also, you should have a few stamina potions to help you restore your energy.
Additionally, speed can be used to remove some of the micromanagement and clicking. You can click on the conveyor belt and remove the conformation to place the ore on in one click. Emptying the coal bag allows you to make several bars at once, and you can also hold the spacebar to take all your bars at once.
Second, you need to focus on inventory management. A coal bag allows you to carry several pieces of coal in one inventory space, saving you from having one coal piece taking up inventory space. Ice gloves prevent the need for using a bucket of water and carrying that around, and then you can pack your inventory full of ore and smelted bars.
What Can I Use Smelted Bars For?
Of course, you don’t have to smelt bars for-profit and/or experience. You can easily use the surplus of bars to make weapons and armor for yourself. If you need weapons, armor, and other pieces of gear made from various metals, you can walk over to an anvil and create various items. The experience level you gain from crafting them, as well as the stats of the item that you get, are all dependent on the type of bar you use.
Still, if you are at a point in the game where you are getting most of your equipment from quests, then you will probably be better off selling the bars that you make at the blast furnace. There’s just no need to make lower-tier weapons and armor unless you need them for some specific reason, especially since the raw resources often sell for more than the finished blades.
Blast Furnace FAQ’s
Question: Do I Need To Micromanage?
Answer: This guide, as well as every other guide to the Blast Furnace that you see on the internet, is packed with numbers, optimal patterns, and equipment guides to help you make the most gold for your time and also gain the most XP. While this works for most of the players who play and enjoy Old School Runescape, you certainly don’t need to be the most efficient at the Blast Furnace to get something out of it.
As long as you have a rough idea of how many bars you can make per hour or every 10 minutes, and a look at the profits you are getting, then you will be able to determine if it is worth your time or not. Who knows, after a couple of trips to the blast furnace you might decide that you want to be more efficient and make a bit more profit. However, you certainly don’t need to break out spreadsheets to use the Blast Furnace for the first time.
Question: Which Bars Should I Try To Smelt?
Answer: If you are going for max profit and experience, you should try to smelt the highest tier bar for your level. For this article, we will assume that you are level 85 or higher, and can smelt all the bars needed. So bars such as adamantite or runite allow you to make much higher profits than making iron or steel bars. It might be more expensive to get all the raw materials needed to craft all of these high-level bars, but the profit will be well worth the cost of expenses.
Gold bars are also some of the highest valued options in the world, so smithing some of those with the goldsmithing gauntlets will have you making a ton of coins in profit. If you can, go for the gold bars and start selling them!
Question: Do I Need To Worry About Prices Changing?
Answer: If you go on any guide that mentions potential profits, the guide will often talk about how the prices of some items are subject to change due to the in-game, player-influenced economy. The selling and buying of items and resources in the Grand Exchange can affect the prices of resources and items in the world.
This means that the average price of a gold bar or piece of iron ore might change, but not to worry, they really won’t fluctuate that much. A gold bar is always going to be expensive, and an iron ore piece is going to be pretty cheap. If you want to track and analyze prices for various smithing components every day, then you certainly can, but the changing prices shouldn’t cause too many problems for your bottom line while smithing.
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