Ultima Online Blacksmithy - ore bonuses, runic hammers, enhancing and the repair maths

Exceptional: 35% Damage Increase, 15 resist points, no shields

uo.com, verbatim: “Exceptional weapons receive a damage increase bonus of 35%”, and “Exceptionally crafted pieces of armor (excluding shields) receive additional resists, distributed randomly among the five resist types. The amount of additional resists being 15.”

Item	Exceptional bonus	With GM Arms Lore
Weapon	+35% Damage Increase	40% (43% on Siege Perilous / Mugen)
Armour	+15 resist points, spread randomly	+20 total (+23 Siege / Mugen)
Shield	Nothing — explicitly excluded	Nothing — explicitly excluded

uo.com adds only that “further additional bonuses may be imparted by the Arms Lore skill”; the figures for that come from the Arms Lore page, which publishes 1% per 20 points to a maximum of 5%. On the armour side the two share one budget: the extra points from Exceptional and Arms Lore together are capped at 20% [!] — 15 from exceptional, 5 from Arms Lore, and no further.

[!] The base exceptional chance is not published. uo.com says the craft gump displays a success chance in-game but gives no formula and no table mapping skill to exceptional odds. Nobody publishes what proportion of your work comes out exceptional at 100 skill, or at 120.

The eight ores, and the skill each one needs

One rule makes the table easy to remember: working a metal’s ingots takes the same Blacksmithy (or Tinkering) skill as mining its ore [!]. The Mining column is uo.com’s own ladder; the Blacksmithy column rests on that rule and is unpublished, except Valorite’s 99, which uo.com confirms below. Mining and Blacksmithy climb the same ladder in step.

Metal	Mining required	Blacksmithy required
Iron	0	0
Dull Copper	65	65
Shadow	70	70
Copper	75	75
Bronze	80	80
Golden	85	85
Agapite	90	90
Verite	95	95
Valorite	99	99

uo.com confirms the top of the ladder on its Enhancing page: enhancing with Valorite requires 99.0 Blacksmithing. That 99 is the real practical target on the way to grandmaster — the last point from 99 to 100 unlocks nothing new in the ore table.

What each ore gives armour

From uo.com’s Material Bonuses page. These are fixed properties the material adds, before any runic or imbued property.

Material	Phys	Fire	Cold	Poison	Energy	Durability	Luck	Lower Req.
Dull Copper	10	—	—	—	—	50	—	20
Shadow	3	2	—	—	7	100	—	—
Copper	2	2	—	7	2	—	—	—
Bronze	3	—	7	2	2	—	—	—
Golden	2	2	3	—	3	—	40	30
Agapite	2	7	2	2	2	—	—	—
Verite	4	4	3	4	1	—	—	—
Valorite	5	—	4	4	4	50	—	—

Read across rather than down. Shadow is the durability ore, at 100, and also the best single energy line at 7. Dull Copper is a pure physical-and-durability piece with a 20 lower requirement. Valorite is the only ore that is good at four of the five resists at once. Golden is the Luck ore, at 40, and carries the largest lower-requirement figure at 30.

What each ore gives weapons

Same page, different table. The percentages in the damage columns are damage type conversion — that proportion of the weapon’s damage is dealt as that element instead of physical.

Material	Cold Dmg	Energy Dmg	Fire Dmg	Poison Dmg	Durability	Luck	Lower Req.
Dull Copper	—	—	—	—	100	—	50
Shadow	20%	—	—	—	50	—	—
Copper	—	20%	—	10%	—	—	—
Bronze	—	20%	40%	—	—	—	—
Golden	—	—	—	—	—	40	50
Agapite	30%	20%	—	—	—	—	—
Verite	—	20%	—	40%	—	—	—
Valorite	20%	20%	10%	10%	—	—	—

The two headline conversions are Bronze at 40% fire and Verite at 40% poison, with Agapite at 30% cold behind them. Those are the ores you reach for when a monster has a hole in one resist.

[!] The physical damage column of this table is not reproduced here. uo.com’s Material Bonuses page carries a leading Physical Damage column for each ore. Those numbers exist on uo.com’s page; they are deliberately left blank here rather than reconstructed, because a per-ore physical figure invented from the resist table would be a fabrication.

Runic hammers

Runic hammers are how a player-made weapon or piece of armour competes with an artifact. uo.com publishes the full table, and notes that the same numbers serve Blacksmithy’s hammer and Stonecrafting’s mallet and chisel.

Material	Min. Intensity	Max. Intensity	Min. Properties	Max. Properties	Charges
Dull Copper	40%	100%	1	2	50
Shadow	45%	100%	2	2	45
Copper	50%	100%	2	3	40
Bronze	55%	100%	3	3	35
Golden	60%	100%	3	4	30
Agapite	65%	100%	4	4	25
Verite	70%	100%	4	5	20
Valorite	85%	100%	5	5	15

Read a row as a guarantee and a ceiling together. A Valorite hammer makes items with 5 properties, each rolled between 85% and 100% intensity, and has only 15 charges — fifteen attempts at a near-perfect item. A Dull Copper hammer gives 1 to 2 properties at 40–100% and has 50 charges. The trade is always the same: scarcity against quality.

Metal runics are the best runics in the game. The wood runics used by Carpentry and Bowcraft & Fletching top out at 4 properties at 50–100%, which is a tier below Valorite’s 5 at 85–100%. That gap is published and it is the reason metal gear dominates the high end.

uo.com states runic hammers are “available as rewards for the BOD system”, and that “from Publish 85 runic hammers can also be used to reforge” certain tinker-crafted items.

Enhancing - and the one system that rewards going past grandmaster

Enhancing adds a material’s fixed bonuses to a plain crafted item after the fact, and an item can only ever be enhanced once. Six skills can do it: Blacksmithing, Bowcrafting, Carpentry, Stonecrafting, Tailoring and Tinkering. One published line makes Blacksmithy structurally different from the rest of them:

• Success chance increases with skill above grandmaster in Tailoring and Blacksmithing only. There are no skill levels beyond GM for Tinkering, Bowcrafting, Carpentry or Stonecrafting, so those four crafters enhance no better at their cap than they did the day they reached it. A smith does. This is the clearest published argument for spending a Power Scroll on Blacksmithy.
• “The more properties an item has, and the higher the intensity of those properties, the more difficult it will be to enhance.” The better the item, the worse your odds — which is exactly the wrong way round for the items you care about.
• “Failing an Enhancing attempt will cost you some of your materials, but there is also a very good chance of destroying the item.”

uo.com names the two failure modes on the Blacksmithing page: “a normal failure means that the enhancement was unsuccessful and the attempt consumes some of the resources but additional attempts may be made”, while “a catastrophic failure destroys the item”.

Two things soften it. The Forged Metal of Artifacts, in 5- and 10-charge versions from the Origin Store, gives 100% success on an enhancement attempt. And uo.com’s Enhancing page mentions a blacksmith’s +60 Ancient Smith Hammer, which uses a charge during an enhancement attempt. [!] Beyond that single +60 figure, the Ancient Smithy Hammer’s full ladder of bonus values, charge counts and sources is not published by uo.com, and is not stated here.

[!] Note also that uo.com warns “gargish necklaces and earrings do not benefit from material bonuses and should not be enhanced” — a straightforward way to destroy a good item for nothing.

Repair, and the arithmetic nobody quotes

Smiths repair all metal armor and weapons, except tinker-made items, which only a Tinkering character can fix. Wooden weapons, shields and armour belong to Carpentry; bows belong to Bowcraft & Fletching.

uo.com’s Repair Chance page publishes the actual formula, from uo.com’s Five on Friday, January 16th, 2026:

• “There is a 40% base chance to lose durability when repairing an item.”
• Offset by 1% per 10.0 points of skill the player or the repair deed has.
• “For each point of durability the item has lost, the chance to lose durability is increased by 1%.”
• “Durability loss can occur even if the repair is not successful.”

uo.com’s own worked example, for an item at 200 of 255 durability repaired at 120.0 skill: ( ( 40 + 255 ) − 200 ) − ( 120.0 ÷ 10 ) = 83% chance to lose a point of maximum durability.

And the success side, published for maximum-durability (255) items:

Skill	100% repair success from
100	52+ durability remaining
120	11+ durability remaining

That is the second published argument for a Blacksmithy Power Scroll, and it is a stronger one than it looks. At grandmaster, an item that has fallen below 52 durability is no longer a guaranteed repair; at 120 you can let it run almost to nothing. Combined with the 1%-per-10-skill offset on the durability-loss roll, a 120 smith simply gets more life out of the same suit than a 100 smith does.

Repair deeds need a minimum of 50 skill and can be made by alchemists, blacksmiths, carpenters, fletchers, tailors and tinkers. They are blessed and survive death, which is what makes them a field item. The catch is published too: “repair deeds have a substantially higher chance of loss of a durability point on a success, as compared to a crafter doing the repairs directly.” Convenience costs durability.

uo.com’s general warnings apply throughout: “if unsuccessful, the item you are trying to repair will lose one point of its maximum durability rating”, and “the lower your skill or the higher amount of damage that needs to be repaired, the greater the chance the item will lose durability”.

Dragonscale armor

Smiths also work dragon scales rather than ingots, and the scale bonuses are a different shape from the ores — one very large number and one negative.

Scale	Phys	Fire	Cold	Poison	Energy	Luck
Red	1	11	-3	1	1	—
Yellow	-3	1	1	1	1	20
Black	11	1	1	1	-3	—
Green	1	-3	1	11	1	—
White	-3	1	11	1	1	—
Blue	1	1	1	-3	11	—

Every colour is +11 in one resist and −3 in another, with ones elsewhere — except Yellow, which trades its 11 for 20 Luck. These are specialist pieces for a suit that needs one resist pushed hard and can afford to give three points back somewhere else.

In PvP

Blacksmithy never swings anything, but it is the largest single input into a PvP character’s survivability, because it makes both the suit and the weapon.

• The weapon arrives with 35% Damage Increase, or 40% from a smith who also has grandmaster Arms Lore — damage-increase budget obtained free, leaving Imbuing weight for leeches and hit chance.
• The suit gets +15 resist points per exceptional piece, +20 with Arms Lore, plus the material line on top: a Shadow piece also carries 7 energy and 100 durability.
• Runic hammers are the only route to player-made gear at artifact level — five properties at 85–100%, fifteen times.
• Enhancing and repair both keep improving above grandmaster, which no other crafter can say except a tailor. PvP eats durability faster than anything else in the game, and a 120 smith repairs a suit that a grandmaster would have to retire.
• Repair deeds at 50+ supply blessed field repairs to fighters carrying no crafting skill at all.
• Not shields. A Parry template gains nothing on the shield itself, from exceptional quality or from Arms Lore.

In PvM

The same pipeline pointed at monsters, plus one thing PvP does not use:

• Elemental conversion by ore choice. Bronze at 40% fire, Verite at 40% poison, Agapite at 30% cold, Shadow at 20% cold. Handing a warrior the right weapon for the thing they are about to fight is a bigger damage swing than most item properties.
• Dragonscale armor for a suit that needs one resist pushed to a wall.
• Cannons and cannonballs for ship combat, pairing with Alchemy’s black powder, and metal kegs for distilling.
• Bulk Order Deeds fund the whole thing, and are the only published source of both runic hammers and Blacksmithy Power Scrolls.

Caps, stats and Power Scrolls

Blacksmithy is the only skill on this side of the trade list with Power Scrolls, and they come from Bulk Order rewards rather than champion spawns. Base cap 100.0, raised to 105 / 110 / 115 / 120 by a Wondrous, Exalted, Mythical or Legendary Scroll of Power. Scrolls are not cumulative: reaching 120 needs a +20.0 scroll directly, and once a scroll is used, “scrolls of lesser or equal type and value can no longer be used” for that skill. It counts against the 720 total skill cap.

Primary stat Str, secondary Dex. No mastery — Blacksmithy is not on uo.com’s Skill Masteries page.

Crafting talismans give a bonus to blacksmithing success and exceptional chance “ranging from 11 to 30%”. [!] uo.com publishes that range on the Blacksmithing page only; it does not state a comparable figure for any other craft.

One more published nicety: a smith may add a maker’s mark to exceptional items via a menu toggle.

Training

uo.com’s route starts in New Haven: “begin in New Haven by buying your skills as high as you can, then take the quests from Jacob Waltz for Mining, George Hesphaestus for Blacksmithing”. It recommends training Mining first, and names the starter build as Blacksmithing, Mining, Arms Lore, Tinkering and Imbuing.

Quest	Item	Gains run to
“Nothing Fancy”	Bascinets	58.3
“Cuts Both Ways”	Broadswords	around 85.5

A Bone Machete quest recipe also exists, which makes the item required to enter Blighted Grove.

Two item paths and a warning, none of them published by uo.com. The standard route runs Mace at 40.0–45.0 [!] through to Platemail Tunics at 118.8–120.0 [!]; the advanced route with a 120 scroll runs Kryss at 47.5–75.0 [!] through to Boomerang at 100.1–120 [!]. Training at high levels is very slow: more than 100,000 ingots [!] and roughly five days [!] of non-stop play to reach 120. Neither is a uo.com number.

The Guaranteed Gain System sets the floor underneath all of it: a mandatory 0.1 when nothing has been gained inside your bracket’s window. On a 700-point character that window is 27.0 hours at 95.0–99.9 and 51.0 hours at 115.0–120.0, which is where the five-day estimate comes from. A Scroll of Alacrity raises each check from 0.1 to 0.2–0.5 for 15 minutes.

What is not published

Blacksmithy has more published detail than any other trade skill, and still leaves these open. None of it is asserted here:

• [!] The base exceptional chance and how skill maps to it — no formula, no table, on uo.com.
• [!] Any success-chance formula for crafting an item of a given difficulty at a given skill.
• [!] The per-ore physical damage values from the weapons material table (see the note above).
• [!] The Ancient Smithy Hammer beyond the single +60 figure — no ladder of values, charge counts or acquisition.
• [!] Bulk Order Deed specifics: which BODs yield which runic hammer, the ingot counts, the reward point tables. uo.com defers these to a separate page.
• [!] The list of tinker-crafted items reforgeable by runic hammers since Publish 85.
• [!] Any skill gain rate figure from uo.com.

Where these come from

uo.com Blacksmithing · uo.com Material Bonuses · uo.com Runic Bonuses · uo.com Enhancing · uo.com Repairing · uo.com Repair Chance · uo.com Armslore · uo.com Scrolls of Power · uo.com Skills, Stats & Attributes · uo.com Skill Masteries · uo.com Skill Gain Systems. Everything here is from uo.com or the game itself; anything uo.com does not publish is marked [!] as unpublished where it appears.