Smithy

A station for mid-tier gear

The Smithy is a crafting station used for mid-tier tools and armor, along with a long list of other items, in ARK: Survival Evolved and ARK: Survival Ascended. The game puts it this way: "Place materials along with blueprints in this to create certain advanced forged items." According to the ARK Wiki, using it starts with a Refining Forge that smelts Metal into Metal Ingot; only items such as the Water Tank and Chitin Armor are made here without metal.

Crafting a Smithy

The engram unlocks at level 20 for 18 engram points. The recipe:

• 50 Stone
• 30 Wood or Fungal Wood
• 20 Hide
• 5 Metal Ingot or Scrap Metal Ingot

A craft takes 5 seconds and gives 6.25 XP. An unplaced Smithy weighs 4 and stacks to 100, which makes 400 for a full stack. Our records list it on 14 maps, and 70 crate types can contain one, among them the Aberration Blue, Green and Purple crates.

What it makes

The wiki's recipe list reaches from the Sword, Pike, Metal Sickle, Metal Hatchet and Metal Pick to the Crossbow, Shotgun, Simple Pistol and Longneck Rifle. Chitin, Fur and Flak Armor come from here too, as do several saddles including platform saddles, Grenades, Tranquilizer Darts, traps, the Radio, the Ballista Turret, the Fabricator and metal buildings. Anything the Smithy makes, a Tek Replicator can make as well.

Crafting on a saddle

Smithy items can also be crafted on a Castoroides, Thorny Dragon, Argentavis or Helicoprion wearing its own saddle, the wiki adds. Items can be repaired on all of them apart from the Argentavis.

Quirks of the station

• Taking an item out mid-repair uses up the resources and leaves the item unrepaired.
• The back of the Smithy cannot go right up against a wall, but placing the Smithy first and building the wall after it works.
• Very high quality blueprints, a Yutyrannus or Rex saddle for example, may call for more materials than fit inside. These can only be crafted in a Tek Replicator or on an Argentavis with a saddle and very high weight.
• It counts as a wooden structure: bare hands, stone weapons and ranged attacks without explosives cannot hurt it. Many aggressive creatures cannot damage it either, the Raptor, Direwolf, Sabertooth, Thylacoleo and Kaprosuchus among them.