How to Forge in 1 Loot To Forge: Ore, Skills and Equipping

What the Forge actually does

You bring ore out of the dungeon and feed it into the Forge cauldron in the hub. The output falls into three buckets: weapons, chest armor and helmets. Weapons determine your damage and your Q ability; armor and helmets contribute Power.

That means a craft is never purely a stat upgrade. If you are already clearing stages comfortably, the skill you roll matters more than the raw item tier, because skill rank and cooldown decide how often you can delete a room.

Two weapon families, two jobs

Katanas lean on forward slashes, thrusts and dashes. They handle a single high-health blocker well — the enemy that is stopping you from finishing a stage.

Greatswords lean on slams, ground cracks, sword formations and explosions. They are better when the room is packed, because one cast damages the whole cluster. Neither family is strictly stronger; they answer different rooms.

Skill ranks run from D to SS

Community-tabled skills run from D through C, B, A, S and SS. On the documented Katana list the top listed value is an SS-rank Wavebreak Slash at 700% total damage; on the Greatsword list it is Golden Collapse at 950%.

Do not read those numbers as a tier list. Blazing Pierce is SS rank and lists only 300% total damage, while Lume Thrust is A rank at 365% — rank and listed damage are separate axes, and cooldown is a third.

Read cooldown before you read damage

The listed cooldowns across both families sit between 5 and 8.5 seconds. On a short stage you will cast your skill two or three times at most, so a 950% hit on an 8-second cooldown can be worth less than a 450% hit on a 5-second one.

Practically: pick the highest listed damage you can get whose cooldown still lets you cast it on the pull that actually kills you, not on the trash in front of it.

Equip it — and don't forget Enchant

Forged gear lands in the Backpack and stays unequipped until you choose it. Open the Backpack, pick the Weapon tab, select the new craft and press Equip. This is the step that quietly wastes the most time in the game: a better weapon in your bag changes nothing about your clear speed, and plenty of players forge three weapons before noticing the first one was never worn.

Then take it to Enchant. Coins go further on the weapon you are actually clearing stages with than on a slot you will replace next run, and the Armor tab rolls randomly between chest armor and helmet, so you cannot target a defensive slot anyway.

Order matters because Coin income is finite: weapon first while you are still pushing into new stages, armor once you are dying on entry rather than running out of damage.

How to compare two rolls properly

When you have two weapons in the Backpack, resist the urge to compare listed damage alone. Three numbers decide which clears faster: listed damage, cooldown, and whether the attack pattern matches the room.

A forward slash and a wide area attack with identical damage are not equivalent. A stage where enemies arrive in a corridor rewards a straight-line skill; a stage where they cluster rewards an area skill. The Sprite tables on the weapon skills page list the behaviour column for exactly this reason.

Cooldown then breaks ties. Across both families the spread runs from 5 to 8.5 seconds, which on a short stage is the difference between casting your skill three times and casting it twice. On a stage you finish in fifteen seconds, an 8-second cooldown effectively gives you two casts — so a 950% hit has less total output than a 500% hit on a 6-second cooldown.

The practical test: take the new weapon on the stage you are currently farming and time one clear. If the clear is faster, keep it; if not, the roll was a downgrade regardless of what the tooltip says.

Ore quality, not ore quantity

The other half of forging is what you feed the cauldron. Ore comes out of dungeon stages, and the deepest stage you can clear cleanly does not always give the best mix — what matters is whether the drops cover the ingredients your target recipe lists.

That is why Stage 7 carries the early game. Its Jackal Zombies drop Emerald, Mystic Crystal, Gold, Sapphire, Obsidian and Fire Crystal, which means one stage can feed several different recipes without you walking a different route. Amethyst, Nova Ore and Sunfire Ore from the earlier desert stages fill in the cheaper slots.

Practical consequence: farm the stage whose drop table matches your next craft, not simply the highest number you have unlocked. If you are two ingredients short of a weapon, the stage that drops both of them saves more time than the deeper stage that drops neither.

What to do when a craft disappoints

Every forge is a roll, so some crafts will land on a low-rank skill. Before you scrap the weapon or spend Coins recovering, check three things: is it actually equipped, does it beat your previous weapon on the stage you are farming, and is the skill pattern simply mismatched to that room?

A disappointing roll on the right stage is still progress if it clears faster than what you had. And if it does not, the ore you spent taught you something concrete about your recipe — which is cheaper than re-modelling the whole build blindly.

Then decide with numbers rather than mood. The ore run planner on the forge calculator shows how many more trips the next craft costs at your current backpack capacity, so you can judge whether to push for a better roll or spend that time on capacity and training instead.

Put it into practice

• 🧮 Plan the grind with the forge calculator — Power target and ore runs.
• 🏆 Check the tier list before your next upgrade purchase.
• 🪨 Reserve the right materials with the ore list before you sell anything.
• ⚔️ See what a craft can roll on the weapon skills page.
• 🎟️ Claim the published codes — Race Rolls are the scarcest reward.

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