Metalwork, Armorsmithing & Weaponry

The two metal-producing vocations on Rookery Isles, Metalwork (ingots and plate armor) and Weaponry (metal weapons and shields), with verified recipe chains from raw ore all the way to the Ayanad ceiling.

Requirements

This craft itself has no character-level requirement. You can smelt, process, and craft at any level if you have the materials. The catch on Rookery Isles is that the raw materials come from world gathering (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing), and all of those are gated at Character Level 52, so in practice a self-supplied crafting career begins at Level 52. You can still craft earlier from purchased or traded materials.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• What Metalwork and Weaponry Cover
• The Two Vocations at a Glance
• Crafting Stations You Will Use
• Step One: Smelting Ore into Ingots
• Alloy Ingots: Sturdy and Sunridge
• How Recipes Gate by Proficiency
• Metalwork: Forging Plate Armor
• Weaponry: Forging Weapons and Shields
• The Crafted Gear Ladder Tops at Ayanad
• Labor, Proficiency Gain and Rank
• On Rookery Isles

What Metalwork and Weaponry Cover

Rookery Isles is an ArcheAge private server running the ArcheAge 3.0 "Revelation" era (the AAEmu 3.0.3.0 NL0bP fork). Everything metal that a player equips is produced by two of the game's 22 player vocations:

• Metalwork, smelts raw ore into ingots at the Smelter, then forges those ingots into plate (metal) armor at the Plate Armor Form. It is the vocation behind every ingot in the game, so almost every other crafter depends on it.
• Weaponry, forges metal weapons and shields at the Anvil, consuming the ingots that Metalwork produces.

A common point of confusion: the in-game label is Metalwork, never "Metalworking." This guide uses the exact in-game spelling throughout. If you have read older guides that say "Metalworking," that wording is wrong for this client.

If you are gathering the ore yourself, start with the Mining & Ore Guide. If you want the bigger picture of how all production vocations fit together, see the Crafting & Gathering Overview. For what happens to your finished gear afterward, enchanting grades, regrade risk and lunagems, see Gear Progression and Regrade & Enchanting.

The Two Vocations at a Glance

Both vocations live in the Crafting tab of the proficiency window. Here is how they break down by the recipe data in the game database.

A clean division of labor. Metalwork owns the Smelter and the Plate Armor Form. Weaponry owns the Anvil. The handoff is the ingot: you smelt with Metalwork, then carry those ingots to the Anvil and forge with Weaponry. A dedicated smith usually levels both side by side, because the weapon recipes burn through ingots that only Metalwork can make.

Crafting Stations You Will Use

A recipe lists a required station; if you are not standing at that station's doodad, the recipe will not appear. Stations are placed on Mirage Isle (free, public) and can be built on your own housing land. The two vocations touch these stations:

Some entry-level shield recipes carry no station requirement (req_doodad_id = 0) and can be made from the proficiency window directly, but the live weapon and armor chains all anchor to the Anvil or the Plate Armor Form.

Step One: Smelting Ore into Ingots

Every metal item begins as ore mined from a vein, then smelted into an ingot at the Smelter. The base smelt is a clean 3 ore → 1 ingot ratio across all metals, plus one Coin per craft. These recipes have no proficiency gate, you can smelt from your very first craft.

Pure ore is more efficient for Archeum. Pure Archeum Ore (#17715) smelts 1:1 to an Archeum Ingot via craft 5301, one pure ore for one ingot, versus three regular ores. That is a real, verified efficiency gain; the equivalent "pure ore is always better" claim for other metals is not confirmed in the data, so treat the 1:1 Archeum route as the one bankable case.

Bulk smelting saves clicks, not labor. Higher-throughput recipes exist (×10 and ×100 output) at the Complex Processing Shelf and Multipurpose Workbench, but they scale labor linearly, ten ingots cost ten times the labor. They are convenience, not efficiency. The bulk recipes are also proficiency-gated (see below), unlike the open 3:1 base smelt.

Alloy Ingots: Sturdy and Sunridge

Higher-tier gear consumes alloy ingots that you build from the base ingots. These two are the backbone alloys and both smelt at the Smelter with no proficiency gate:

Notice the cascade: a single Sunridge Ingot demands 10 Sturdy Ingots, each of which already costs 8 Iron + 1 Copper + 1 Silver. That is 80 Iron Ingots (240 Iron Ore), 10 Copper Ingots, 10 Silver Ingots and 5 Mysterious Garden Powder for one Sunridge Ingot. Plan your mining accordingly, alloys are where the ore sink really opens up.

How Recipes Gate by Proficiency

A recipe unlocks based on your cumulative proficiency points in its vocation, stored on each recipe as actability_limit. These thresholds line up exactly with the proficiency rank ladder. The Rookery rank ladder (verified from the game database) is:

Rank 1 is Amateur, not "Basic." The 50,000 mark is Master, and 70,000 is Authority, older guides swap these two, so ignore any "Authority = 50k" claim you may have seen.

The good news for smiths: most metal recipes are open from the start. A recipe with actability_limit = 0 needs no rank. Within Metalwork's plate-armor recipes, for example, the vast majority sit at 0, with only a handful gated at small sub-rank values (25, 50, 75, 100 points) and a single recipe gated higher. The gating that actually bites is on bulk processing and the very top tiers:

There is no character-level gate on crafting. The crafting and smelting recipes themselves carry no character-level lock, so you can run the Smelter and forge at any level provided you have the materials. The catch is supply: the ore and other raw materials come from world gathering (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing), and all of those gathering skills require Character Level 52 on Rookery, enforced by the client. So you can craft earlier only from purchased or traded materials; self-supplied smithing begins at Level 52.

Metalwork: Forging Plate Armor

Plate armor is built at the Plate Armor Form using the Craft Metal Armor skill. The 3.0 system is a linear upgrade chain: you start from an Apprentice's-tier base piece (bought from a Mirage Isle merchant or earned from quests, not crafted) and feed it forward, each step consuming the previous piece plus ingots, escalating Archeum, polish and Coin.

Here is a fully verified plate chain, the Quake Helm, straight from the recipe tables. Watch the Archeum climb from Dust to Shard to Crystal as the tier rises:

The chest piece scales the same way but eats more ingots per step. The Quake Cuirass, for comparison:

The pattern to internalize: ingot count and Coin climb every step, the Archeum grade upgrades roughly every tier (Dust → Shard → Crystal), and labor steps 150 → 200 → 250 → 300. A full set is six pieces, so budget your Iron Ingots in the hundreds. Pull your Archeum refining tiers from the Crafting Overview (Alchemy turns Essence → Crystal → Shard → Dust at the Archeum Workbench).

Weaponry: Forging Weapons and Shields

Weapons are built at the Anvil using the Create Weapon skill (and Craft Two-handed Weapon for 2H gear). The chain mirrors plate armor exactly: an Apprentice's base weapon plus ingots and escalating Archeum, climbing one named tier at a time.

A fully verified weapon chain, the Mountain Dagger, from the recipe tables:

The same Apprentice → Conqueror's ladder applies to swords, katanas, axes, clubs and the other weapon families, for example the Summer Sword, Sky Katana, Typhoon Axe and Autumn Club all share the identical Craftsman's-step recipe (8 Sunlight Archeum Dust + 10 Iron Ingot + 2 Copper Ingot + 3,000 Coin, craft ids 4964 / 5004 / 5044 / 5084). Once you know one chain, you know them all; only the base item and the final stats differ.

Higher-Archeum weapon route. Some weapon recipes use Blood Archeum instead of Sunlight, for instance the Honor's Slashing Dagger upgrades to the Honor's Mighty Slashing Dagger with 1 base weapon + 5 Blood Archeum Crystal + Coin at the Anvil (250 labor, craft 4049). The mechanic is the same; the Archeum color simply varies by weapon family.

Shields are also Weaponry, built at the Anvil with the Craft Shield skill. Named shield chains follow the same Apprentice's → Conqueror's upgrade pattern as weapons, consuming ingots, escalating Archeum and Coin at each step. (Some legacy low-level shield recipes carry no station requirement in the data, but the live shield chains anchor to the Anvil.)

The Crafted Gear Ladder Tops at Ayanad

After Conqueror's, the gear ladder continues, but the top tiers switch mechanic, they are produced by Reforge at a Salvage Forge (a Machining station consuming salvaged Mana Wisps) rather than by the Anvil or Plate Armor Form. The full ascending crafted ladder is:

Apprentice's → Craftsman's → Artificer's → Artisan's → Conqueror's → Illustrious → Magnificent → Epherium → Delphinad → Ayanad.

Ayanad is the top crafted gear tier in this build. There is NO Erenor or Hiram gear on Rookery Isles, those were 3.5 and 4.5 content, released after our 2017-03-15 client. No Erenor weapons or armor exist in the item data, the only "Erenor" equippables are a cosmetic Hero Cloak and a PvP token ring, not a regradeable crafted gear tier. Anyone who tells you to "grind toward Erenor weapons" is describing a different, later version of ArcheAge.

For reference, the top crafted pieces carry an item level of 62: the Ayanad Mountain Dagger (item #31313, item level 62) and Ayanad Quake Cuirass (item #31433, item level 62), versus Delphinad at item level 55 and Epherium at 49. (Item level is the piece's data field, not a character-level requirement, character level is capped at 55 on this server.) Every crafted piece can be regraded all the way to Mythic. For the full tier-by-tier breakdown and the Reforge path, read Gear Progression; for what to do with a finished Ayanad piece, enchanting it up the grade ladder and socketing lunagems, read Regrade & Enchanting.

Labor, Proficiency Gain and Rank

Every craft action spends labor points from your shared labor pool. The verified labor costs for the core actions are:

Crafting awards proficiency to the relevant vocation (smelting feeds Metalwork via "Refine Metal"; forging weapons feeds Weaponry). As your rank climbs, the game grants small per-rank advantages to labor cost and cast speed. Higher rank means slightly cheaper, faster crafting, but the exact per-rank percentages are not exposed in the server data in a clean form, so treat any specific "X% labor reduction at rank Y" figure as community-reported, not server-confirmed. The direction is reliable; the precise numbers are not.

The labor numbers above are read directly from the recipe and skill data. Any other labor figure you find for these actions that is not in this table should be treated as unverified.

On Rookery Isles

A few places where Rookery Isles differs from generic ArcheAge lore or from older community guides:

• The spelling is Metalwork, not "Metalworking." Likewise the leather vocation is Leatherwork, not "Leatherworking." This matches the in-game proficiency labels exactly.
• Crafting is ungated, but world gathering requires Level 52. Smelting and forging carry no character-level lock, so you can run the Smelter and Anvil at any level if you have the materials. However, world gathering (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, Fishing) requires Character Level 52 on Rookery, enforced by the client, so the ore and raw materials that feed your crafts cannot be gathered yourself until Level 52. Until then you must buy or trade for inputs.
• The crafted gear ceiling is Ayanad, full stop. There is no Erenor or Hiram gear in this 3.0 build. Plan your endgame around Ayanad plus regrade, not around tiers that do not exist here.
• Smelting is dirt-cheap to start. The base 3:1 ingot smelts have zero proficiency gate and no character-level lock, so any character can begin smelting ingots immediately, as long as they have the ore. Sourcing that ore yourself means Mining, which is gated at Character Level 52. The proficiency gating on smelting is reserved for bulk processing (10,000 / 30,000 / 50,000 thresholds) and the very top tiers.
• The Master rank is 50,000 proficiency, Authority is 70,000. If a guide tells you 50k is "Authority," it is using the wrong ladder.

See also

• Gearing Supply Chain, the full path from gathered material to best gear
• Mining & Ore Guide
• Crafting & Gathering Overview
• Labor Points & Proficiency
• Gear Progression
• Regrading & Lunagems
• Currencies & Vendors
• Alchemy Guide
• Auction House & Player Economy