Building a Dragonforge

A Dragonforge is a 3 × 3 × 3 cube of Ice and Fire blocks that turns iron into dragonsteel while a dragon of its element breathes into it. This guide covers the three layers, what one forge costs in dragon scales and bones, and how many dragons you need to kill to pay for it.

One forge takes 360 dragon scales, 72 dragon bones and one dragon heart. In dragons, that is about 4–5 fully grown cave dragons, or about 21–22 of the younger dragons that guard roosts. The scales are the bottleneck: the dragons you kill for them leave more than enough bones.

Before you start#

• Pick an element. A forge is Fire, Ice or Lightning. Its bricks, core and aperture are all of one element, and only a dragon of that element can power it.
• Scales must match; bones need not. The brick recipe takes the scale blocks of any color of the forge’s element, mixed freely. Dragon bones are one item for every dragon, so bones from a Fire Dragon go into an Ice forge.
• Scales come from dragons of that element, and so does the heart:

What one forge costs#

The cube holds 17 bricks. The core takes 8 more bricks to craft and the aperture 4, so you need 29 bricks in all. Bricks are crafted four at a time, which makes 8 crafts and 32 bricks, with 3 to spare. Each craft uses 5 scale blocks and 4 stone bricks.

The structure#

Build the layers bottom to top: layer 1 on the ground, layer 2 on top of it and layer 3 on top of that. The schematic below shows the finished cube. Pick an element, show a single layer, or stack the layers to see how they fit.

ElementFireIceLightning

LayerAll123

ViewSpreadStacked

In total the cube is 17 bricks, 8 blocks of dragon bones, 1 core and 1 aperture.

• Any side can hold the aperture. The forge checks only that at least three of the core’s four sides are bricks. The aperture is the side the dragon faces, so put it where a dragon can stand.
• A complete forge lights up. The core you craft is the “disabled” one; once the cube is complete it switches to the active core, and the bricks beside it change to their grill look.
• The corner blocks must be dragon bones. A brick on a corner of layer 1 or 3 doesn’t count, and neither does a bone block anywhere else.

Crafting the parts#

The recipes below are for a Fire forge. Ice and Lightning use the same patterns with their element’s scale blocks, bricks and heart (see Dragonforges).

Collecting scales and bones#

How a dragon corpse pays out#

A killed dragon leaves a corpse, and you harvest it by right-clicking with an empty hand. It can be harvested once for every 5 days of the dragon’s age (rounded down, at most 25 times), and the harvests come in this order:

1. The first half roll the dragon’s loot: 60 in 100 for scales and 40 in 100 for flesh. A female’s roll is 60, 40 and 2 in 102, the 2 being an egg.
2. One harvest in the middle gives the dragon’s heart.
3. The second half each give a stack of dragon bones.
4. The last harvest gives the skull, and the corpse disappears.

An older dragon has more harvests and bigger stacks. A scale stack is the dragon’s age ÷ 25 (rounded down), plus a random 0 to its age ÷ 5 (rounded down). A bone stack is 1, plus a random 0 to its age ÷ 25 (rounded down). A dragon’s stage comes from its age: stage 1 under 25 days, then one stage every 25 days, stage 5 from day 100.

Dragons needed#

Roosts hold a stage 3 dragon, 52–59 days old. Caves hold a sleeping stage 4 or 5 dragon, 75–124 days old. Stage 1 and 2 dragons only exist if you raise them from an egg. The table gives the average for the youngest and the oldest day of each stage and what it means for one forge (360 scales, 72 bones).

Wild roost dragons are 52–59 days old and give 17–18 scales and 8–10 bones each, so a forge’s scales take 21–22 of them. These are averages from the harvest rules above, assuming a scale roll of about 59% (the mean of a male’s 60% and a female’s 58.8%). Real kills vary, so plan for one dragon more than the table says.

• Count the scales, not the bones. The dragons that supply 360 scales also supply at least 130 bones at every stage from 2 to 5, so one batch of kills covers both. Bones can come from dragons of any element.
• Scales must come from your forge’s element. Kill the dragons of that element, and keep the heart from one of them.
• Older is better. A stage 5 dragon gives about as many scales as 4–7 roost dragons. Dragon health scales with Soulrend level, so check the dragons’ stats first (see Fire Dragon); dragon radars find wild dragons, but stage 4 and 5 cave dragons only show on the Master Radar.

Powering the forge#

A forge does nothing until a dragon of its element breathes into the aperture. The Draconic Bestiary gives two ways:

• A tamed dragon. Hatch an egg (see Dragon Eggs & Scales), and build the forge near the dragon.
• A chained wild dragon. Chain the dragon and stand it directly in front of the aperture. Dragons break most walls, so tie the chain to dragon bone walls.

The dragon then breathes while the forge holds a valid recipe: one iron ingot and one dragon blood of the forge’s element make a dragonsteel ingot, which takes 50 s of breath. For the forge’s controls and recipes, see Dragonforges.

Next#

• Dragonforges and Dragonsteel for what the forge makes and how to use it.
• Dragon Parts for blood, hearts, skulls and bones.
• Dragonslayer, whose “Your First Dragon Forge” quest describes this build and whose Fire, Ice and Lightning Dragonsteel Ingot quests reward a dragonsteel ingot and 5 XP levels each.