Rune Factory 4 Special: Complete Guide To Forging

In Rune Factory 4, it is very important to keep your equipment up to date. Both your weapons and your farming tools need to be upgraded regularly if you want to have an edge on the game’s rate of progression, with stronger enemies and larger farms to contend with.

Enter the Forge. Rather than buying new equipment, Rune Factory 4 will have you making your own. With just a few ingredients and a whole lot of Rune Points (RP), you can get the latest, greatest weapons and tools that you need.

Forge Basics

The Forge is acquired quite early on in the game by following the tutorials on the Request Board. This request will have you purchasing a Forge from Bado for the price of 3,000 Gold, 30 Lumber, and 25 Material Stone. Once purchased, you can place it and use it anywhere.

When using the Forge, you will be prompted to choose whether you want to make a weapon, make a tool, or upgrade an existing weapon. You can make weapons or tools using recipes that you can learn by eating Weapon Bread or Farming Bread respectively. This bread can be purchased from Porcoline’s restaurant.

It is possible to forge something without having learned the recipe, however. If you guess a recipe correctly or use a guide, you can make something before the game tells you about it. There are downsides to this, however:

• If the recipe is too highly leveled, it has a chance of failing. If it is ten or more levels higher than your forging skill level it will always fail.
• Making a recipe that you do not know will cost a lot more RP than if you knew the recipe. Luckily, guessing a recipe correctly adds it to your recipe collection.
• Recipes that are a higher level than your forge skill level will also cost more RP to attempt, even if you ‘know’ them.

Failing to forge something will produce Scrap Metal, an item with few uses.

If, when forging, the recipe has spare slots, you may put items into these slots. Depending on the items used the weapon may gain extra stats or special effects such as an elemental alignment or a status effect.

Upgrading Weapons

You can upgrade a weapon up to ten times. Upgrading a weapon involves taking an item and forging it into the weapon, adding stats and sometimes special effects. You can check the effects of an item in its description, which will also tell you the difficulty level of the item.

Upgrading a weapon follows the same rules as forging. If the item’s difficulty level is higher than your forge skill level there is a chance that the upgrade will fail. In addition, the upgrade will cost a lot more RP.

When you first upgrade a weapon with a particular item, the weapon will gain the item’s full effect. If you then forge more of that item into the weapon, the effect will not be as potent.

For example:

• If you forge Bronze onto a Zweihaender, it will gain +4 Defense.
• If you then attempt to forge a second Bronze onto the Zweihaender, it will only gain +2 Defense for a total of 6 Defense.

From this, we can see that it is far better to forge a range of different items onto a weapon if you want to upgrade it efficiently.

Weapon Recipes

There are eight classes of weapons in Rune Factory 4 and each of them has a bevy of recipes to learn and use. These recipes use a combination of specific items and required item classifications. To illustrate this, let’s take two Short Swords – the Cutlass and the Aqua Sword.

• The Aqua Sword’s recipe is a lump of Silver and an Aquamarine. You can only use these two items to make this sword.
• The Cutlass’s recipe requires a Bronze and then any Claws and Fangs item. This means that while you must use a Bronze in the recipe, the second item can be any item that comes under the Claws and Fangs category. It could be a simple Insect Jaw or even an Ivory Tusk.

In these recipes, we have put item classifications in italics. This means you can use any item of that classification. You can find an item’s classification in the first line of their description box.

Click the links in this table to jump to a particular weapon type.

Short Sword Recipes

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Long Sword Recipes

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Spear Recipes

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Axe Recipes

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Hammer Recipes

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Dual Blade Recipes

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Glove Recipes

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Staff Recipes

As elements are so important to Staves we have included them in the recipe table.

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Farming Tool Recipes

Forging a new farming tool works in the same way as weapons. Some recipes will have item classifications listed in italics instead of specific items and for those, you can use any item of that classification. You can check an item’s classification on the first line of its description box.

Hoes

Waterpots

Sickles

Axes

Hammers

Fishing Poles