Hey there, fellow Catz! Today I want to talk about one of the NPCs in ZpellCatz: The Blacksmith.

Last time, I talked about the Merchant NPC. In contrast to the Merchant where you can acquire new items, the Blacksmith in ZpellCatz can't create new items. Instead, they are able to enhance or transform a given item. Lets have a look at the Blacksmith's services.

Sell Item

Get rid of items you no longer need and gain some Thalers (or other currencies). There's no difference whether you sell your items to the Merchant or to the Blacksmith.

Upgrade Rarity

There are normal, special, rare and epic items in ZpellCatz. The Blacksmith is able to upgrade a normal item to special rarity and also to upgrade a special item to a rare one. One of the design pillars of ZpellCatz is "Randomization vs. Reliability". That's why upgrading does not reroll stats. It keeps the old ones (reliability) and adds new random ones (randomization). Also, the level requirements stay the same. So, rarity upgrades are a riskless way to increase an item's overall power.

Craft Epic Items

Epic items are very powerful but they rarely drop. If you've had bad luck for a few dungeons, don't despair: The Blacksmith can help by crafting epics. In order to do so, they need an existing item to consume. The item type consumed defines the crafted epic item. For example, if you select to craft a tier 1 epic item and use a "Wizard Hat" as target item, the Blacksmith will always create the epic item "Black Magic". The stats of every epic item are always the same (reliability) but the rolled values vary (randomization).

Not every epic item in ZpellCatz can be crafted, but there are more than enough craftable ones to support any build possible. The Blacksmith can craft tier 1 (level 1-20) and tier 2 (level 20-44) epic items. Tier 3 (level 45) epic items can only be found, but these are late game items that you don't need at all for a normal playthrough.

Oh, one important thing: It's cheaper to craft epic items providing normal rarity items. So, don't mindlessly sell every white item. It might be a good base item for crafting.

Enchant Item

You may be wondering where to put your rare currencies if tier 3 epic items can't be crafted. That's where the late game services come into play. Enchant item is one of them. It adds a powerful stat to the given item randomly selected from a pool defined by its type (e.g. helms can roll hit points, weapons can roll dark damage, etc). You can reroll your enchantment stat by enchanting the item again (feel free to repeat the process until you are satisfied or completely broke :-D ).

Polish Item

Another way to spent your late game currencies is the "Polish Item" service. Polished items do not gain new stats, instead all existing (and future) stats are increased. Any item can only be polished once.

Chaos Enchantment

"Chaos Enchantment" is a very expensive service that has the potential to greatly increase the power of an item. Regarding the "Randomization vs. Reliability" design pillar, randomization clearly wins here. There are 5 types of chaos enchantments.

The dark grey type is the most common one. You get +7 to a stat picked from a special pool. +7 HP is an unlucky roll, whereas +7% HP is a lot better.

Another type of chaos enchantment is "Might of Enchantment". This type doubles the value of the stat gained from the regular "Enchant Item" service.

Next up is the "Strength of Origin" chaos enchantment. It randomly picks one of the base stats of an item (the white colored ones on the top) and doubles it.

The blue type is called "Force of Balance". It increases the values of all of the item's bonus stats (the ones displayed in blue, yellow or orange) by about 20%. This chaos enchantment is especially powerful for epic items since they tend to have lots of bonus stats.

The rarest chaos enchantment type is the red one. The item receives a bonus stat picked from a list of extremely powerful stats. A lucky roll can upgrade your crafted tier 2 epic to the point where it can easily compete with tier 3 epic items.

Crafting a Late Game Tier 2 Epic

Okay, now that we know how the Blacksmith's services work, lets create a completely overpowered item. :-D

We pick the tier 2 epic item "Cruel Priest". Firstly, we need to find the appropriate base item. In order to create our picked item, we need a normal / special / rare "Silk Robe". The outcome is not affected by the rarity of the provided item. However, nearly all services are cheaper when we use a normal (white) base item. In contrast, most services are more expensive when the provided item is of epic rarity. That's why we want to use the "Craft Epic" service last.

To make the item really powerful, we want to find a normal "Silk Robe" with as high as possible base stats. Lets pick the one with the highest defense. 2 points of defense are more valuable than 3 points of spell power.

There are multiple possible enchantment rolls that would work on "Cruel Priest". I'd say the best match is the skill bonus for "Suffering".

Since we're not limited on rare currencies in this article, we want one of the very powerful red chaos enchantments. ^^

Stats like crit chance, curse duration or damage vs. cursed would be great. Lets pick crit chance. (Note: Since chaos enchantments are very expensive, you shouldn't reroll a chaos enchant at all. It'll be difficult enough to even have a chaos enchant on most of your items...)

Time to polish the item. This won't increase the power of the item a lot now, but the future stats from epic item craft will be increased, too!

Finally, lets craft the epic item itself! Unlike with the enchantments, we're not able to reroll the outcome. So we have to live with the result.

Now you see why the mentioned enchantments are good choices. In order to trigger the nice epic effect, we need to crit enemies cursed by "Suffering".

So, that's all the cool stuff the Blacksmith has to offer. If you've missed it, I already wrote an article about the Merchant NPC and there'll be another one soon covering the Jeweler. Want to get notified when new articles are released? Join my Discord and follow me (Sima) here on itch.io.

Note: All info here is in development content and subject to change.

Kickstarter

There is a Kickstarter campaign currently running for ZpellCatz. Check it out to grab the last remaining Early Bird Tiers here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sima/zpellcatz-magical-action-rpg-with-cats