Salty's Realistic Forging | Blacksmithing Mod

A More Immersive Take on Smelting and Forging

Salty's Realistic Forging replaces Minecraft's one-click furnace workflow with a hands-on blacksmithing process. Instead of dropping ore in a furnace and walking away, you clean, heat, hammer, and quench each material with the right tool in hand. The result is a slower, more deliberate progression from raw ore to finished ingot, polished gem, or forged weapon.

It is built for players who enjoy immersion and roleplay over automation. The author is upfront that early game gets noticeably harder, so it pairs best with modpacks that want a grind rather than convenience. Every step happens through held items and right-clicks, with no menu screens to click through.

What the Mod Changes About Resource Processing

The core idea is that obtaining basic resources like iron, gold, copper, and netherite should feel earned. Each ore type has its own processing path, and each tool needs its own set of forging steps. Ore veins now drop up to five raw ores, and a single rough gem can be cut into two polished gems, which rebalances how you value a diamond or emerald find.

Vanilla blocks that normally serve one narrow purpose get a bigger role. Cauldrons, stone cutters, and grindstones become the backbone of the workshop, which keeps the mod feeling native instead of dumping a wall of new machines on you.

How the Forging Process Works

Forging an ingot follows a consistent loop, but the details shift per material. Here is the iron flow so you can see the shape of it.

Cleaning and Smelting Raw Ore

Start by cleaning raw ore. Right-click with the ore in your main hand to brush it off. Paper in the off-hand speeds cleaning up but gets consumed, and a brush in the off-hand is fastest while also collecting ore dust as a byproduct.

Drop the cleaned ore into a furnace or blast furnace and it comes out as a hot metal ball. Do not grab it barehanded or you will burn. Hold blacksmith tongs in your main hand to pick up and carry the hot metal safely. Sticks work as a weaker, breakable substitute.

Shaping and Quenching the Ingot

With a smithing hammer in your off-hand, right-click on an anvil or smooth stone to hammer the hot metal into an ingot shape.

Then quench the shaped metal in water to cool it into a finished ingot.

Forging Iron Tools From Scratch

The same logic extends to weapons and tools. Forging an iron sword shows how the parts come together, and gold, diamond, and netherite tools each follow their own variations.

First, combine two iron ingots into a hot iron bar for the blade. Hold one ingot in your main hand and another in your off-hand, then right-click.

Hammer the hot bar into a blade shape on an anvil with the smithing hammer.

Quench the blade in water to set it.

Cut and sharpen the cooled blade on a grindstone.

Forge a guard from another iron ingot using the same heat, hammer, quench loop.

Craft a wooden handle separately.

Assemble the hilt by holding the guard in your off-hand and the handle in your main hand, then right-click.

Finish the sword by combining the completed hilt with the blade.

That is a full iron sword, built piece by piece. Hardcore modpack authors tend to love this kind of pacing.

Installing Salty's Realistic Forging

This is a Forge and NeoForge mod, so start by setting up the matching loader for your game version. If you need a refresher, our Minecraft Forge setup guide walks through the install. Drop the downloaded JAR into your mods folder and launch the game.

A couple of companion mods make the experience smoother. Keep Just Enough Items handy to look up the tool recipes, since they are not obvious, and install Polymorph if you run other content mods that might clash with the new crafting steps. The author notes there is no Fabric version, so plan around Forge or NeoForge.

Compatibility With Other Content Mods

The mod only changes how you obtain vanilla resources and tools, so anything that consumes standard iron, gold, diamonds, or similar materials keeps working. Conflicts show up mainly as overlapping recipes, which Polymorph resolves. If you want to skip the forging chain for a specific task, you can still smelt a silk-touched raw ore block the vanilla way.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Salty's Realistic Forging work without any required dependencies?

The mod itself has no hard dependencies, but you really want JEI alongside it for the tool recipes, and Polymorph is recommended when recipe overlaps appear with other mods.

Is the project still being updated?

The most recent releases landed in mid-2024 and have been quiet since then, so check the project page for current status before building a long-term modpack around it.

Will this slow down my early game?

Yes, noticeably. The mod is designed for immersion and roleplay, and the author explicitly warns against it if you dislike slower progression or rely on automation farms.

Can I automate the forging process?

Not really. The whole point is hands-on, right-click-based crafting with held tools, which sits at odds with auto-farming setups. You can still bypass a step by smelting silk-touched raw ore blocks when you need a vanilla shortcut.

Where do I learn the tool recipes in-game?

Use JEI. The author points players to JEI for tool recipes while an in-game guidebook is still being worked on.