The blacksmith provides services to improve your equipment. Besides just crafting new gear, the statistics on the gear are equally important. Whenever you select a piece of equipment to work with, the stats of that equipment are displayed in the lower-right. These statistics do not directly affect your character. In other words, dumping fangs into STR and seeing how high you can get it is a fruitless effort. Consult the titles page for more information on how to make the most of equipment statistics.
Upon speaking to the blacksmith, a few options are presented. The first option gives access to crafting, and there are three main methods to make use of.
合成(Combining) - Create a brand new item from required materials.
精錬(Refining) - Combine an existing item with required materials to create a higher level item.
強化(Upgrading) - Utilize materials at will to strengthen gear.
Increases the level of the equipment by 1 (+1, +2 etc) for each upgrade.
刻紋(Engraving) - Using hard to obtain items, it is possible to overwrite a weapon's skill.
If an engraved weapon is refined or upgraded, the skill is lost.
The second main option at the blacksmith allows you to hand over rare items for safekeeping, and so they do not take up storage space after you've found quite a few. The only items storable this way are dark matter, tincture, and aqua regia.
The third main option allows you to review information such as titles, armor set bonuses, and katana skills.
Equipment Statistics
Materials utilized to work on equipment, whether through combining, refining, or upgrading, affect the equipment's statistics. By building up these statistics, titles can be imbued onto equipment. Through this system, your characters stats can be boosted, as well as increase damage or resistances.
Saving Materials
Though there are five item slots to insert materials upon refining, not all may be used by the recipe. In this case there are green 'free' slots that you can put whatever you choose, or nothing at all. Likewise, you may perform upgrades with a minimum of one item. After you have made your decision press the C button to advance to the confirmation screen.
Upgrade Limits
Always double-check that the item being crafted is as you intended to make it. Normal equipment has an upgrade limit of +5, uniques +3, dispel ring will break even at +1. If you try to go past this, the confirmation screen will show a useless item (がらくた - garbage) as you will be breaking the item. Tinctures may be used to increase equipment level past its inherent limit. On the contrary, dark matter is used to lower equipment level by one.
Initial Points
Another reason to double check is what are known as 'initial points'. Every piece of equipment has a base value of certain statistics that it cannot go below. If materials reduce it below the initial value it will remain. For example rings possess an initial value of 10 in their element. Were they to be changed to special element rings, they would gain 10 points in the new element. Some weapon refinement recipes use a different type of weapon, such as crafting a scimitar from a katana. In this case, the katana's intial points are lost, and it would gain those of a scimitar. If the loss of initial points causes a statistic to fall below a desired value, even though on the refinement screen the statistics look correct in order to achieve the desired titles, the confirmation screen may show a different title than expected.
What is this warning message?
Through upgrading, equipment is made stronger. However, as it does, so does the level required to wear it. If conducting an upgrade will put the equipment's level over your current character's level, there will be a warning message displayed that you will be unable to equip the finished product (Even if it is already above your level). It will be unequipped if you perform such a procedure while wearing it.
Why doesn't this recipe show up?
If you refined an item while it was equipped and wish to refine it into a different item, the recipe may not be available until you unequip the item once. In other words it needs to have been in storage for recipes requiring it to show up. If it still doesn't show up, make sure you have all the materials required.
