Null Smithy

Vanilla's smith, made load-bearing.

Since 1.17 the game took on the nails, strips, hoops and plates that mods like Hammer's Ringing Fall once added, so Null Smithy does not replace any of that — it builds on it, and adds only the three things still missing: rivets, hinges, and hafts. Where vanilla already has the part, vanilla's part is used.

Every metal tool above copper now takes a rivet to seat its smithed head on its haft. Copper is exempt on purpose: rivets are smithed on an anvil with a hammer, and the first hammer is copper, so gating it behind a rivet would gate it behind itself.

A haft has to season. Carve a green handle or pole from firewood with a knife and it is wet; leave it about two days to dry into a seasoned haft before it will take a head. A short handle takes axe, hammer, pick, knife, saw, cleaver and blade heads; a long pole takes spear, scythe, hoe and shovel heads.

A haft can also be oiled. Dress a seasoned handle or pole with rendered fat or a quarter litre of linseed oil, and the tool you build on it carries a permanent +35% maximum durability — not a temper that wears off, a property of the tool for as long as it exists. It stacks with a quenched head. Every tool recipe takes a seasoned or an oiled haft, so oil is a reward for keeping fat and flax on hand, never a wall in front of your first axe.

Chest lids, doors and gates swing on a hinge — forged as two leaves and a pin, then assembled in the crafting grid. One metal throughout.

The anvil is the point. Forging layouts reward skill at the anvil, not more ore: a single tool head is heavier than vanilla's flat outline but still fits inside one ingot, while an interlocked batch layout tessellates two or three heads into one puzzle and pays about double the yield. Every forging voxel has to rest on metal below it, so a layout that reads as clever is one you can actually finish.

Crafting

• Rivet — 8 rivets smithed from one ingot on the anvil
• Hinge — assembled in the grid from two hinge leaves and a pin (4 leaves / 8 pins per ingot)
• Green handle — 1 firewood + a knife makes 2 green handles
• Green pole — 2 firewood + a knife makes 1 green pole
• Seasoned haft — a green haft left about 2 days to dry; no crafting step
• Oiled handle — 2 seasoned handles + 1 rendered fat or ¼ litre of linseed oil makes 2 oiled handles (1 : 1 also works)
• Oiled pole — 1 seasoned pole + 1 rendered fat or ¼ litre of linseed oil
• Copper tool — head + seasoned or oiled haft, no rivet
• Any tool above copper — head + seasoned or oiled haft + 1 rivet of any metal
• Batch heads — 2 small heads from one ingot, or 3 large heads from two

Seasoning, and oiling, a haft

A freshly carved handle or pole is green and wet, and shows it. Leave it about two in-game days and it seasons into a dry, true haft — only then will it combine with a tool head. Short hafts fit axe, hammer, pick, knife, saw, cleaver and blade heads; long hafts fit spear, scythe, hoe and shovel heads.

A seasoned haft can then be oiled: rendered fat, or a quarter litre of linseed oil poured from a fired bowl, a wooden bucket or a fired jug. An oiled haft looks different, and the finished tool carries +35% maximum durability permanently. The bonus is a server setting, so an owner who finds a third too generous can tune it without touching the mod.

The anvil is a puzzle

Vanilla's single-head recipes stay, redrawn heavier — same metal cost (still one ingot), roughly double the hammer work. The mod's own batch layouts are the reward for laying voxels out well: two small heads from one ingot, or three large heads from two. Rivets, hinge leaves and hinge pins are smithed the same way. Every voxel above the first layer must sit on metal below it — no floating metal — so the layouts are puzzles you can complete, not just draw.

What takes what

• Rivet — every metal tool above copper (one, any metal), plus hoppers (one) and helve hammers (two)
• Hinge and nails — chests, and solid wooden doors
• Hinge only — wooden fence gates
• Vanilla's own nails — barrels, wooden buckets, shelves, tables, chairs, beds, crates, signs, and wooden trapdoors (both the window and the solid one)
• Left alone — planks, slabs, stairs and roofing. A nail per building block turns "the smith matters" into "you cannot build"

Requirements

• Every player needs this mod installed. It registers its own item types, and a client that has never heard of a rivet, a hinge or a haft cannot render or craft them.
• Server-side only: each patch group — tools, woodwork, machines, forging — is a switch in ModConfig/nullsmithy.json, so a server owner can turn any group off without touching the mod. Switching a group off restores the vanilla recipe exactly; the mod's own items and batch recipes stay.
• The oiled-haft durability bonus is a setting in the same file (OiledHaftDurabilityBonus, default 0.35), as is every patch group, and all of them are published as world-config values too.

Plays well with

Part of the Null family — Null Lockdown, Null Compass, Null Cartography, Null Claims, Null Arts and Null Skills — but it needs none of them and stands alone. It sits beside anvil quality-of-life mods such as SmithingPlusPlus and Toolsmith without conflict. It is not compatible with mods that add their own head-and-handle tool recipes (Advanced Tool Parts, GetAGrip): those reopen the free stick path this mod removes.

If you also run Null Skills, its Metalworking tree is tuned around this mod — several abilities that would have skipped the anvil entirely were cut or rescaled for exactly that reason, so the two are meant to be played together rather than merely tolerated.

About this mod

Built for Null Ossuary — a small community that runs its own game servers. This mod was written for our own Vintage Story world, ran there with players on it before it was published, and is free for anyone's server or singleplayer game.

Found a bug, or want to argue with a design decision? Every mod has its own board on our forums: nossuary.com/forums. The community, the servers and the rest of the Null mods are at nossuary.com, and the Discord is linked from there.

 

AI disclosure. This mod was built with help from an AI coding assistant. The design, the gameplay decisions, and every choice about what the mod should do are mine; the AI wrote and revised code, tests and documentation under direction and was reviewed before anything shipped. Bug reports and feedback are read and acted on by me.