WELL if you know how to play you can max out almost everything in 1.30 hrs then refund content is not enough to cover a replay value

As long as the game is $15 or less, I can recommend it. Over $15 though not so much. Since there is only 1 way to play the game and it is very linear with no way for variations once you play it 1 time, you played all of it. Yes you could choose not to do this or that, but that will just shorten the game, not change it. The AI is ultra basic, 1 person does 1 job and only that 1 job.

Not worth it. Shallow gameplay. Too few development options. No complexity and no interesting choices. Brainrot.

---{ Graphics }--- ☐ You forget what reality is ☐ Beautiful ☐ Good ☑ Decent ☐ Bad ☐ Don‘t look too long at it ☐ MS-DOS ---{ Gameplay }--- ☐ Very good ☑ Good ☐ It's just gameplay ☐ Mehh ☐ Watch paint dry instead ☐ Just don't ---{ Audio }--- ☐ Eargasm ☐ Very good ☐ Good ☑ Not too bad ☐ Bad ☐ I'm now deaf ---{ Audience }--- ☑ Kids ☑ Teens ☑ Adults ☑ Grandma ---{ PC Requirements }--- ☐ Check if you can run paint ☑ Potato ☐ Decent ☐ Fast ☐ Rich boi ☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer ---{ Game Size }--- ☐ Floppy Disk ☑ Old Fashioned ☐ Workable ☐ Big ☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive ☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it ☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data ---{ Difficulty }--- ☐ Just press 'W' ☑ Easy ☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master ☐ Significant brain usage ☐ Difficult ☐ Dark Souls ---{ Grind }--- ☐ Nothing to grind ☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks ☐ Isn't necessary to progress ☑ Average grind level ☐ Too much grind ☐ You'll need a second life for grinding ---{ Story }--- ☑ No Story ☐ Some lore ☐ Average ☐ Good ☐ Lovely ☐ It'll replace your life ---{ Game Time }--- ☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee ☐ Short ☐ Average ☐ Long ☑ To infinity and beyond ---{ Price }--- ☐ It's free! ☐ Worth the price ☑ If it's on sale ☐ If u have some spare money left ☐ Not recommended ☐ You could also just burn your money ---{ Bugs }--- ☐ Never heard of ☑ Minor bugs ☐ Can get annoying ☐ ARK: Survival Evolved ☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs ---{ ? / 10 }--- ☐ 1 ☐ 2 ☐ 3 ☐ 4 ☐ 5 ☐ 6 ☑ 7 ☐ 8 ☐ 9 ☐ 10

Forge It and Forget It Came to make swords, left with 12 frying pans and a broken anvil. Every customer wants Excalibur in 5 seconds or less. I'm basically a medieval fast food worker now. Would recommend if you enjoy stress, fire, and yelling at metal. 10/10 Now I dream in sparks.

Have you ever been addicted to cocaine? Me neither. But if I had to guess what that level of life-destroying obsession feels like, it’s probably exactly what Blacksmith Masters delivers. I sat down to play it for an hour. That was three days ago. I haven’t seen sunlight since, and I’m 80% sure my plants are dead. This game—this absolute menace—lets you watch a bunch of soulless NPCs build a blacksmith empire. That’s it. That’s the whole game. And yet, somehow, it’s the most thrilling, all-consuming, dopamine-fueled simulator of power, progress, and pointless micromanagement I’ve ever experienced. I don’t even know why I care so much about making sure my store shelves are fully stocked, but God help me, I do. The worst part? I’d recommend this to anyone. Got work to do? Forget it. Got friends? Not anymore. Want to feel something? Play this. Just be warned—you will waste your life building an NPC forge empire while your own real-world life collapses in the background. 10/10. Would forget to eat again.

17 hours of 3 days disappeared and that's unhealthy for me, but it warrants a review. Satisfying, fun, and in some ways deeply terrifying game. I feel deep, instinctual discomfort watching my 20 assistants operating 20 ingot smelting furnaces in an unlit, unventilated, windowless basement for 18 hours a day, followed by 6 hours of 'rest' sitting upright on a bench, with no weekends or holidays, for 100 days straight. In the meantime, on the 5th floor, 10 dudes sit in a luxurious, all-windows, decorated chamber doing nothing but scribbling on blue paper until they 'improve' a design (it becomes more expensive and people are more likely to buy it, so I expect what they do is actually marketing). Other than dread, this game tickles the satisfaction parts of the brain in me. It's the first release of an Early Access. That only shows in terms of some depths and feature issues. No bugs, but missing QOL features like 'drag-select several people to move them between jobs in large groups', or 'tab through people' or 'auto level all'. Stuff you need when you've got 200 people to manage and just can't click through all of them. Issues with logistics, where you can tell assistants to move stuff between pallets, but an assistant can only be assigned to ONE pair of pallets. Blacksmiths tasked to restock the shop chilling instead of helping merchant-tasked blacksmiths. Stuff like that is what's missing the most. I expect future updates to address all this.

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Relaxing and enjoyable game 8/10 BUT: It forces you to play exactly as it want's you to play. If it says "Do this now please." you can't say 'Thank you' and click away the message to do it later because right now you have so much fun with something else. Instead it grabs your attention with non-removable, blinking, colorful and obstructing warnings. Suddenly, you don't feel relaxed but stressed. Then you realize, wow, this otherwise good and enjoyable game just took away your agency. Too bad.

It's an OK at the start, but gets extremely monotonous in the later in the game due to the hoards of assistants you need to keep up with ingot production and the entire concept of "ingot transfer" assistants. There's also a lot of completely unneccessary micromanagement of employee skills because the "level up strategy" option is poorly designed. Ingot transfer is a micromanaging nightmare once you get a few floors (a handful of hours into the game) and not remotely fun. The game gives you no good tools or information to deal with routing once you have a few. You can't really stockpile extra ingots without making it way worse on yourself because you just compound the number of ingot transfer routes you have to setup, often not knowing how many you really need without staring at the stockpiles. Extremely frustrating. Only way to deal with the mess is carefully sift through the ingot routes, which has no useful UX/UI, or wipe and redo them all entirely which may result with the player tossing their keyboard through their monitor. They should just make ingot stockpiles one of two types. Smelting destination (only ones where smelters can drop ingots), or blacksmith source (only place blacksmith can pick up an ingot, period) Then assistants can simply be hired globally as "transfer ingots" that automatically move ingots from smelting piles to blacksmith piles, based on "least stockpiled" logic and be done with it. Absolutely, positively no settings on "transfer ingot" assistants whatsoever, this should just happen. I do not want to micromanage this, it sucks. And give me a UI that shows every ingot count from "blacksmith" piles and "smelting" piles. 50/100, 23/150, like SOMETHING. The options for auto-leveling employees don't make sense. Just let me set a priority per skill: off, low, or high. That's it. You don't need a "level up strategy" that long term causes problems by over-leveling skills certain workers' assignments because they're NEVER used or you're stuck micromanaging them all. Smelters get nothing from carry capacity. Designers get nothing from.. anything but the design skill. Please, for the love of all that is holy, remove level up strategy. I question why blacksmith types are designers at all, considering the game wants you to just park them in front of the design table forever and never, ever skill up carpentry, smithing, or pottery, which also leads to useless micromanagment, leveling up design by hand until max when you can finally take a deep breath and set the level up strategy to "do not level up." But well, fixing the skill up system as above would fix this anyway. Also, there is no replay value.

Great bones, but much like my ex-girlfriend it started out amazing and then I discovered how shallow she is and it ended abruptly.

The number of hours I have played this game is most likely as much as you'll ever get out of it before throwing in a white flag. Let me begin by saying, production starts with making goods for a few selected merchants, the number of items you produce range from 30 low count, to 150 at the high end of the spectrum per merchant. Iron ore is at the core of the game's playability, meanwhile there's just not enough to go around to to satisfy production at the halfway point in the game for merchant sales. As you progress in the struggle to manufacture goods, selling your own stuff in-house becomes another 'production option'. In this mode, my workers sit around for half of the day meeting the quota of at least 35 different items to manufacture. No iron shortage. However, in merchant mode, there's just four different things to make. In this scenario there's not enough iron, period. I played and made over a thousand individual products, grinding til I got tired of it because game progression at this point seems to have taken the back seat. I was unable to get into copper, silver and gold products to manufacture because leveling-up is broken. I fired all of my employees and tried it all over again to achieve the same results. With that said, I wholeheartedly cannot recommend this game, it's not ready for prime time. There's a game out there called Rising World, it costs as much as this one does, and I have five times more game-play hours on it and I'm still exploring the countless ways to play it.

It's a milquetoast production line sim game. There's basically no reason to keep playing after just a couple hours, there's not much to do beyond growing production lines with no real metagame or reason to do what you're doing. I guess it's fine as a time waster? Meh.

If you liked Tavern Master you will like this game as well. Same basic premise just different skills and advancement trees. Surprisingly deep. You can tell the single Dev working on this game loves the work he is doing and it shows. If more game developers took a page from this one 's book than games would be better across the board. This Dev could teach the others a little something about taking pride in your work and listening to the community. If you like this genre of games you will not regret this purchase even at full price. 2 thumbs up from me.

100% the game in 20h. There's not much here. Waste of 20h.

I spend every in-game day buying ores and ingots. That's it. There's not much else to do, and even less time to do it, since if I stop buying ores and ingots, my entire chain dries up. The game needs a lot of work - thankfully, the dev is still working on it, but I really can't suggest it in it's current state. Too grindy, and simultaneously too much and too little to do.

if you build a stash, and fire your assistant, your blacksmiths will just fill the stash box and no orders will be able to be finished. i fired my assistant because they could only carry two items at once, making it slower than my blacksmiths just taking the items to the merchants themselves. it softlocked my game because i didnt have the money to hire another assistant, and because all the items were going into the stash box instead of the merchants I wouldnt be able to hire another assistant

incredibly basic and uses the same character assets you see in other games.

Really good and fleshed out for a early access title its crazy what can be achieved when the developers actually care

Nice idea but the almost complete lack of logistics control makes it frustrating to play. Examples: - You can specify a smith as store only or orders only, no priority. Likewise for item type it's only a vague 'top' priority. - Complex items need several parts with different skills, but a smith with do it all from start to finish even if they have poor skills or debuffs on a certain section. We can't split up production into stages. - Unable to delegate stations/chests for certain tasks or smiths. - Only one staffer can use a chest at a time, but if you build more than one the runners will ignore all but the one closest to the door and the other items never get moved/sold. I can only see it getting more of a headache if I get to mines/logging camps.

I want to make clear first and foremost, I enjoy this game but I cannot recommend to new players at this stage. The reasons for this are because there is elements which make the game frustrating to play and some of the biggest complaints made from the demo weren't addressed. There is a repeat problem with queuing in this game, while the dev tackled and corrected the AI, neglected what people had the actual issue with and this was; stockpile sizes. Ingots for example isn't small and takes up a fair amount of space, combined with blacksmiths only ever taking one at a time, which results in queuing behind the stack, a simple method raised was having quarter/half size ingot storage. This would address the frustration players felt; the AI side of it works, but didn't complete on the problem and this festers still. While you have numerous floors to unlock and work towards obtaining, this creates more issues down the line with delays, build up, leading to more problems coming out with how everything functions and has the adverse effect with creating problems and time wasted to fix what wouldn't be a fault to begin with. The overall size of the playable map for your blacksmith isn't big. While bigger than it's counterpart - Tavern Master - here, you have more items which take up a lot of space and what is one thing which vital but takes up far more room than it should? Ingot space. Next is the downtime for chests, while the animation is nice, when you're beginning to have more and more blacksmiths, doesn't matter how many chests you have. Them each queuing up to unload can take a whole in-game hour(this is about a minute or so but important to note as time stops at midnight). Including assistants coming to empty the chest? It's almost designed to waste time and further increase frustration for the player. The market carts don't have this issue however. Numerous people can dump items at them with no limit, or slowdown, this needs to be applied to storage within the smithy itself. Having more options with various sizes would be better overall for design layout. The inability to control your store opening/closing to customers to grant you time to restock items. - As mentioned above, bigger you get, more you're plagued by lack of space and more floors doesn't equal more fun. It's the opposite as you're forced to deal with queuing, spacing and sorting out so much more which can solved but aren't. Another issue is the fact you cannot turn off notifications and this here leads into the biggest gripe with Blacksmith Master right now; progression. Progress is swift in this game as everything keeps blazing and flashing with notification column down the side too.. You are forced to bow and do things just to make them vanish and stop distracting you. This results in making the game, where the demo showed us a truly relaxing and calm experience but the early-release swept over that fact which is a strong allure to this type of game. Sure, you can't ignore the notifications in the beginning but when you go along the research? You will start to have red notifications pop up from lacking this or that type of resource/workstation/workers. All in all. As much as I am enjoying this game, in it's current condition, I cannot recommend while these issues persist. I understand they won't be looked and moved on instantly as it's a lot to handle and balance around. Hopefully switch this review to positive in future! As the game is fun, truly is, but people can get frustrated so much over minor issues and they're not getting addressed. Longer they persist, more work is created to fix what they product and not the root cause.

I you want to watch a game play on its own, then this is for you!

One of the best simulators I've ever played. Despite the graphics, it's an interesting combination of a blacksmith simulator and automation games. Seriously, I find myself thinking about the balance between consumption, production, and logistics. At the same time, the game doesn't force you to do anything, allowing you to learn step-by-step.

horrible game

This game is shutting down on my mac over and over again.