Dark Sand: My Players Are All Actors
Chapter 365 - 233: The New Craftsman Challenge

Chapter 365: Chapter 233: The New Craftsman Challenge

In the blink of an eye, a whole night had passed.

Li Hongyun woke up in the real world, his head still buzzing.

"It’s too hard!

"I couldn’t forge a single qualified blade all night, it’s infuriating!

"Do I have a fake talent or what?

"...It’s not that it’s useless, but success still seems so out of reach."

Thinking back on his struggle throughout the entire night, Li Hongyun felt a sense of disillusioned busyness.

Every blade he painstakingly forged failed the test for various reasons!

The first two times, the blades cracked directly when chopping hard bone.

Afterward, Li Hongyun reflected on whether the high carbon content was the problem and worked the metal more, only to find that the blade didn’t break when chopping bone this time, but it actually bent...

Then, he encountered all sorts of issues, such as not being sharp enough to cut through leather, or having a poor balance that made it impossible to sever a dead pig with all his might.

The most frustrating part was when his blade seemed pretty good, but failed just because he didn’t control the material well, resulting in the blade being too short.

He tried using this blade, but because it was too short, it couldn’t sever the dead pig in one cut.

With no other choice, he wondered if he could fix it somehow and found another piece of metal to try to forcibly extend it, only to prove that it was futile. Since ancient times didn’t have technologies like welding, forcing an extension resulted in both the blade and the metal becoming practically useless, and they had to be melted down and reforged.

So frustrating!

Li Hongyun even began to feel that the talent he received was useless. Where was the keen observation it promised? Where was the significant improvement in observation and memory?

But after several failures, he realized that his talent did indeed come into play, albeit not very obviously.

His observation and memory had improved; in the game, he could clearly remember the color of the flame, the state of the sponge iron, the approximate temperature for quenching, and so on.

However, the problem was that these details were hard to translate directly into success.

He certainly remembered each failure, but the process of forging weapons was so intricate, a confluence of countless steps interacting with one another, that it was hard to pinpoint exactly where things went wrong.

For instance, the blade breakage issue could be due to carbon content, impurities in the steel, or some other factor...

Without being able to determine the specific cause or to isolate the exact step where things went awry, figuring out what was going wrong was still too difficult.

All in all, after a night of toiling, Li Hongyun was somewhat disheartened.

As a lucky person, he wasn’t used to encountering such frustrating situations often.

He opened the forum to see the feedback from other players.

As expected, the other players were virtually all lamenting in despair.

"The new trial instance is outrageous! Making players forge swords with ancient techniques??"

"Outrageous, and not just ancient sword forging, I can’t even handle modern methods..."

"I think it would be acceptable if players were given steel with a set carbon content for the trial. Starting straight from iron sand, letting players refine from sponge iron, is just too hard!"

"The crux is that the technique for forging in the old ways has long been lost, even professional craftsmen rarely dabble in such things nowadays. They mostly use ready-made steel and power hammers to make weapons."

"Is there any expert who can provide a strategy guide? I really want to know what the special talent skill for a god-level talent is..."

Besides that, there were many sharing their experiences from the game.

Or more precisely, their failure experiences.

Some players got stuck at the first step, not knowing that iron sand was a better raw material and directly throwing unbroken iron ore into the furnace, only to spend half a day burning it and the iron ore remained iron ore, wasting a lot of charcoal and time pointlessly.

Some threw iron sand and charcoal together only to find they couldn’t produce quality sponge iron, not knowing if it was because the furnace was damp underground or because the furnace temperature wasn’t high enough.

Then there were players who managed to produce sponge iron after much trouble, but without sorting it, they directly forged the rough chunks of steel, which naturally led to wasted effort and resources.

Of course, there were also players with exceptional talents, those who had relevant knowledge in real life or were enthusiasts in forging, progressing much faster than other players.

But these individuals also encountered a variety of challenges.

Because when they played with forging, they used modern methods. The raw materials were usually ready-made steel or steel balls, which could be melted and forged into a decent blade blank.

Moreover, they didn’t need to do the forging by hand; it was mostly done with power hammers.

Starting from melting and sorting presented an instant challenge for many.

Nonetheless, among the players there were experts like Cui Huowang, who after a night of hard work had already forged a decent weapon and was just a step away from passing the test at the sword-testing platform.

Not long after, Cui Huowang released a fairly detailed preliminary strategy guide.

The basics of this guide were similar to the information Li Hongyun had researched before, starting from melting, sorting, forging, quenching, and other different processes, informing players about the details to be aware of during the crafting sequence.

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