In games that need heavy grinding, like The Forge, your gear won’t carry you far unless you upgrade it. Enhancement and enchantment are the two main ways to make your weapons and armor stronger. Both systems are important if you want to handle tougher enemies and keep moving forward. Here’s a simple breakdown of how to enhance and enchant in The Forge. Check them out!
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What Are Enhancement and Enchantment in The Forge?
Enhancement and enchantment are two separate upgrade systems in The Forge, and you’ll use both to make your gear as strong as possible.
Enhancement
This upgrade is all about leveling up your equipment. When you enhance a weapon or piece of armor, you’re increasing its base stats like damage, attack speed, defense, and other important numbers. Each enhancement level makes your gear stronger, but it also gets more expensive and requires better materials.
Enchantment
This upgrade is different. This is where you attach runes to your gear to give it special passive effects. When you enchant, you are adding extra abilities on top of your weapon’s normal stats. You can’t enchant right away, though. You need to enhance your gear to at least level 3 first, which unlocks rune slots.
How to Enhance Gear in The Forge
Finding the Enhancer is easy since this NPC shows up in every region of the game. In Stonewake’s Cross, the starting area, you’ll find the Enhancer across from the Runemaker near the pier.
What You Need for Enhancement
Enhancement isn’t free. You’ll need two things: money and essence. The money part is just your regular in-game gold. Essence is what you need to search for while grinding in the game. There are different types of essence you can get, and they all drop from enemies when you kill them.
Early on, you’ll mostly need Tiny, Small, and Medium Essence. These drop pretty regularly from the basic enemies in Stonewake’s Cross and Forgotten Kingdom. But once you start pushing for higher enhancement levels, you’ll need Large and Greater Essence, which are way harder to find.
Enhancement Steps
Here’s exactly what you do when you’re ready to enhance:
- Talk to the Enhancer NPC and select “Yes, I’m here to enhance.”
- Pick the weapon or armor you want to upgrade from your inventory.
- Check the requirements (essence types and gold amount).
- Look at the Craft Chance percentage before you confirm, and then click the Enhance button at the bottom.
After you enhance successfully, your gear goes up one level and gets better stats. Simple enough, right?
Enhancement Levels in The Forge
Enhancing starts out safe, but it gets harder the higher you go. Your first upgrades are always 100% guaranteed, but after that, the success rate drops. At the +3 tier, your chance is about 70%, and at the +4 tier, it falls to around 60%. The higher the level, the easier it is to fail.
If you fail an enhancement, your gear tier goes down one level. For example, if you try to go from +4 to +5 and fail, it drops back to +3. You also lose the materials you used, but your gear never breaks. However, when you successfully enhance a weapon or armor to a +3 tier, you unlock one rune slot. This lets you attach a rune and get those passive effects.
How to Enchant Gear in The Forge
Once you’ve got your gear to +3 and unlocked a rune slot, you can head over to enchant it. The Runemaker NPC handles all enchantment, and you’ll find them in a building right across from the Enhancer in both Stonewake’s Cross and Forgotten Kingdom.
How to Get Runes
Runes drop from enemies just like essence, but they’re much rarer. Different enemies drop different runes, so you might need to hunt specific creatures to get the rune you want. When you kill an enemy, there’s a small chance they’ll drop a rune along with essence and gold. You can also get runes from tougher enemies and mini-bosses scattered around the world.
Enchantment Steps
Here’s exactly what you do when you’re ready to enchant your gear:
- Walk up to the Runemaker and press E, then select “Yes, I’m here to craft some runes.”
- Pick the weapon or armor you want to enchant.
- In the middle of the screen, you’ll see all the runes in your inventory. Click a rune to check what effect it gives.
- Select the rune you want and press Attach.
- Confirm the gold cost to finish the process.
Should You Enhance and Enchant Early Game Gear in The Forge?
This is a question a lot of new players ask. Should you dump resources into early game weapons and armor, or should you wait until you get better stuff?
The answer is, you can upgrade selectively early on. You don’t need to enhance every piece of gear you find. Pick one good weapon and maybe one full set of armor that you like, then focus your resources on those. Once you get into Forgotten Kingdom and start finding better base weapons and armor, that’s when you want to go all in on enhancement.
In the end, enhancing and enchanting your gear in The Forge will definitely pay off. Once you improve your equipment, your character becomes much stronger in every fight. Don’t forget to check our dedicated The Forge Wiki to find more details about the game and its features, too!
