Salvage Forge
The Salvage Forge turns a stack of your own single-use salvage bags into a reusable, multi-charge Hammer. It is a fixture of the Marketplace crafting room, and the only one of the crafting stations that takes salvage rather than a piece of gear.
What it does
A squat brick forge banked with coals, kept by Forge-Warden Nadira Sahl. Hand it one full bag of Tiger Eye, Obsidian, Tourmaline, Amethyst or Serpentine salvage together with 5 Trade Notes, and it forges that bag - plus more full bags of the same material out of your packs - into one full ten-charge Hammer of that material.
A Hammer does exactly what the matching bag does, ten times over, spending one charge per use and crumbling to dust when the last one goes. It shows its remaining uses as the green bar on its appraisal panel, and unlike a bag it stays usable when part-spent. See Custom Crafting for the whole family.
Matching is by material only, not by which specific bag you hand over. Every eligible full bag of that material anywhere in your packs - main pack, side packs, all of it - counts toward the total, and the forge takes whichever ones it needs. An existing Hammer of the same material never counts toward the total and is never consumed; only ordinary single-use bags are.
Anything the forge cannot use - a partial bag, a Hammer, a material outside the five - it hands straight back untouched, and charges nothing. There is no White Quartz option: that material is a retail-style imbue rather than a custom application, and has no Hammer.
The price scales with skill
How many bags the forge needs depends on your current value in the tinkering skill that material answers to - Armor Tinkering for Tiger Eye and Obsidian, Weapon Tinkering for Tourmaline and Amethyst, Magic Item Tinkering for Serpentine:
| Your skill in the matching tinkering | Bags required |
|---|---|
| Under 500 | 10 |
| 500 to 699 | 9 |
| 700 to 899 | 8 |
| 900 and up | 7 |
Ten bags for ten charges is break-even, so the forge is a way to turn skill investment into a discount on the bags themselves: a well-trained tinker gets ten applications out of seven bags, and a poorly-trained one gains nothing but pack space and a tidier inventory.
Where the bags come from
You make them. Every material the forge accepts is ordinary salvage: loot an item made of it, run it through a tinkering tool as you would for any other tinkering, and fill the bag. Tiger Eye, Tourmaline and Amethyst also drop as named gems you can salvage whole; Obsidian and Serpentine have no gem and come from salvaging gear made of the material. Custom Crafting has the detail, including which tiers favour which material.
Assay Row hands over your first Hammer of each material as a one-time quest reward, so the forge is the refill route rather than the introduction.
The Hollow Hammer
Before the forge was built, the same work was done by a hand tool called the Hollow Hammer, used on a bag in your own pack. The tool is retired: it is no longer sold anywhere, and the Marketplace forge replaced it.
If you still hold one it continues to work exactly as it did - use it on a full bag in your pack, with the same skill-scaled bag count above, and it is consumed on a successful forge. It costs no Trade Notes, which is the one advantage it keeps over the station.
See also
- Marketplace Crafting Stations - the rest of the crafting room.
- Custom Crafting - every way gear can be reworked, in one place.
- Equipment Mods - Tiger Eye and Obsidian, two of the materials this forges.
- Weapon Mods - Tourmaline and Amethyst, two more.
- Serpentine Salvage - the fifth material this forges.
- Assay Row - where the first Hammer of each material is granted.