Smithing: forging a mace, difficulty 233 against skill 188

About this game

Developer: TaleWorlds Entertainment · Publisher: TaleWorlds Entertainment · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Realistic 3D · Screen type: Trade / Economy

More Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord screens in the Gallery

What to study

Bannerlord's smithing is a crafting system drawn as a workbench: the weapon exists in the middle of the screen before it exists in the world, floating over the forge it will be made in, and every decision is a physical part, pick a shaft from a tiered grid, read its effect as five plain stat bars, watch the material piles at the bottom lose the pieces the build will eat. The difficulty thermometer is the screen's one act of honesty: it places the recipe's 233 against the smith's 188 on a single green-to-red scale, so attempting too much is a visible risk the player chooses, not a locked door. Even the slot column's dice-and-lock buttons borrow the language of rerolling a physical object until it comes out right. Frame at about 1:05 in the Official Release Trailer (Steam; manual extraction, fine-probe frame relB_09 from the 60.5–66.5s window at 2 fps; the panel is settled and identical across relB_08–10).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

crafting-panel item-slots cost-list single-action

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Tabs Grid Marker Vitals bar Slots Slider Dice

Screen inventory

• the workshop is the background, not a backdrop image: the half-built mace floats at an angle over a stone forge full of coals with the anvil behind it, and the three smithing verbs, Smelt, Forge, Refine, sit as tabs across the top, with Orders (0) and Free Build as the mode switch beside them
• feasibility is one thermometer on the left: a vertical bar running green to red, a marker reading 'Difficulty: 233' sitting in the yellow above the ring that marks 'Smithing: 188', the smith (Urentur's card at lower left, skill 188, 20% stamina) is attempting a piece above his level and the screen says so in one glance
• the build is assembled from parts in the right-hand panel: the weapon class (Mace), tier filters (All, I–V), and a grid of shaft parts each stamped with its tier numeral, the chosen tier-IV shaft lit gold; a narrow slot column beside the forge shows the three part slots (V, IV selected, V) with dice and lock buttons for rerolling and locking a part
• the outcome is predicted as five stat bars under a Size slider and a One Handed tag, Weight 2.70, Weapon Reach 83.0, Swing Speed 69.0, Swing Blunt Damage 71.0, Handling 79.0, while the material stock runs along the bottom with the cost of this build picked out in red (-5, -1, -1) over the piles it will come from, above the single Forge button

Top 3 colors

#3b2e1d 19%#070503 19%#0f0b06 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© TaleWorlds Entertainment, Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord screenshot: Steam trailers (Official Release Trailer / Gamescom 2016 Siege Defence Gameplay), TaleWorlds Entertainment, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by TaleWorlds Entertainment.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-26. verified 2026-10-26: manual extraction manual-forge-64.png @ ~64.5s in the Official Release Trailer, MD5 74877204aa6e6b263075ea90d9cc1567, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (94,927,294 B, MD5 a65be9363994c1ccc2d1910939795b52; full decode to null with -xerror exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-261550-Official-Release-Trailer.mp4.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the difficulty thermometer, the tiered part grid, all five stat bars and the material cost row legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-26); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.