Polished Bronze

A Writing Desk costs four Wooden Plank, six Bronze Nails and one Polished Bronze, and the third of those is where the build stops. The recipe runs at the Woodworking Workbench, so Woodworking II reads like the technology that opens it. Buying that node changes nothing.

Polished Bronze is unlocked in Metallurgy, four steps past the node that gave you Bronze Detail. A woodworking bench makes it, a metallurgy technology sells it to you, and your Building mastery decides whether the button works. One item sits across three disciplines, which is why nobody finds it by looking in the obvious place.

Two Bronze Detail, two Sand and one Melted Fat come back as two bars. Eight buildings want them, and among those eight are the desk that writes every prayer in the game and the furnace that smelts iron.

Bronze Polishing is the node, and it is in Metallurgy

Bronze Polishing costs 30 and sits fifth along the Metallurgy line. Bronze Works opens the branch at 5, Bronze Melting follows at 10, Bronze Craft at 30 and Bronze Forge at 20, so 95 has gone into the branch before the recipe is on offer at all.

The node pays for more than the bar. One purchase hands over Polished Bronze, Bronze tools and Copper Trinkets at the same time, and Bronze tools is a Smithing mastery item worth carrying for its own sake.

Woodworking II is the node that looks right and does something else. It costs 40 and 5, sits behind Oiled Wood rather than behind anything bronze, and what it opens is the Bronze Chisel, Furniture Kit I and the second workbench. Buy it when you want those.

The bench, and the rack that has to stand on it

Either woodworking bench runs the craft. Woodworking Workbench I costs eight Board and four Bronze Nails and comes from Woodworking I at 10, so anyone who has made a Wooden Plank already owns the one they need.

The recipe also wants a Tool Rack fitted to the bench, which is a second technology at 35 behind Stone Basics and Woodworking I. The extension itself is two Wooden Plank, four Bronze Detail and six Bronze Nails, and it goes up in the build menu under Workbench Extension rather than as a building of its own.

Fitting the rack early pays for itself. Eleven recipes look for it across the woodworking bench and the Stonemason’s Workbench, among them Polished Stone, the Amateur Rod and the stone gravestones. Furnace II wants six Polished Stone on top of its two bars, so the rack is on the road to that building twice over.

Building mastery five is the gate nobody warns you about

The craft asks for five in Building, the orange track, because the bench belongs to Building rather than to Smithing. Fall short and the window prints your number over the requirement and leaves the button dead, with every ingredient sitting in reach.

Five is the whole buyable ladder for a track, so this gate is usually closed by what is on your belt rather than by levels. Axes and pickaxes are the two families that feed Building, and both of them count while you stand at this bench, so a Bronze Pickaxe is worth two here and a Bronze Axe another two.

Swapping a rusty pickaxe for a bronze one moves you a point without spending one, which is what gets most people through. A better shovel does nothing here at all, because shovels feed Farming. The mastery guide has the full ladder.

The recipe, and where each of the three parts comes from

Two Bronze Detail, two Sand and one Melted Fat return two Polished Bronze. The craft runs six seconds at 2 a tick, pays 3 back, and adds one to the Bronze crafts inspiration on the way past.

Bronze Detail is the cheap third of the recipe. One Bronze Ingot becomes six of them at any anvil, three more with the Engineer perk, so a single ingot covers three batches of bars and leaves enough over for the Tool Rack.

Sand comes out of pits in the ground, and the nearest are at your own base, left of the house by the broken bridge. They ask Building mastery three of their own, and four swings at 1 each empties one for four Sand.

Melted Fat comes off a Distillation Cube, which is two Wooden Plank, two Bronze Detail and twelve Brick behind Alchemy, Distillation at 5 and 5. One Fat, two Clay Plate and twenty Fuel return four Melted Fat, and three Seed oil in place of the Fat returns three.

The Apothecary stocks twenty Melted Fat at every tier, which covers a long time at one a craft, and that is the only way to skip the cube. Nothing else in the game produces Melted Fat, so without the shop the Distillation Cube is the route and Albert’s reputation is the gate on it.

Three shops sell it, once the town has them

When one bar is all that stands between you and the Writing Desk, the town is faster than the chain. The Smithy carries ten, the Furniture Maker ten and the Jeweler twenty, and each carries more as the shop levels up, the Jeweler reaching fifty.

What the bars are for

The Writing Desk is how most people meet Polished Bronze, and it repays the detour. Twenty four recipes run on that desk, among them every prayer in the game, Clean Paper, Ink, Story, both notebooks and both Science Kits.

Furnace II is the other building that changes the game. Six Polished Stone, two Polished Bronze and twelve Brick raise it, and it is the first bench that can smelt Iron Ingot, which puts the whole iron half of the game behind this bar as well.

Six more buildings ask for it, and each opens a system rather than a single craft: the second workbench, the Weaving Loom and Sewing Table for cloth, Embalming Table I for bodies, the Formulation Bench for transmutation and Monument II for the graveyard.

Recipes eat bars too. Bronze tools take one, Copper Trinkets two, the Amateur Rod two and the Starter Alchemist’s Kit one, and the broken bridge at the vineyard wants one to repair.