Forge of Potential was added to Valheim with the official Deep North 1.0 update and has since met with strong criticism over its design and horrible RNG mechanic. However, a Redditor by the name of Melichorak has found a way to break this system by calculating specific character names, making a chain of characters to infinitely upgrade and enhance items in the Forge of Potential.
The ins and outs of the Forge of Potential exploit:
How the Valheim Forge of Potential Bug Works
Forge of Potential makes a dice roll each time you attempt to upgrade a weapon or armor above its threshold, and that dice roll is dependent on the name of the character who is trying to upgrade. Meaning, if you’re unlucky enough, your character’s name might be the reason you can’t upgrade past level 1 in the forge.
This also means, potentially (pun intended), you can calculate the correct name to upgrade each weapon to 8 without the item breaking. But there’s more to this bug.
How to Get Unlimited Forge of Potential Upgrades
The limit on how many upgrades you can do on a weapon is tied to a seed, which the seed itself is tied to the character. To put it into simple terms, the longest chain of uninterrupted upgrades in Valheim goes up to the 8th, with the 9th attempt breaking the item. But the item itself can be upgraded almost without any limits, as long as you have the suitable names on subsequent characters and enough idols to do so. Read our guide on how to find the bronze protection Idol.
So this begs the question: how do we find the correct names for this exploit?
Find the Right Character Names
Once again, Redditor Melichorak made a tool to analyze and give you the potential names to upgrade your desired item. That was all it could do at first. But by digging further into the topic, Melichorak found that the seeds are character-reliant, and no matter the current level of a weapon, if a new character tries to upgrade it at the forge of potential, they can do it up to 8 times.
Just put in the item you want to upgrade and its current level of quality into the name finder, and it will give you potential names that would guarantee success if the upgrade process if followed correctly.
Use Multiple Characters to Upgrade the Same Item
If you have enough Idols, you can try to push past the limit the game has defined for this mechanic. By working with the more advanced part of this name finder, with the same simple controls, you can path out a chain of names to upgrade the item however much you want to. Just write the name of the item, current quality, and the target quality you are looking for so the name finder can plan it for you.
How Does the Name Finder Work?
Whenever someone tries to upgrade an item for the first time at the forge, the game creates a key that follows a simple formula: seed = hash(character_name) + hash(item_name) + quality + 1.
This seed determines whether a character succeeds or fails to upgrade their desired item. The namefinder does the calculations for you. Pay attention that there’s no limit based on the item itself, so you can put an item already at level 8 with a new character and still upgrade it to 16 and even more.
How to Check Your Current Character’s Forge Upgrade Chances
There’s also a section on the site that allows you to input your character file, and it will calculate all the potential upgrade chances for the items in the character’s inventory.
You can also put in an item name, its quality, and a character name for the name finder to tell you what the potential is for your character and your desired item.
Will Iron Gate Fix the Forge of Potential Bug?
In patch 1.0.20, Iron Gate decided to remove the exploit that allowed players to get new results at the Forge of Potential with every reload of the world. They made the upgrades more predictable, by tieing to the characters. This has now led to a bigger but less time-consuming workaround to the Forge of Potential risk and reward system.
Now, whether they will fix this exploit as well or not is still up for debate.
