I still remember the first time I booted up Terraria, spent three hours digging for copper and tin, and then realized I had no way to turn those ores into usable tools and armor. If you’re stuck at that same hurdle, you’re in the right place. Learning how to craft an anvil in Terraria is one of the most critical early-game milestones that unlocks 90% of the core gear you’ll need to beat your first bosses and explore more dangerous biomes. It’s not a complicated process, but there are a few small mistakes new players make all the time that delay their progress by hours.
What You Need Before You Craft an Anvil in Terraria
You don’t need to beat any bosses or find rare hidden items to make your first anvil. All the required materials are accessible within the first hour of a new playthrough, as long as you have a basic pickaxe to dig for stone and ore. There are two identical starter anvils you can craft, depending on what metal your world spawns with: an iron anvil or a lead anvil. Lead anvils work exactly the same as iron anvils, so don’t waste time searching for iron if your world generates lead instead.
Before you start gathering materials, make sure you have these core pre-requisites checked off:
- 1 fully placed workbench (crafted from 10 wood, no extra tools needed)
- 1 fully placed furnace (crafted from 20 stone blocks, 4 wood, and 3 torches at a workbench)
- 90 pieces of either iron ore or lead ore (your world will only spawn one of these two metals)
- At least 10 extra wood to keep furnaces running while you smelt ore
You don’t need any special tools to craft the anvil itself once you have the bars. The only thing you’ll need access to besides the materials is a standard workbench. That means you don’t have to do any fancy exploration or combat to get this core crafting station set up early on.
Step-by-Step Process to Build Your First Anvil
Once you have all your pre-requisites sorted, building your anvil only takes a few minutes. Start by grabbing your best pickaxe and heading underground to mine your iron or lead ore. Both metals spawn most commonly between 50 and 300 blocks below the surface, in the underground and upper cavern layers. Iron ore has a pale grey, flecked appearance, while lead ore is a darker, blue-grey color that’s easy to tell apart from lighter silver ore.
Once you have 90 pieces of ore, head back to your base and stand next to your placed furnace. Open your crafting menu, and you’ll see the option to turn 3 pieces of ore into 1 bar. Smelt all 90 pieces of ore to get the 30 bars you need for the anvil. But if you’re running low on fuel for the furnace, you can use wood, gel, or even coal you find while mining to keep it running.
After you have all 30 bars, walk over to your placed workbench and open your crafting menu again. The anvil will show up as a craftable option automatically. Click to craft it, then find a spot to place it. Always place your anvil near your workbench and furnace to cut down on travel time while you’re crafting early gear. Note that anvils take up a 2-block wide, 3-block tall space, so you’ll need a flat, solid 2-block base to place it on – it won’t attach to platforms or half-blocks.
What You Can Do With Your New Anvil
Your new anvil unlocks almost every pre-hardmode crafting recipe in the game, so you’ll be using it constantly for the first 10 to 20 hours of your playthrough. The most immediate use is crafting better tools and armor from the ores you mine. You can make copper, tin, iron, lead, silver, tungsten, gold, and platinum sets all at a standard anvil, which will let you survive much harsher biomes like the corruption, crimson, and jungle.
You can also craft a huge range of weapons at your anvil, from broadswords and bows to yoyos and magic staves that deal far more damage than the basic wooden or copper weapons you start with. You’ll even need your anvil to craft most early boss summoning items, like the crown used to summon King Slime, or the materials needed to summon the Eye of Cthulhu.
An anvil is required to make the nightmare pickaxe or deathbringer pickaxe, which are the first tools strong enough to mine hellstone. Hellstone is the material you need to make the strongest pre-hardmode gear, and it’s required to beat the Wall of Flesh and unlock hardmode. If you ever need to craft gear on a long exploration trip, you can also carry the anvil in your inventory and place it temporarily – it only takes up one slot, so it’s worth bringing along if you’re planning to be away from base for a while.
Common Anvil Crafting Mistakes to Avoid
Even though crafting an anvil is a simple process, almost every new player makes at least one of these mistakes when they’re starting out. The most common one is showing up to your workbench with 30 pieces of ore instead of 30 bars. Forgetting that you need 30 bars, not 30 ore is such a frequent error that I’ve seen dozens of new players post about it on community forums, so double check that you’ve smelted all your ore before you try to craft.
Another common mistake is trying to craft the anvil without standing right next to a workbench. The anvil recipe only shows up in your crafting menu when you’re within 3 blocks of a placed workbench, so if you don’t see it pop up, move a little closer. I once spent 20 minutes running back and forth between my furnace and storage chest before I realized I’d left my workbench in a cave I’d explored the day before, so don’t make that same silly error.
Finally, don’t waste time trying to find iron if your world only spawns lead. A lot of new players see guides that reference iron anvils and think lead anvils are worse, but they have exactly the same functionality and unlock exactly the same recipes. The only difference is the material used to craft them, so use whatever your world gives you.
Once you get your first anvil set up, you’ll be shocked at how much faster your Terraria run progresses. You’ll be able to make armor that lets you survive the corruption or crimson, tools that dig through rock in seconds, and weapons that take down early bosses without a hassle. Taking the time to learn how to craft an anvil in Terraria is one of the smallest but most impactful steps you can take as a new player, and it opens up the entire rest of the game’s content for you to explore. Next time you log in, grab your pickaxe, dig up a stack of iron or lead, and get that anvil built – you won’t regret it.