Smithworks – Portal Strategy for Solo Academy (Still Works in Party)

This guide will cover a setup in Academy that will send any smelted items immediately to your smithing area without any player interaction. Introducing the first example of automation within smithworks!

Solo Academy Portal Strategy

Please note: all credit goes to davour!

Introduction

This portal setup will eliminate the tedious step of throwing your ingots over to the smithing stations and eliminates the possibility of you throwing your precious metals into the water below.

Introducing the first example of automation within smithworks!

Every step in this guide can be done PREGAME, meaning it can all be done before taking the first order with no time limit stress!

Portal Locations

These portals are rather hard to spot when you’re not looking for them, despite their immense utility.

This highlights their location from the front desk.

This shows where they are, the platform at the top is where the furnace is located.

The fastest way I have found to gather these is to jump from the smelter onto the big window to your left, then to jump down to the platform.

Other Necessary Items’ Locations

For this setup we will also need:

  • 1xBarrel
  • 1xChair

These are very easy to find and can both be seen here at spawn.

Note that there is only one barrel here, and any of the three chairs will work. If you need there is also a barrel on the floor under this one

Furnace’s Portal Setup

The first part to this setup will be setting up the Furnace’s portal (You will need a barrel for this step).

To do so, place the barrel right up in front of the furnace as such:

Note: Tapping RMB instead of holding it will drop the barrel lightly so you can position it well.

Afterwards, place the portal you have just brought up here on top of the barrel and the furnace’s “lip”. It is important that the portal’s edge is as close to the furnace’s hit-box as possible but it must lay flat.

Smithing Area’s Portal Setup

The second step to this setup is placing the portal by the smithing area (You will need a chair for this step).

This is rather tedious but consistent, bear with me here.

The Chair

This is the goal for the chair’s setup:

Please take note of the direction the chair is facing.

Now this may seem impossible, yes the chair is balanced very precariously, but there’s a simple lineup for it!

Grab your chair and stand as far back in the corner here as you can:

Once you are standing in this corner, turn to face the giant window opposite you and try to place your cursor on the corner of this brick:

Note: Although I have not thoroughly tested it, I believe you can generally have your cursor in the blue region, if you find out anything more about this let me know in the discussion.

Finally, it’s as simple as tapping RMB to drop the chair in place, if it is rotated poorly you can easily pick it up and try again (Remember, there is no time limit before you take the first order!)

The Portal

Next, we need to put the portal on top of the chair as such:

Although this does not exactly have a lineup, it’s fairly easy to pull off.

You generally want to stand in front of the chair like this and then drop the portal with varying amounts of power (with RMB).

Another approach is to jump straight up and tap RMB to drop the portal onto the chair as you fall.

It is very important to remember that items are not dropped at the center of your screen, instead they will be dropped exactly where you can see them off to the side.

And You’re Done!

With this all set up, when you go into your run, you can simply throw your ores into your furnace and they will guaranteed be nicely piled up for you by your smithing area!

Why the Floating Chair?

When the idea first struck me to do this portal setup I did not use the chair at first. I loaded up a run to get the new “Expert” achievements and all was going perfectly!…

Until I got a hefty order.

See, as soon as more than two or three ores were sent through the portal, they stacked up high enough to get sent back through and to be lost at the top of the furnace’s platform. Although this isn’t catastrophic seeing as you can hop back through the portal to grab them. It is detrimental to the flow in your run. Without the chair you cannot be 100% certain that the materials you need will be there, leaving the possibility of unnecessary backtrack and points loss in your run!

General Playthrough of the Setup

Generally, these are the steps I follow immediately after spawning in:

  • Grab the barrel to the left and behind you (next to the open shop sign) when you spawn and run through the blue portal.
  • Drop the barrel here and jump down onto the window sill to the left of the furnace and then sprint down onto the platform with the portals.
    Make sure that when jumping to the window, you hold W into the window while you slide down it to prevent fainting.
  • Grab the portal closest to the window and run across the rafters to the reception desk and hop back into the blue portal.
  • Drop the first portal you picked up onto the floor and jump through it to end up on top of the other portal.
  • Pick this portal up and run straight across the rafters, this time going past the reception and up the stairs to the left where the smithing area is.
  • Drop the portal here (you can also skip some of the last step by throwing the portal up here if you’re feeling risky).
  • Jump to the alchemy table and again jump across to the chair on the opposite side of the room (To the left of the big bookshelf on the opposite wall).
  • Grab the chair and head back to do the smithing area setup.
  • Carefully jump through the set up portal to get out at the furnace.
  • Set up the furnace’s portal and go through the blue portal behind you.
  • Open up shop and break records!
Egor Opleuha
About Egor Opleuha 8075 Articles
Egor Opleuha, also known as Juzzzie, is the Editor-in-Chief of Gameplay Tips. He is a writer with more than 12 years of experience in writing and editing online content. His favorite game was and still is the third part of the legendary Heroes of Might and Magic saga. He prefers to spend all his free time playing retro games and new indie games.

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