The forge replaces the crafting grid: break down, heat, hammer, assemble.
The vision
An item is no longer a three-by-three recipe, but an assembly of parts: a handle, a guard, a blade, a tool head. Each is made separately, then the whole is put together at the bench.
The important thing is the reading direction. Existing items, vanilla or modded, determine the forge: the mod takes the target item as the desired result, breaks it down, and derives what must be forged. Compatibility with the whole arsenal therefore comes for free, with no recipe written by hand. It is exactly the logic of Tactile:Wood with trees.
The handle and guard come from a simple craft. The blade is earned. It takes two ingots, lighting the forge, and heating until the metal glows red: a procedural rough blade then appears.
Each hammer blow visually brings the piece closer to the expected result. The shape is the gauge: there is no progress bar, you watch the blade become the blade. Final assembly is done with a wooden mallet.
Heat management is mandatory, not optional. A cooling piece stops working, and must go back into the fire.
Subtle procedural marks from the hammering can be kept on the finished item. Hand-forged gear then becomes unique, recognizable, with no impact whatsoever on balance: a purely aesthetic reward, and that is exactly right.
Around that base there is room for metallurgy: a quench step in water or oil, and the possibility of mixing materials in a single blade, which shows on the piece.
Weapons show their wear procedurally through combats, chips, patina, rather than settling for a bar going down. A blunted weapon is repaired by re-hammering at the forge, which restores its look as well.
The forge stops being an early-game step and becomes a place you return to.
The anvil, the grindstone and the smithing table are literally forge stations. Their logical home is Smith, which already handles heat, hammering and assembly. Bringing them together there would strengthen the module instead of scattering the suite, and would avoid maintaining two parallel forge systems.
Today they live in Tactile:Blocks and are not moving. This regrouping is a documented track for later, which will not happen without an announced transition, and never at the cost of worlds already played.