Blacksmith Master leaves early access on November 19, 2026, on Steam, GOG, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store. The price stays at $19.99, the same as it has cost since early access began on May 15, 2025. Publisher Hooded Horse announced the date on Monday.
You run a medieval smithy as a production chain. Mines and woodcutter camps at the edge of the map feed ore and timber to your forge. Ingots become swords, pots, rings and crowns at a sequence of stations, each run by a worker you hired and equipped. The shop either sells over the counter or fills bulk orders from around the kingdom. You lay out the floor for throughput and reinvest in staff, tools and a second storey. The failure state is the usual one. Wages come out every day whether the counter is busy or not, and a shop that spends faster than it sells stalls.
What master workers and siege machines change
Master Workers are the headline addition at 1.0: specialist staff who unlock unique items, sets and abilities for their whole profession and raise its output. Siege machines are the new top of the production tree, ballistas, catapults, cannons and battering rams, multi-part builds the studio says are meant to strain even a well-run workshop. Both change the arithmetic of the shop rather than its scenery, which is the right kind of 1.0 content for a game about margins.
Eighteen months of early access, in three patches
The early access run added coin minting, rebalanced progression and salaries, and rebuilt both the staff menu and the mastery tree that governs worker skills. Eighteen months is brisk for this genre. The game is also translated from English into sixteen languages at 1.0, including Japanese, Korean and both Chinese scripts. That is more than most solo projects manage.
Solo is the word. Untitled Studio is one developer, Luka, based in Serbia, who came out of mobile games. His first PC title, Tavern Master, did well enough to fund this one. Hooded Horse is the label behind Manor Lords, Against the Storm and Old World, and it has a habit of picking strategy and management games that reward attention.
It is a game about margins, not about swords, and if that reads as a recommendation, it is. Blacksmith Master reaches 1.0 on November 19, and the early access build is on Steam now at the same price.
