Iron and Mithril in WoW Forever: Mid-Level Mining Prices

The short answer

Iron and Mithril are the middle of the mining ladder in WoW Forever, and they are where bar demand gets serious. The latest player scans put Iron Ore at 5 silver49 copper, Iron Bar at 5 silver89 copper, Mithril Ore at 9 silver50 copper and Mithril Bar at 12 silver18 copper. Steel Bar, made from one Iron Bar and one Coal, scanned at 7 silver10 copper. On the beta every one of those smelts added value, and iron added the most. Smelt your iron, smelt mithril when you have the skill, and sell Truesilver Ore raw: it was the one ore in this band that sold above its own bar.

What the client says

All of this comes from the Forever beta client. Smelt Iron takes one Iron Ore for one Iron Bar and is trivial from 130 to 140. Smelt Steel takes one Iron Bar and one Coal for one Steel Bar at 165. Smelt Mithril is one ore for one bar at 175. Smelt Gold runs 170 to 185 and Smelt Truesilver sits at 230, both one ore for one bar.

Vendor prices from the client: Iron Ore 1 silver50 copper, Iron Bar 2 silver, Coal 1 silver25 copper, Steel Bar 60 copper, Mithril Ore 2 silver50 copper, Mithril Bar 4 silver. Steel Bar vendoring for less than either of its inputs is a client quirk carried over from Classic, and a good reminder that vendor price says nothing about demand.

Who buys the bars

Here is the demand side from our extract, counted recipe by recipe.

Mithril is the big one: 92 recipes and 921 bars to craft each once, more than iron and steel combined. It is also the one where Engineering matters most. Thirty-seven Engineering recipes use Mithril Bar, compared with ten for iron and one for steel, so mithril has two large buyer groups instead of one. Iron and steel are mostly a Blacksmithing story.

Iron Ore itself also shows up in Forever's camp system. The Mining recipe Rock Garden (Tier 2, skill 140 to 145) takes two Heavy Stone, one Iron Ore and one Silver Bar, and Skinning's Trapper's Workbench (skill 300) asks for an Iron Bar. Neither moves the market on its own, but both are new uses Classic never had.

The smelt math

Here is the arithmetic on the 2026-10-08 scans, per bar.

Iron is the clear winner. A miner who smelts every Iron Ore gets about 1.3 times the ore's value back as bars. Steel adds value on top of that, but less than you might think, because Coal is a third of the steel bill: 4 silver99 copper out of 13 silver59 copper on that date. If Coal gets expensive, steel stops paying long before iron does. Mithril smelting gains a little, and you need it for skill anyway. Truesilver is the odd one out: sell the ore.

Where the new demand comes from

The Forever client adds a mid-level armour family in five parallel versions, the same design pattern we saw with bronze. The five versions are Justicar's, Officer's, Prefect's, Sentinel's and Warder's. Each version uses the same bars and grinding stones plus one flavour reagent: Globe of Water, Jade, Golden Pearl, Purple Lotus or Black Pearl.

Across all five versions that is 30 Iron Bars, 70 Steel Bars and 100 Mithril Bars, just to craft each piece once. On top of that, Blacksmithing gains Azure and Cloudy Skyforged helms and pauldrons that take fourteen to eighteen Iron Bars each, a new Hard Gold set, and a new Shining Mithril set built on Truesilver.

The Hard Gold set is worth a closer look, because it changes the value of Gold Ore. The seven pieces (Cuirass, Boots, Bracers, Leggings, Coif, Gauntlet and Pauldrons) take sixty Gold Bars between them, plus fourteen Steel Bars. In Classic, Gold Bar had a short list of uses. In Forever, one blacksmith working through one new set needs sixty of them.

The engineers' share of mithril

Blacksmiths get the headlines, but engineers are why mithril holds its price. Most of the 37 Engineering recipes are the familiar ones: Mithril Tube and Mithril Casing (three bars each, and both are parts that feed dozens of later recipes), the Goblin Mining and Construction Helmets at eight bars, the Mithril Heavy-bore Rifle, the Gnomish Battle Chicken and the fourteen-bar Mithril Mechanical Dragonling. Because Tubes and Casings are intermediate parts, an engineer levelling from 195 to 260 burns mithril even on recipes that do not list it directly.

Forever adds three new Engineering uses: Dented Goggles at 205 to 210, an Ultrasafe Rechargeable Battery at 320 to 340, and the Dimensional Transporter to Mount Hyjal, which takes ten Mithril Bars along with a Truesilver Transformer, Cores of Earth, Essences of Air and two Legionite Bars. That last one ties mid-level mithril to the new endgame zone, which means a slice of mithril demand will come from players who are long past the mithril zones themselves.

What to do with each ore

1. Always smelt Iron Ore. It had the biggest gain of any smelt in this band and it levels Mining from 130 to 140.
2. Make Steel only when Coal is cheap. Check one Iron Bar plus one Coal against one Steel Bar. If the difference is small, sell Iron Bars and skip the coal.
3. Smelt Mithril for skill, sell bars. The gain is small, but Smelt Mithril is your skill-up at 175 and bars reach both blacksmiths and engineers.
4. Sell Truesilver Ore raw. It sold above the bar on the beta. A blacksmith who needs bars for the Shining Mithril set will smelt it themselves.
5. Watch Gold Bar. The Hard Gold set could make gold the surprise metal of launch month. Smelt your Gold Ore and hold a few bars.
6. Keep your stone. Heavy Grinding Stones and Solid Grinding Stones appear in almost every new armour recipe in this band. Heavy Stone scanned at 4 silver43 copper and Solid Stone at 10 silver99 copper, far above their vendor prices.

The precious metals in this band

Gold and Truesilver veins show up alongside iron and mithril. Here is how the bars compare on the beta.

Where to mine

The beta client does not ship zone maps for these zones yet, so the banners below show the continent art. In Classic Era, iron veins sat in the level 30 to 45 zones (Arathi Highlands, Desolace, Stranglethorn Vale, Thousand Needles, Alterac and the Badlands) and mithril in the 40 to 55 zones (the Badlands, the Hinterlands, Tanaris, Feralas, Searing Gorge and Azshara). We have not walked a timed route in any of them on the Forever beta.

The new zone to watch is the Riverglades. Blizzard calls it a mid-level zone roughly the size of Stranglethorn Vale with nearly 200 quests, and its subzones in the client have explore levels from 36 to 44. That is squarely the iron and early mithril band. We have no node data for it yet; our Riverglades guide collects everything the client does say.

Arathi and the Badlands were the classic iron and mithril stops on the Eastern Kingdoms side.

Tanaris and Feralas covered mithril in Kalimdor in Classic.

Requirements

Level

30 or higher (the beta cap is 20 to 30, so most of this waits for launch)

Profession

Mining (Expert for mithril in Classic) and a Mining Pick

Skill

Smelt Iron 130 to 140, Smelt Steel 165, Smelt Mithril 175

Group

Solo

Walked route status

Iron and mithril loop, Riverglades and Arathi

Not walked yet

No hourly gold figure is published here until this route has been walked end to end with a timer and a full loot log. Until then this page gives you the inputs (live prices and what drops) and leaves the arithmetic to you.

What to watch on the Auction House

• Coal. It decides whether steel pays, and it is also an input to the new Azerothium Bar. Two new demand sources on one small item can push its price up fast.
• Gold Bar in launch month. If blacksmiths start the Hard Gold set, gold bars will climb before anyone thinks to stock them.
• Mithril once launch characters reach 40. On the beta the scans are thin because the cap keeps players out of mithril zones. At launch the first mithril on the market sells into two professions at once.

Is it worth your time?

On the beta, barely: the level cap keeps most testers below iron, and every scan in this band comes from a handful of listings. As preparation for launch, this is one of the most valuable bands to understand, because iron, steel and mithril feed the largest new armour families in the Forever client. The miner who smelts iron by default, makes steel only when coal is cheap and sells truesilver raw will price the market instead of following it.

No route has been walked yet, so there is no hourly figure here, only the inputs: prices, yields and the recipes that create demand.

Changelog

• 2026-10-08: First version. Item data as of beta build 70291, recipes and smelt yields from our beta profession extract (build 70124), Riverglades area data from our new-world extract (build 70058), prices from player scans of the beta Auction House on 2026-10-08.