The Forge wraps a very simple loop — mine, craft, fight — in a map full of tucked‑away quests and gated rooms. Those optional paths matter. They unlock some of the strongest pickaxes in the game, open new crystal caves, and quietly boost your long‑term progression.
This overview walks through the main secret missions and locations that meaningfully affect your account: the Bard’s guitar chain and Fallen Angel’s Cave, the Goblin side content, the lava‑zone demon contracts with Skal, and the Demonic Pickaxe door in Volcanic Depths. It also highlights how these pieces connect to the broader layout of Stonewake’s Cross and Forgotten Kingdom.
The Bard, Secret Cave, and Fallen Angel’s Cave (Stonewake’s Cross)
Everything starts in Stonewake’s Cross, the first town. Near the Forging Station sits the Bard, an NPC who offers the “Find Bard’s Guitar” quest. This is the gateway to your first major secret area and an early end‑game pickaxe.
Inside The Cave beneath Stonewake’s Cross there is a hidden side tunnel that leads into Secret Cave. The area is small — plants, vines, a miner helmet, an Undead NPC, and crucially, the Bard’s guitar on the ground. Picking up the guitar and returning it completes the quest.
Handing the guitar back rewards you with an Unknown Key. That item opens a locked metal gate deeper in The Cave, leading into Fallen Angel’s Cave. Despite its size, this room is one of the most important in the entire early progression: it holds the Arcane Pickaxe.
| Location | Gate / Item | Reward / Use |
|---|---|---|
| Secret Cave | Bard’s Guitar | Return to Bard to receive Unknown Key |
| Fallen Angel’s Cave | Locked gate opened by Unknown Key | Access to Arcane Pickaxe |
The Arcane Pickaxe sits on a pedestal with a deliberately dramatic presentation. Stat‑wise, it’s one of the strongest mining tools available before you touch the late‑game 500,000‑cost tiers. It delivers very high mining power, increased mining speed, a large bonus to luck, and three rune slots, which keeps it relevant for a long stretch of progression.
That combination — power, speed, luck, and three rune slots — effectively makes it the best pickaxe you can buy until you reach the ultra‑expensive end of the shop. Unlocking this path as soon as your damage and survivability in The Cave allow is one of the cleanest early spikes in efficiency you can get.
Hidden House Roof and Lucky Blocks in Stonewake’s Cross
Stonewake’s Cross also hides a smaller secret that is easy to miss: a house with a passable side wall leading into a hollow roof. By squeezing through a narrow triangle‑shaped gap — often by abusing a smaller race model such as Elf or zombie — you can drop into an attic‑like space containing several lucky blocks.
Breaking these blocks doesn’t shower you with late‑game gear. Typical drops are novelty ores such as Relic Fish, which are more collectible than transformative for your build. This makes the spot more of a curiosity than a must‑farm node, but it is still worth visiting once for completion and to see how the game hides interactable geometry around town.
Stonewake’s Cross and The Cave in the wider map
Stonewake’s Cross itself is built as a compact hub surrounded by forests and mountains. It houses the full early‑game infrastructure: the Forging Station for weapons and armor, the Enhancer’s Place for stat upgrades, the Runemaker for rune sockets, Maria’s potion cart, Miner Fred’s basic pickaxe shop, and buyers like Marble and Greedy Cey for equipment and ores.
The Cave directly underneath functions as the core tutorial for mining and combat. It starts with Pebble nodes and basic zombies, then funnels players through Inner Cave into Deep Cave, where Rocks, Boulders, Elite Zombies, and Brute Zombies begin to test both your pickaxe and weapon quality. Secret Cave and Fallen Angel’s Cave sit off this main spine, reinforcing the idea that exploration in The Forge is almost always rewarded with some form of progression item.
Forgotten Kingdom, Goblin Village, and the Crystal Cave
Forgotten Kingdom is the second major region. You reach it using the Portal Tool once you hit level 10 and place a portal to the new island. The town here mirrors Stonewake’s Cross but with upgraded vendors and higher‑tier ore veins nearby. Miner Fred’s stall sells stronger pickaxes such as Cobalt, Titanium, Uranium, Mythril, and Lightite variants, and a new buyer, Wo, replaces Marble for equipment sales.
One of the most important side areas inside Forgotten Kingdom is Goblin Village, home of the Goblin King and his underlings. The village sits off the main path and serves as the staging ground for the Goblin King questline, which eventually opens the Goblin Cave behind a stone wall. This cave is full of slimes and rare crystals, making it a dense, late‑game mining pocket.
Elsewhere on the second island, a small, far‑off isle hides a monkey NPC that requests bananas. Those bananas drop in the first island’s cave while you mine, turning a routine farm run into a light collection quest that pays out once you bring 30 bananas back. The reward is not game‑breaking, but it layers more incentive on your early‑game ore loops.
A separate NPC on the first island sends you looking for a missing cat. The cat appears in a hidden altar behind a waterfall in the Goblin Cave area. Retrieving it and returning to the owner unlocks further rewards, though not enough to offset the money sink elsewhere in Forgotten Kingdom.
That money sink is the Elf King. Tucked away in a side area, he offers quests that mostly demand large payments in gold and gems like topaz. Completing his chain unlocks a crystal‑rich room behind a large door, introducing new crystal rocks, slimes, and materials that tie back into other secret tasks, including the cat and banana quests.
Volcanic Depths, Demonite, and the Demonic Pickaxe
Deeper in Forgotten Kingdom’s cave system, Descent’s Beginning and Crumbling Halls gradually steepen the difficulty: Basalt Rocks replace common stone, and skeleton variants — Bomber, Rogue, Axe Skeletons — occupy branching halls. Eventually the layout burns down into the Volcanic Depths, an underground zone of black rock and lava pools where contact with lava inflicts direct damage.
Volcanic Depths is gated behind a simple requirement: you need a pickaxe that deals at least 78 damage to enter. Inside, you mine Basalt Cores, Basalt Veins, and Volcanic Rocks while dealing with some of the toughest ambient enemies so far, including Elite Skeletons, Elite Deathaxe Skeletons, Blight Pyromancers, Reapers, blazing slimes, and eldritch‑style mages.
The centerpiece here is Skal, a demon NPC who stands near an imposing metal door. Skal offers a short contract: bring three pieces of Demonite, a mythical ore that rarely drops when you mine Volcanic Rocks. The raw odds are roughly one Demonite per several hundred nodes, but luck events can temporarily double that rate, making this much less of a grind if you time it with a 2x luck weekend.
Completing Skal’s request rewards a key — often named Demonite Key or Demonity Key — that unlocks the metal door beside him. This door leads to a chamber containing the Demonic Pickaxe, a late‑game upgrade to the Magma Pickaxe you can buy earlier in the lava zone.
| Pickaxe | Cost | Mine Power | Mine Speed | Luck Bonus | Rune Slots |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Magma Pickaxe | $150,000 | High (below Demonic) | Standard | Moderate | 3 |
| Demonic Pickaxe | $500,000 (base) | 180 | -10% speed | 47.5% | 3 |
The Demonic Pickaxe demands a heavy gold investment, but it pushes mining power to 180, nearly doubles down on luck compared with mid‑tier tools, and continues the three‑rune‑slot pattern. The only major drawback is a slight hit to mining speed. In practice, it sits just above Magma in raw effectiveness without completely trivializing earlier content.
Race choice can soften the price. The Goblin race reduces shop costs by around 12 percent, dropping the Demonic Pickaxe from 500,000 to roughly 440,000. Swapping into Goblin before you confirm the purchase saves about 60,000 gold for free, which matters in a progression system where every large pickaxe purchase delays your next big weapon craft or armor set.
Support gamepasses and their impact on hidden content
Some optional gamepasses interact indirectly with these secret zones and pickaxes by cutting down on the time you spend inside forges and shops:
- Quick Forge skips the main smelting minigame, letting you jump straight to the final shaping phase. You still need to time the last hit for maximum mastery, but the friction between ore collection and usable gear shrinks dramatically.
- Forge Anywhere adds a forge button directly to your equipment menu. You can craft weapons and armor from any location — beside a vendor, in a cave, even mid‑farm in Volcanic Depths — without returning to town.
- Sell Anywhere adds a similar control to the materials tab, allowing you to sell ores and drops without walking back to Greedy Cey, Marble, or Wo. Combined with Forge Anywhere, this almost completely removes the need to think about inventory limits.
- Supporter quietly increases experience gain and luck by around 10 percent each and adds an in‑game supporter title. The stat boosts compound with luck‑focused pickaxes like Arcane and Demonic, indirectly improving your odds of rare ore and rune drops.
- Better Forge gives a flat boost to forge quality, increasing the chance that a craft rolls into stronger rarities and stat distributions. Over time, that translates into higher‑end weapons and armor for tackling zones like Goblin Cave or the Reaper‑filled depths.
The raw curation of these passes is simple: the more your late‑game loop revolves around chaining secret areas and farming rare ores, the more time saved by cutting travel and forge overhead. None are required to access any hidden location, but they sharply reduce the grind between attempts at high‑roll crafts or Demonite runs.
Upcoming islands, enemies, and what they imply
The current layout of Stonewake’s Cross and Forgotten Kingdom already points toward a pattern: each island comes with its own cave system, hub, and secrets. The next planned addition continues that. A dedicated ice biome island is in the works, complete with new orc enemies, other ice‑themed creatures, and entirely new spear weapons and armor sets.
Entry is expected to require a higher character level than Forgotten Kingdom — somewhere between a modest bump and a steeper late‑game gate — so leveling efficiently before the update lands is less about chasing a number and more about being ready to explore as soon as a new portal destination appears.
Seen together, the Bard’s guitar, Goblin and Elf King quests, Demonite contracts, and upcoming ice island sketch out a very particular design: The Forge hides its strongest tools and most lucrative mines behind short narrative beats, optional detours, and occasionally punishing enemy mixes. The players who thrive are the ones who talk to every NPC, check every waterfall, kick every suspicious wall, and treat each locked door as a promise rather than decoration.
