1 Loot To Forge Ore Farming Route (Stage by Stage)
Last verified: · Published 2026-09-23
Ore is the only material that turns into weapons, and dungeon stages are the only place to get it. The route below is built around one idea: farm the deepest stage you can finish, not the deepest stage you can reach.
Stage 2 to 4 — Upgrade fuel
Goblins and Armored Goblins drop starter clears with little crafting value. Treat these rooms as an income source for backpack capacity and nothing else.
This is also where you find out what your current Power can actually handle. If a room takes more than four hits per enemy, it is beyond your current setup and retreating is the correct play.
Stage 5 and 6 — the first real materials
Desert Zombies start appearing, and with them Amethyst, Nova Ore and Sunfire Ore. Sunfire is the one to watch: it feeds recipes and sells for enough to fund Upgrades, so it does double duty early.
Run these stages until your backpack is the limiting factor rather than your damage — that is the point where capacity upgrades start paying for themselves immediately.
Stage 7 — where the farming actually happens
Jackal Zombies sit in Stage 7 and cover the widest ore spread in the early game: Emerald, Mystic Crystal, Gold, Sapphire, Obsidian and Fire Crystal all appear here. That breadth is why it is the recommended farm target rather than a stage you simply pass through.
It is also the stage where the sell-versus-forge decision starts costing real time. Sapphire, Gold, Obsidian and Fire Crystal are all recipe ingredients, so reserve them before you visit the Sell stall.
Stage 8 — a benchmark, not a farm
Pharaoh Zombies hit noticeably harder than the Jackal Zombies before them, and the stage is anchored by the Desert Reaper, reported at around 500 million HP. Walking in with one Epic weapon and a few training levels ends in a fast trip back to the hub.
Treat Stage 8 as a checkpoint. Farm Stage 7 until your capacity is maxed, forge and enchant off that ore, take the highest training multiplier you can hold, and bank a Rebirth or two before you seriously attempt the Reaper.
The run loop that wastes the least time
Train in your best zone, run the deepest stage you clear cleanly, stop before the bag overflows, and return to the hub. Check the Forge preview before selling anything, craft or sell, then repeat.
Each cycle should visibly move the next stage's health bars further than the last. If it does not, the fix is almost always capacity or training rather than a new weapon.
The one adjustment worth making early: decide your exit condition before you enter. If your bag holds thirty items and you are on a stage where ten of those slots will fill with junk clears, plan to leave at twenty useful pieces rather than walking back with a full bag of the wrong things.
Why capacity changes everything downstream
Max Ore Count is bought at the Upgrade station, and it is the only upgrade in the game that improves every single thing you do afterwards. It does not make you stronger, faster or luckier — it changes how much of a run you get to keep.
A backpack that fills in six minutes on Stage 7 produces the same ore-per-minute as a backpack that fills in eighteen minutes, but the second one lets you finish the rooms you walked in for. The practical effect is that a capacity upgrade converts wasted trips into usable ore without touching your combat performance at all.
That is why capacity comes before rolls on the progression tier list. A reroll changes one multiplier; capacity changes how much material every future run yields, and material is what becomes the weapon that clears the next stage.
Measuring your own run instead of trusting ours
Everything on this page about stage drops is a dated community observation, and the developer publishes no drop table at all. That leaves you with a better instrument than any guide: your own runs.
Pick one stage, run it three times while counting what you actually leave with. Three runs is enough to see the pattern and it takes ten minutes. If your numbers disagree with what is written here, trust your numbers — the build you are playing on is the authority, and ours may be describing an earlier version.
Then feed the result into the ore run planner: enter the recipe cost, your real capacity and your real useful-ore-per-run figure, and it will tell you how many trips stand between you and the craft. That number is worth more than any drop-rate guess on the internet.
Stage 8 and the long game
Past Stage 7 the documentation thins out quickly, and that is worth knowing before you plan around it. Community route coverage currently ends around Stage 8's Pharaoh Zombies and the Desert Reaper, which is reported at roughly 500 million HP.
Treat everything beyond that as unexplored rather than solved. If you push past Stage 8, the useful things to record are the stage number, the enemy names, the ore you saw and roughly how long a clear took — because that is exactly the record this page is built from, and the guides here get better the more concrete those reports are.
In the meantime the progression loop does not change: capacity, training zone, weapon, Enchant, Rebirth. Wherever the game goes next, those five levers are what carry you into it.
Put it into practice
- 🧮 Plan the grind with the forge calculator — Power target and ore runs.
- 🏆 Check the tier list before your next upgrade purchase.
- 🪨 Reserve the right materials with the ore list before you sell anything.
- ⚔️ See what a craft can roll on the weapon skills page.
- 🎟️ Claim the published codes — Race Rolls are the scarcest reward.
Related guides
1 Loot To Forge Beginner Guide (First Hour)
A first-hour walkthrough for 1 Loot To Forge: train Power, clear the first dungeon rooms, keep the ore that.
How to Forge in 1 Loot To Forge: Ore, Skills and Equipping
How the Forge works in 1 Loot To Forge: which ore goes into a weapon, why every craft rolls a random skill,.
Power Training and Rebirth Timing in 1 Loot To Forge
How Power, training zone multipliers and Rebirth interact in 1 Loot To Forge, plus the exact moment a Rebirth.