Alright, sorry for being so late guys, wrapping up my second last exam which may or may not have gone well. This isn't going to be the full promised Manifesto for reasons which will soon become clear.

To get this over with more quickly, I'm launching straight into the most important part of the statement.

[center][h1]What needs to change?[/h1][/center]
[u]Absolutely nothing.[/u] Last time my statements were overreactions, due to my infrequent checking of the thread, and the problems; in my mind, compounded into something far greater than they actually were. The only single large issue is, again, of the time it took to craft the swords, and even then, it's a bit late for that now.

This decision comes from me choosing to prioritize moving on over preserving the challenge's rules in it's current state. This doesn't actually mean anything except that we carry on as we were doing before.

It's too late to fundamentally change the way people are going about their crafting right now, and even then it might be a long time before there is another mandatory challenge, so it might even be pointless to try doing so.

But I will say next time the rules are going to be slightly stricter, and I'll actually be around to actively regulate them this time. This next segment is a segment of those new rules which you don't have to really care about right now. You won't need to read them unless you would like to, but they do have kind of important stuff, I guess?
[hider=New Stuff]
Firstly I'm going to more clearly define a Banter Action and some use cases involving Actions.

[u]Banter Action:[/u]
The act of replying to someone, and then saying something to them [i]won't[/i] count as 1 of the 2 actions in the post as long as there are smithing actions in between. Whether or not Banter counts as an action is mostly dependent on what your character is currently focused on. If the main focus is on their smithing, then it won't count; but if the main focus is the Bantering and they are actively dropping their work in order to do something else.

I guess it'd be more accurate to call it just a Social Action, and the Smithing action is just the Smithing Action. Anyway, now for some examples.

[u]Examples:[/u]
The most common example would likely be if a few people were forging together and bantering back and forth. A given character's post may go something like;

"Banter"
Smithing Action
Smithing Action
"Banter"

And it'd be alright. A more specific example could be;

"Banter"
Hammering + Banter
Reheating, more hammering + Banter
"Banter"

And it'd be alright. Examples of a full Action would be something like stopping smithing temporarily to go eat lunch and socialize at the same time. Generally, two different kinds of social interaction happening at the same time will count as a Social Action, but there may be some exceptions.

[u]Stuff to think about with Hammering:[/u]
Firstly, hammering is likely going to take the majority of your post time, even though it may not be taking the most actual time, since hammering is easily the most intensive process. You don't have to be specific about how you're hammering or what shape you're hammering into, but keep in mind that spending one action hammering won't give enough time to do awfully much. You'll only be able to pound out a fairly basic blade before it cools down too much and you'll have to re-heat it.

The very first hammering you do will count as a full Smithing Action no matter how long or short it was, even if it was disrupted before even going very far. To think of the time-frame, imagine how long it'd take to hammer a block of soft plastic into a sword, and you'll have  a pretty good estimate.

After the first Hammering, the subsequent hammerings and re-heatings can all be combined into one Smithing Action, and time-skipped until blade completion. [b]It will take a lot of time.[/b] Depending on the detail in the blade itself, it will take at least 4 or 5 hammerings to complete it. This also goes for making just a good blade, but a masterpiece will take as many as 10 hammerings.
[/hider]

There are still a few minor things that should probably be acknowledged.

Firstly, [@KOgaming], it probably isn't feasible to be able to finish forks before your pork gets cold. You're going to have to hammer out a bar pretty darn thin, and shaping the prongs is pretty delicate work, it'll take some time. Your pork's going to be cold after you're done so you're going to want to weigh up whether you want to eat it more conveniently or whether you want to enjoy it.

Also it seems like Alduous has finished his sword, am I right in assuming the appearance of the sword would be the same one you had all that time ago?

The wolf does need to be acknowledged as well, just for continuity, probably. Since [@Jerkchicken] is posting next if I'm not mistaken, you may want to give it some pork, or something?

[center][h1]Moving On[/h1][/center]
After this challenge we'll be moving on to an open-world kind of thing where you'll be free to either make more swords, do expeditions and a bunch of other stuff which I'll do when it comes to it.

[@TheWindel] mentioned a while back the idea of finishing the challenge now and skipping to the judging which, all in all, isn't a bad idea. But I'll only do it if everyone's in favor of it, and I'd understand if people wanted to keep doing what they were doing. It'll also be nice if I could get a yes or no from everyone so I know who's still in this so I can do a headcount, since I do also have to get to the cool stuff I said I was going to do for the character page which I [i]still[/i] haven't gotten around to.

And that's all I got, again, sorry it took so long.