Board Thread:Bug Reports/@comment-176.37.178.103-20170730144408/@comment-33763020-20180120124139

It's on purpose, one of the funny learnings of the mod :). The Oddment Collector's work is sketchy, to say the least, but if you look at his speech, that makes it pretty clear, as he's looking for excuses all the time or asking innocently whether something's the matter :D. But he's one of the perfect additions to the game in my opinion due to its benefit, with downsides that you can avoid:

1. The name of the item will change at every forging until unrecognizable (though you can easily rename back to original with one ingot and the full name will instantly show correctly, for example rename "Mrdiiir lmeeet" back to "Mordor Helmet" will instantly show "Enduring Tough Mordor Helmet" in the item slot, while it shows "Mordor Helmet" on the anvil).

2. Restoring items renames them, but sometimes even messes up their (optimized) stats. Best not to use his services for the items you have optimized already, but these are few anyway and hopefully Enduring, so they need restoring only rarely.

3. I may be wrong, but I believe once an item was still intact after his reforging, but after first use it changed stats to worse. Though I may have overlooked the effect of reforging. This only happened to me once in hundreds of reforged items.

On the upside, he will reforge and restore ANY item I believe (except Mithril, but including Gondolinian), meaning he has access to all forging materials (Iron/Elven steel/Dwarven steel/Orc steel/leather/fur, etc., except Mithril). For example if you want to reforge a Dwarven weapon, the Elven smith cannot do this for lack of Dwarven steel ingots, so you'll have to fast travel to different smithies all the time to reforge different material-based items (unless all your weapons/armour are from one faction or based on one material). When it comes to enemy aligned factions, you cannot use their services, so you'll have to have sufficient ingots from their faction to reforge their items on your own anvil, for example an Uruk Scimitar when you're Good aligned.

Another major benefit (and this is why I use his services whenever possible) is that when you amass loot that you will not use but unsmelt for ingots, the looted items usually give much less ingots as the item's durability is used up. For a few coins however he fully restores the item's durability, thus you gain many ingots for a few coins. Since creating money through trade is much easier than finding ores through mining or killing enemies, this make it a no-brainer.

Last but not least, if you happen to fancy equipping yourself with enemy faction armour or weapons, it will be quite expensive (in number of ingots used) to reforge the items on your own anvil until you can finally combine that Enduring with Legendary with Blessed Utumno sword from three swords you collected in Utumno. Enemy ingots are harder to come by than aligned factions' ingots, so the Oddment Collector is a good solution there, even if he's messy.

I do not recommend using his services for your good gear, because things can go easily wrong and then you've ruined an item you combined with a lot of effort (my full Woodelven Scout armour for example is my favourite due to the speedboost, but it cost me hundreds of leather just to reforge one set to an optimal level and upholding a deer farm for leather is much more bothersome than any other way of getting ingots).

An additional tip if you want to maintain your equipment well when you're not around a smith (e.g. in Utumno, on a long cooldown timer or just in general if you don't feel like mining for ores to repair your stuff): buy a lot of armour from smithies in advance and unsmelt them so you get the ingots, that you can us on an anvil to repair your items! Best to find the smithy that has forged a low-quality item that holds many ingots (e.g. a Crude Chestplate is less than 20 coins I believe), as this will be quite cheap but still give many ingots. They have quite a stock before they run out and if you wait, their stock fills up regularly.