The Forge Shows There’s Still Room for Deep Games on Roblox

Jan 13
7 min read

Updated: Jan 13

Join 2.5K+ business leaders (at Roblox, Epic Games, Xbox) subscribed to the #1 Roblox newsletter: sign up here

Roblox’s Anti-Brainrot Breakout

An action RPG has quickly broken out on Roblox over the past month, and it looks nothing like the platform’s most recent breakout hits.

While recent chart climbers like Fish It, Steal a Brainrot, and Plants vs Brainrots lean heavily into simplicity to reach the widest possible audiences, The Forge moves in the opposite direction.

At a glance, The Forge has a straightforward core loop. Mine for resources, craft gear, defeat enemies, repeat. But beneath that simplicity sits a much deeper system of progression that demands active engagement. Advancement requires constant interaction, mastering mini-games, optimizing equipment, understanding crafting components, and chasing increasingly rare outcomes. This isn’t a game you leave running in the background or can play with little effort. To progress, players have to stay engaged, and many describe the experience as intentionally grindy.

Visually, The Forge immediately stands out as one of the most polished games on Roblox, showcasing what’s possible within Roblox Studio. Mining physics and forging mechanics feel smooth and responsive, well beyond what players typically expect from the platform. Even in beta, the game feels deliberately crafted rather than rapidly assembled.

In less than two weeks, The Forge peaked over 1 million CCUs. That milestone places it among just 17 games in Roblox’s history to ever cross the one-million concurrent player mark (per Rolimons). Very rarely does a game ever generate this much hype so quickly. This was done smartly, by the creator, FireAtacck, who actively built anticipation ahead of launch through YouTube videos, framing The Forge as a passion project inspired by Jacksmith, a beloved Flash game from the 2000s. Public stress tests, early discord engagement, and creator-led visibility helped prime the game for scale. FireAtacck also brought prior credibility as the creator of Gym League, which had found meaningful success on the Roblox platform.

At its core, The Forge is engineered to appeal to a very specific Roblox audience, players who want depth, progression, systems built around sustained engagement rather than instant payoff. By combining RPG elements with RNG driven unpredictability and a repeatable loop built around mining, crafting, and combat, it offers a clear counterexample to Roblox’s recent wave of simplicity driven hits.

Core Gameplay: Simple Loop, Serious Depth

At a high level, The Forge follows a familiar progression loop:

Mine → Forge (Craft) → Fight (PvE) → Upgrade → Repeat

What makes the game stand out is how much depth is layered on top of that foundation.

Mining serves as the primary entry point. Players extract ores from the world, with rarity and yield governed by RNG. Those ores feed directly into the forging system, where weapons and armor are created through a series of interactive mini-games rather than a single button press. Combat and enemy encounters serve as natural progression barriers, requiring better-crafted gear to advance through quests and zones, which in turn pushes players back into mining and forging. The result is a loop that’s easy to grasp within minutes, but difficult to fully optimize, a design choice that keeps players engaged well beyond the onboarding phase.

The familiarity isn’t accidental. Many players have already drawn comparisons between The Forge and games like Fisch and Fish It, and at a structural level, the similarities are clear. All three revolve around a repeatable core action (mining versus fishing), RNG-driven outcomes (ore and fish rarity), and a constant pursuit of better tools that unlock faster and more efficient progression. Where The Forge diverges is in how much complexity it layers onto that loop. Ores aren’t just collected like fish, they’re inputs into a probabilistic crafting system where material combinations influence what type of weapon or armor is produced. Combat and character races add another layer of decision-making, turning progression into something closer to a full action RPG rather than a pure simulator.

Forging as the Game’s Mechanical and Economic Core

Forging in the The Forge is an active, skill-based process. Every crafting sequence requires players to complete three separate mini-games, with performance directly influencing item quality, combat effectiveness, and resale value. That alone represents a major step up from the one-click, menu driven crafting systems or “clicker” games that dominate much of Roblox’s top charts.

The system is also unusually “mathy” for a Roblox title. Material selection doesn’t just determine what you can craft, it defines probability distributions for the outcome itself. Players can combine multiple ore types in varying quantities, which affects the probability of:

The category of item produced (e.g. dagger vs straight sword)
The likelihood of specific variants within each item (e.g. cutlass vs falchion)
Base damage and traits

Even in forging, RNG is a huge factor, and nothing is guaranteed. It’s incredibly complex for a Roblox game, and someone has even created a calculator online to help calculate all the forging probabilities.

Crafting is vital to progressing in the Forge. Players aren’t just forging to equip better gear (weapons and armor); they’re also forging to sell. Pickaxes, which are used to mine ores cannot be crafted and must be purchased with in-game currency. The game smartly creates a secondary grind loop where players forge items specifically to sell in order to fund pickaxe upgrades, which then unlock access to better materials and more lucrative crafting outcomes.

While I could easily spin up a full monetization section, it’s worth briefly touching on it here. There are three game passes that mainly focus on making forging less tedious: skipping parts of the mini-games, improving forge quality, and allowing players to forge anywhere. These passes work as natural purchase triggers. They don’t feel necessary early on, but once players are fully invested and forging repeatedly, making the game’s most critical system faster and more efficient becomes an easy value proposition.

Image credit: All Things How

RPG x RNG: The Engine Behind the Grind

Progression in The Forge is deliberately constrained. The strongest pickaxes, weapons, and upgrades aren’t easily attainable, requiring sustained engagement and repeated cycles of the game’s core gameplay loop.

To advance players must complete long quest chains, hit certain level thresholds, mine specific materials, and defeat certain enemies. While many pickaxes can be purchased directly with in-game currency, some of the most powerful ones are gated behind quest progression and zone unlocks before they can even be bought.

At its core, The Forge blends traditional RPG elements with heavy RNG variability to create an addictive grind.

On the RNG side, ore drops vary widely in rarity, crafting outcomes are probabilistic, and race rerolls introduces stat bonuses and special abilities that can meaningfully impact efficiency. On the RPG side, character levels, gear-based power scaling, quest driven narratives, and constant risk-reward decision-making, push players toward a clear end-game goal, which for many players centers on unlocking the game’s most powerful pickaxes.

Together, these systems create constant anticipation. Every mining run, forge attempt, or reroll carries the possibility of hitting something rare and highly rewarding, while also contributing incremental progress toward expensive pickaxe upgrades. The mix of long-shot upside and guaranteed forward momentum keeps players chasing “just one more run” even as core actions repeat.

This level of depth isn’t universally appealing. Many players churn once the grind becomes apparent, and some community feedback frequently describes The Forge as overly demanding or too RNG-dependent. But for the audience that sticks, that grind is the point.

That design philosophy shows up in the data. The Forge averages roughly 26 minutes per session, exceptionally high by Roblox standards, despite having no auto-clicker or AFK mechanics. Players aren’t leaving the game running in the background, they’re actively playing for extended periods of time which makes this metric really stand out. As the chart below highlights, The Forge achieves one of the highest average session lengths among top Roblox games, underscoring how depth and progression can drive engagement even without idle or auto-clicker mechanics.

Rank	Game Title	Avg Playtime
1.	Steal a Brainrot	3.2 minutes
2.	Fish It	52.4 minutes*
3.	99 Nights in the Forest	16.0 minutes
4.	Brookhaven	16.5 minutes
5.	Blox Fruits	18.4 minutes
6.	The Forge	25.9 minutes
7.	Adopt Me!	31.6 minutes*
8.	Rivals	11.9 minutes
9.	Forsaken	16.0 minutes
10.	Murder Mystery 2	17.2 minutes

*AFK / idle mechanics contribute to inflated session length

**Data sourced from Rolimons 1/7/2026. Ranked by the sum of daily CCUs during the period in which The Forge has been live

Why The Forge Matters and Where Its Ceiling Lies

The Forge is a reminder that there’s still meaningful demand on Roblox for deeper, complex games even as the platform continues to be dominated by simpler, mass-appeal hits. Its breakout wasn’t fueled by simplicity or memes. Instead, it found success by leaning into complexity, grind-heavy progression, and systems that reward sustained engagement.

This approach comes with clear trade-offs. The Forge was never positioned to compete directly with Roblox’s largest chart-toppers. Its complexity and grindy progression narrows its potential audience. For many players, the game is simply too demanding, too repetitive, or too luck-dependent, creating friction that leads to churn or prevents entry altogether.

That friction is visible in the data. After briefly crossing the one-million CCU mark in December, The Forge has shown signs of normalization. Weekend peaks have declined week-over-week suggesting a more defined ceiling compared to the top Roblox games. Today, its CCU sits will below breakout hits like Steal a Brainrot and Fish It, and closer to established mid-to-upper tier games such as Blox Fruits and Adopt Me!

The Forge does not need to compete directly with Roblox’s largest hits to succeed. Instead, it occupies a valuable middle ground: an action RPG that proves depth can still drive meaningful engagement on Roblox. As long as the game continues to update regularly and cultivate its core community, it’s well-positioned to remain a durable, high-engagement title, even if it never reaches the absolute top of the charts.