1. Being Baron will need from you investment of time and effort in other skills and things so you will need to manage your Garrison sometimes more than your inn if you want to be good Baron.
2. If you want be blacksmith hardcore best course is get proprietor and extra EP / items from store if you have cash to spend to advance your career and compete for being legendary blacksmith at some point.

3. You can pick your place in few ways:

   • find community you like and join them via discord (race/location can be somewhat dictated by your community pick)
   • select location/race you want to start in and then find community which populates it(your community pick somewhat dictated by race/loc pick)
   • wait and look on discord recruitment channels and join depending on where your profession needed (I am sure that everyone will be happy to have blacksmith - me too)(find balance between race/loc, community picks and demand)

You don't need to become a noble if you just want to buy a piece of land to start your business. Nobles and aristocrats are people who own a city or more, but most players will just have a few parcels for their home, farm, or whatever is their specialty.

If you want to work for a baron or just have some network, as said above you should reach the discords and see who can help you with your plans: see the section SERVER/x domains on the forum to find them ;)

Then yes, you can be both a blacksmith and run an inn. You decide how much time you spend on which activities in the game, there are no class or whatever that would limit your possibilities.

If you want to go into go deep into blacksmith and run a tavern, I wouldn't be a baron unless you have a lot of time. A baron focuses on defense of the duchy while also running the town he/she is in. That would be a lot for one person to focus on. In my opinion, if you want to focus on being a being a higher tier crafter I wouldn't be a noble. I would contact someone who is a noble and try to be a part of their town. This frees you from need to deal with people, random problems near or around the town, and town management. You can just work on blacksmithing.

As a noble, it may seem like you can just control the flow of resources and use them to boost your own crafting but the people of your town may not like that. Most people will feel as though the noble is greedy and not caring about the town. Once you become a noble, you are no longer playing for yourself.

Having a forge next to a tavern is totally feasible and they won't interfere with your skill development in the way that being a baron and a blacksmith would. Combat skills and crafting skills are in entirely different trees and so pursuing both will mean a slower rate of progression in both.

What we know about the skill trees thus far:

With respect to finding and contacting people in the lands that interest you, unfortunately, SBS hasn't made this very easy yet. For now, you have to browse forums that are sort of buried.

From the main forums page, scroll down to the SERVERS section to find information about the various kingdoms, duchies and counties on the server you want to play on. Most of these communities use Discord and publish their links in forum posts and/or signatures so that's how you'd find them.

Another option is to just use the search function to find relevant posts using the name of the domain you intend to place in. That can sometimes work as well.

Anyway, welcome to CoE!

If you want to be both blacksmith and inn owner, that sounds like enough. I would recommend finding a town/city that has a blacksmith/martialsmith listed in it (along with miners). While that means you would likely have some competition, it also probably means that the ores that you would need are in the area.

If you want to have your own settlement, then you could pick up a hamlet and still do what you are talking about. That would give you the opportunity to spend EP to build that inn and forge right where you want it. That would cost you $, of course, and you might end up more or less by yourself. So you might want to pick a hamlet near a large town or city.

Lots of options, just depends on what you want to do!