you can craft the weapons and items at your table but you need the forge to make composite obsidian which takes 5 obsidian and 1 steel to make i bar of composite obsidian.
Composite obsidian bars take 10 seconds to forge in the volcano per bar. This means it takes you 15 to 16 minutes to forge 100 bars and you will have to fight a re-spawn at least once per 100 bar forge. we did 160 bars and had to do two re spawns in that time it took to forge 160 obsidian bars.
so 15 minutes per 100 bars and having to waste time clearing.
Did a test with new durability of the obsidian picks with T3 tool enhancements against the hardened steel ones with a t3 tool enhancements. The hardened steel one is easier to maintain and you get similar numbers mining ore almost. Obsidian seems to only get one more per strike on average. For some reason the hardened steel seemed to last longer.
The acheron pick with enhancements brought in 400 more ore over the obsidian pick even with it having less durability.
in the end it takes 3 shaped wood and 15 composite obsidian to repair a pick fully and a hardened and acheron pick each cost 15 hard steel and 3 shaped wood to repair.
The time consumption on gathering materials to be able to repair is ridiculous for the obsidian pick. They killed it like they killed the black ice pick.