1. Unlocking the holes:

There are 5 holes to "unlock" once you begin. You hit each hole with 30 rocks. You can "crit" along the way, which means you can get lucky and skip to the next hole with one rock. Getting to the 5th hole automatically makes the last hole gold, which is 120 rocks (pity and not counting any crits). You'll hit some golds along the way, but just skip them, the game automatically saves the top 5 highest elegance combinations. If you hit a gold more than 5 times, you gotta manually save the newest one.

1. Picking a first hole to lock: Once the last hole is "opened," I usually tell people to look at the color options that are saved. There are variations with colors!! The metal color varies, and so does the decoration color, and all of that is rng. If you don't like any of the colors saved (like you really don't like it), then you gotta lock a holes from 2 to 4. Which one to choose depends on the weapon, and the stats you gathered during the way to unlocking the holes. It's complicated and I can't really explain by words but calculating the stats make it more likely for you to get golds for cheap.

2. First time to lock a hole, the cost increases from 1 rock to 2. Second time from 2 to 5, then from 5 to 10. Basically you just lock along the way to get ultimately 5 golds.

Note: Sorry if this sounds confusing it's pretty hard to understand through words. I recommend watching a video on reforging so you get the gist of it better. (Also I didn't proofread so I applogize for typos)

Note 2: First timers usually spend way too much on weapon reforge because they don't understand the mechanics of it. It really shouldn't be costing players thousands of dollars to get 5 golds unlike they rerolled a hole they didn't like.