Wootz steel has been reproduced and studied in depth by the Royal School of Mines. Dr. Pearson was the first to chemically examine wootz in 1795 and he published his contributions to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.
Russian metallurgist Pavel Petrovich Anosov (see Bulat steel) was almost able to reproduce ancient Wootz steel with nearly all of its properties and the steel he created was very similar to traditional Wootz. He documented four different methods of producing Wootz steel that exhibited traditional patterns. He died before he could fully document and publish his research. Oleg Sherby and Jeff Wadsworth and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have all done research, attempting to create steels with characteristics similar to Wootz, but without success. J.D Verhoeven and Alfred Pendray reconstructed methods of production, proved the role of impurities of ore in the pattern creation, and reproduced Wootz steel with patterns microscopically and visually identical to one of the ancient blade patterns. Reibold et al.'s analyses spoke of the presence of carbon nanotubes enclosing nanowires of cementite, with the trace elements/impurities of vanadium, molybdenum, chromium etc. contributing to their creation, in cycles of heating/cooling/forging. This resulted in a hard high carbon steel that remained malleable
There are smiths who are now consistently producing Wootz steel blades visually identical to the old patterns. Steel manufactured in Kutch particularly enjoyed a widespread reputation, similar to those manufactured at Glasgow and Sheffield.
Wootz was made over nearly a 2,000-year period (the oldest sword samples date to around 200 AD) and the methods of production of ingots, the ingredients, and the methods of forging varied from one area to the next. Some Wootz blades displayed a pattern, while some did not. Heat treating was quite different from forging, and there were many different patterns which were created by the various smiths who spanned from China to Scandinavia.