Tools
The axe, pick and spade you need to work, and how to make your first ones with nothing.
You can't fell a tree with your bare hands, and you can't break rock or dig a hole either. Each of those needs the right tool in your pack. You don't have to hold it, it comes out when the job needs it, and if you've got more than one of a kind you work with the best one.
Nobody starts out with any, but nobody gets stuck without them either. The first set you make by hand from things anybody can pick up.
Your first tools#
Tap any tree and choose Gather sticks. That's deadwood and fallen branches, so it doesn't need an axe, and you get 2 at a go. Tap any boulder and choose Pick up flint for a sharp flake off the rubble round it. Neither one takes long. When a tree or a rock has nothing else you can do to it, that's what tapping it does.
Then open your backpack and look under Gear. They're also on the list when you tap a fire and choose Make…, under Tools. Making one is instant, and you can do it anywhere.
| Tool | Made from | Needed for | Lasts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stone axe | 2 sticks, 1 flint | felling trees, splitting firewood and chopping a hole in the ice | about an hour of work, then worn |
| Stone pick | 2 sticks, 2 flint | breaking boulders, mining underground, sinking a shaft, sinking deeper and chipping out fossils | about an hour of work, then worn |
| Wooden spade | 4 sticks | digging, raising ground, uprooting stumps and bushes, tilling and shovelling snow | about 1.5 hours of work, then worn |
Stone and wood don't last like iron does. After a while one goes worn, and if you keep at it, it gives out. They can't be mended, so when that happens you just make another, and it's worth keeping a few sticks and some flint in your pack so you aren't caught out in the middle of a job. Each one you make gives a bit of Crafting.
What doesn't need a tool#
Plenty of things you do with nothing but your hands: picking berries and flowers, foraging in the long grass, trimming grass, gathering herbs, lifting a flower out of the ground, panning for gold, and prospecting. Building, cooking and crafting use the hammer and knife you always carry.
Iron tools#
Once you have a forge and a few iron bars, a smith can make an iron shovel, axe and pick. They do the same jobs, only about 25% quicker, and they last about 3 hours of work before going worn, against an hour for stone. Iron can be mended at the forge with a lump of coal, so a good iron tool can keep going a long time. See Wear and mending.
| Tool | Smithing | Iron bars |
|---|---|---|
| Iron shovel | 5 | 1 |
| Iron axe | 6 | 1 |
| Iron pick | 8 | 2 |
The stone pick is what gets you started mining. Break a few boulders for iron ore, coal and stone, and that's the road to a forge and iron tools.