Tools & Crafting
Crafting is real work: trees can't be punched, crafting takes time and roots you in place, and metal gear must be forged and tempered by hand. This page covers the progression from bare hands to a full toolkit.
No punching trees
Bare hands don't fell timber:
- Bare hands, a chicken, or a block of dirt do nothing to a log.
- A sword, pickaxe, or flint knife (a crude chopper) hacks a log apart very slowly (~75 seconds).
- An axe fells a log slowly but functionally (~30 seconds).
Flint tools
Before any metal, flint is knapped into primitive tools:
- Knapping is a real action, not a grid recipe: hold flint
in one hand and a rock 
(a hammerstone) in the other, then sneak and hold right-click to strike it. After about ten strikes a sharp flint shard 
flakes off — but a raw novice shatters nearly half their flint. That improves with practice (see Skill by doing below): a skilled knapper wastes far less. - Flint shards are then crafted (with sticks and plant fiber) into a flint hatchet
(fells trees), a flint pick 
(mines stone, coal, and copper ore — but not iron ore, which shatters flint; that needs a copper pick, gating the flint → copper → iron ladder), a flint knife 
(a crude cutting blade that also strips plant fiber, below), a flint hoe (to till a field — the stone-age hoe that lets you farm long before any metal, as the Neolithic did), or a flint spear (below).
The spear — reach, from the first day
The spear was humanity's first great weapon — and the very first spears were plain fire-hardened wood, older than any stone tip (the ~300,000-year-old Schöningen spears are sharpened wood, nothing more). So in Alone the spear line starts crude and runs the full ladder:
- A wooden spear (3 sticks) is the day-one weapon — a sharpened pole with real thrusting reach, so from your first minutes you can strike game or an attacker before it reaches you. It's fragile and weak (wood-tier), and a blunt wooden point can't cleanly skin a kill — but it costs nothing but sticks, which is exactly why it came first.
- The flint spear (flint shard + plant fiber + 2 sticks) is the upgrade: the same reach, but a sharp knapped tip that hits harder, lasts longer, and — being a true blade — salvages the hide off a kill.
Both carry the full spear feel — a charged thrust and piercing — the reach being why you can hit game or an attacker before it closes. Above flint the metal tiers run copper → iron → steel, each sharper and tougher. (The stone, gold, and diamond spears aren't craftable — they're off the pack's tiers.)
Flint comes from digging gravel — you don't get it in a lump when the block finally breaks, you sift it loose bit by bit as you work through the gravel: nodules shake out at intervals across the (slow) dig, so even a half-finished dig keeps what you've already turned up. A finished cubic metre yields a couple on average, sometimes none, sometimes a few. The break itself just turns up the odd loose rock (rocks are also foraged off the ground).
Skill by doing
You get better at a craft by doing it, not by spending experience — there's no XP bar and nothing to level up on a menu. Every attempt teaches your hands a little, on a learning curve that's fast at first and then a long plateau toward mastery. It shows up only as the occasional note that you've stepped up a tier: Novice → Apprentice → Skilled → Expert → Master. Your skills stay with you through death — you don't forget a trade because you drowned.
All six crafts respond to skill:
- Flintworking — knapping succeeds ~55% of the time as a raw novice, climbing to ~92% at mastery (it was a flat ~65%). You learn from every strike, whether it flakes or shatters.
- Firecraft — a practised firemaker coaxes a friction fire alight sooner (the catch chance scales up to ~1.3× at mastery, and a novice is a touch slower). Learned each fire you light.
- Mining — a practised miner quarries faster: dig speed on stone and ore rises up to ~1.5× at mastery. Learned by breaking stone and ore.
- Smithing — a practised smith draws better steel: the random quality of a forged piece is nudged toward masterwork the more skilled you are. Learned each piece you forge.
- Tracking — a practised tracker hunts better both ways: persistence hunting chase-fatigue builds up to ~1.6× as fast (quarry tires in fewer seconds), and wounded game leaves a longer, more followable blood trail (up to ~1.5× at mastery). Learned by taking wild game.
- Pottery — a practised potter fires ware faster: the kiln's firing time for a batch drops up to ~35% at mastery. Learned by loading ware into a kiln.
Skills otherwise stay quiet — you only hear about them when you step up a tier — so to check your progress, run /skills: it lists all six with their tier and how far along you are.
Plant fiber and string
String does not require spiders:
Cordage is the real, slow way people made it — three steps, and a serious investment:
- Strip plant fiber — a timed pull (hold right-click on grass, ferns, vines, or dead bushes for a couple of seconds). Bare hands yield 1–2 strands (a second on about half the strips); a cutting blade (sword, axe, hoe, or flint knife) strips 2–3 clean lengths at once.
- Bundle it into a hank — 4 fiber makes 1 fiber bundle
, a handful gathered ready to twist.
- Twist a length of string
— 2 bundles (8 fiber) makes 1 string, and the reverse-wrap twisting takes ~35 seconds (it stands in for ~40 real minutes of hand-work — cordage is genuinely one of the slowest bushcraft jobs).
So a single string is eight strands of fiber and a long twist — real cordage is precious, which is exactly why you'd throw down a no-cordage deadfall before you'd spend string on snares. It feeds rope, bandages, bows, snares, fishing gear, and more.
Boards — riving by hand, or a hand saw
Before saws, boards were split from a log with a froe and mallet — here, your flint hatchet. Hold a log and a hatchet (either hand) and sneak + hold right-click to rive:
- It's brutal, slow work — dozens of blows (~13 seconds) that drain most of your stamina, and a log yields just 2 rough boards. A stack of planks is a real day's labour, not a crafting-grid afterthought.
- Splitting runs along the grain, so it's gentle on the edge — the hatchet barely wears.
A hand saw turns that chore into ordinary work. Craft it from 2 iron ingots + a stick, then use it exactly like riving:
- Hold a log in one hand and the hand saw in the other (either way round).
- Sneak (crouch) and hold right-click — a "Sawing…" progress readout ticks up.
- Keep holding for about 6 seconds and the log saws into 4 clean boards.
Sawing costs only a fraction of the stamina riving does and yields twice the boards, so once you can spare the iron it's the way you make planks. (There's no crafting-grid shortcut — logs never craft straight into planks; you rive or saw them.)
Timed, stationary crafting
A craft is not instant. Once a valid recipe sits in the grid, it must be worked at before the result can be taken:
- A green progress bar fills along the result slot (with a percentage on the action bar). The result cannot be picked up until it is done.
- Times scale with the effort involved:
| Craft type | Time |
|---|---|
| Simple items (sticks, torch) | ~2s |
| Planks & string (riven / twisted by hand) | ~12s |
| Food | ~5s |
| Tools & weapons | ~15s |
| Working an iron bloom into an ingot | ~30s |
| Stations (chest, furnace) | ~60s |
| Armor | ~2 min |
- Crafting is resumable — progress is kept per item and survives closing the screen or switching recipes and back.
- Taking a result also costs stamina.
Forge & temper — metal gear
Metal tools and armor aren't finished in the crafting grid. A grid-crafted iron or steel piece comes out a brittle unforged blank (barely usable) until it is worked hot:
- Heat it — holding the blank by a lit forge (blast furnace, furnace, smoker, campfire, or lava) makes it glow hotter. Stepping away cools it. It can only be worked while hot.
- Hammer it — with a smithing hammer
in the pack, right-clicking an anvil lands a blow. A piece takes many blows across several heats — a dozen for a tool, up to twenty for a chestplate. - Quality — when it finishes it rolls a random quality, from crude → masterwork, which sets its durability.
- Re-temper — reheating and rehammering a finished piece rerolls its quality. Each rework lowers the ceiling on how good it can get, and also fully repairs the piece.
The smithing hammer — 3 iron ingots and 2 sticks:
The forge state and quality grade show in the item's tooltip; heat and blows show on the action bar during work.
Whetstone — maintaining an edge
A whetstone hones tools:
- A whetstone
is crafted from two smooth stone and a stick.
Honing restores durability; only a forge re-temper changes a blade's underlying quality.
Sewing kit — mending clothing
There's no anvil in the wild, so worn leather/hide clothing is mended by hand:
- A sewing kit is a bone needle and a length of cordage — crafted from a bone and string, and good for many repairs before it wears out.
- Hold right-click with it to sew: it patches the most worn leather piece you're wearing (leather armor and the turtle helmet) by about 35%, taking a couple of seconds of steady stitching.
- Each mend spends one plant fibre as thread and frays the kit a little.
- Metal plates are forged, not sewn — the kit won't touch them (those need a forge re-temper).
Keeping your hides mended matters for more than durability: leather is your insulation (see Body Temperature), so a repaired coat is a warmer one.
Steel — the top tier
Steel replaces diamond as the best gear:
- Blasting an iron ingot (in a blast furnace) makes a steel ingot
: → (blast furnace). - Steel tools mine at diamond level with high durability, and steel armor sits above iron.
- The set includes a steel spear (1 steel ingot + 2 sticks) — the top-tier reach weapon, so the spear runs the full ladder alongside the sword and axe.
Diamond gear is abolished
Diamond and netherite tools and armor can no longer be crafted — diamond would shatter as gear, so it is simply not craftable. Diamonds remain as items (for blocks, trade, and other uses); they are no longer the endgame material. Steel is the top tier instead.
Related pages
- Fire — the campfire and forge heat you need for smithing.
- Water, Thirst & Vessels — crafting the waterskin and iron pot.