Remove "use a knife to harvest faster" tooltip on mushrooms (or replace 'knife' with 'axe')

[Byrnorthil]

A flint knife has a 1.2x speed boost on plants.
A flint axe has a 2.2x speed boost on plants.

The game really should not be telling new players to use their knife on mushrooms when there is absolutely no reason to do that. I can only presume the tooltip was added long ago before a rework to tool speeds.

[Krakuntun]

I think this points rather to a rework on gathering speeds. A knife should be the obvious and logical choice for gathering mushrooms rather than an unwieldy axe.

Are these tooltipps toggleable btw?

[LadyWYT]

2 hours ago, Krakuntun said:

Are these tooltipps toggleable btw?

They should be. It should be the "Block interaction help" options in the Interface settings, with the shortcut to toggle on/off being ctrl + N on Windows.

 

4 hours ago, Byrnorthil said:

The game really should not be telling new players to use their knife on mushrooms when there is absolutely no reason to do that.

Well think about it realistically...what would you use to harvest a mushroom? Your hands, a knife, or an axe? The axe would be my last choice, simply because while it technically can do the job, it's going to be very unwieldy and likely to smash the mushroom rather than harvest it. My hands would be better, but a knife would be the best choice to ensure a clean cut and unblemished mushroom. Plus from a gameplay standpoint, the player is always going to have a knife on them, but not necessarily an axe.

In any case, the better solution here would be to boost the harvest rate of the knife for plants, and perhaps lower it for the axe.

[cjameshuff]

I do think the knife takes too long to harvest a mushroom. Realistically, this is a single slash motion...if it takes sawing, I question the edibility of what's being harvested.

And maybe the axe should have a high failure rate.

[BoobsUp]

Late to this topic but I think depending on how you forage it you can get two separate items.

Like hand harvested mushrooms can be full ones and knife ones can be "pre-cut" and cooked?

 

[TheRealMork]

If we're going realistic:
- Picking a mushroom with bare hands is faster.
- However, cutting the mushroom (rather than just removing it from the ground) ensures that mushrooms will regrow there.

EDIT: Well, I stand corrected!

Edited 2 hours ago by TheRealMork
Kulze shared actual knowledge, see below.

[Kulze]

If we actually go with realism then the arguments are generally in a bit of a odd direction.

Mushrooms are the fruiting from mycelium underneath the ground. Harvesting them properly doesn't damage the mycel below, they will regrow.

Harvesting with hands is the common way to do it by twisting the mushroom carefully out, hence not ripping and damaging the mycel underneath apart. Also not trampling the area and trying to keep weight off the ground around where it is, the mycel spreads for a very large area fighting against other mushrooms and the microbiome constantly to be the winner of that area, so avoiding to damage it is good.

Cutting is a very very bad decision actually. The only mushrooms to be cut are those which have a rather hard fruiting body. Those growing on trees tend to be tougher, there it makes sense. Otherwise leaving the cut-off part of a mushroom in the ground invites rot and can substantially damage regrowth.
This approach is only viable in controlled environments, where this myth of doing it this way in nature stems from. In a controlled environment the mushrooms are helped along so they absolutely thrive with little competitors, this allows cutting to not invite rot as easily, and 'clumping' ones like oyster mushrooms are cleaner to extract this way from growth bags, allowing to re-harvest them before long.

And if we wanna go realistic properly I would say that using an axe is the most nonsensical approach one can do, that should definitely be removed, or made slower then a knife at least since you can use it, but it's just clunky.

[SnapJelly]

On 5/7/2026 at 3:00 PM, cjameshuff said:

Realistically, this is a single slash motion

Well personally I don't interpered a mushroom as a single mushroom but rather a cluster of mushrooms so it would take longer to harvest them all, It wouldn't make sense for a singular brown mushroom to have 80% of the nutrients of a whole turnip

[TheRealMork]

1 hour ago, Kulze said:

If we actually go with realism then the arguments are generally in a bit of a odd direction.
[...]

Well, I've been educated and rid of what thought I known!

[Kulze]

The clustering depends on the type of mushrooms. Some do it, some absolutely avoid it, it depends on the growth type.

Same with nutrients, mushrooms are... weird... really weird. They have a ridiculous growth speed and life-cycle overall. 'Bloom' quick, spore quick and then usually re-absorb the fruiting body depending on type as well (ink-caps do that, that's why they're called that. They digest themselves in a ink-like black oily substance to re-introduce the nutrients used into the mycel and repeat the process quicker).

What most see when they think about 'clumping' mushrooms are the more 'flat' ones on trees, chicken of the woods for example. Or the classic one... oyster mushrooms. Portobello also do clump a little bit, but far less then those.
In comparison when you find 'parasol' mushrooms those have a distance to each other, sometimes they still overlap a bit but they tend to grow far enough apart to get fully ripe and allow the spores to spread, usually a hand-width of distance minimum, and a primary fruiting body overtaking the others and growing massively larger.

Which also leads to nutrients. Those things are HUGE. Their average cap diameter is 8 inches (around 20 cm), and while the internet states they grow 'up to' 40cm (15 inches) they absolutely can get quite a bit bigger. The biggest one I found was over 50 cm, that thing alone was a full meal, it weighted 700 gramms.

There's generally 3 types of growth:
- Cespitose - those are the clustering ones. Oyster, enoki, honey mushrooms and the likes.

- Gregarious/Troops - those make groups of mushrooms but separate, like parasol or many of the 'russula' genome.
- Solitary - as the name says, single ones. Boletes grow this way, they tend to not touch each other under most circumstances.