Any reason to make higher tier knives?

[Trex_Crazy]

So I have rarely ever made a copper knife, and never anything over that, and usually just use stone knives. On the wiki, which cpuld be wrong idk, the only difference between knives is durability. So why would I ever waste metal on a knife when I can just keep using stone with no penalty?

[MKMoose]

29 minutes ago, Trex_Crazy said:

So why would I ever waste metal on a knife when I can just keep using stone with no penalty?

Besides durability, higher-tier knives have a couple advantages:

• higher plant harvesting speed (e.g. a stone knife has 1.0x, tin bronze has 1.8x, steel has 2.4x) - doesn't matter all that much given that the axe and scythe are usually better for mass-harvesting of plants, but can be very useful occasionally,
• hidden bonus to entity harvesting speed (equal to half the plant harvesting speed bonus, e.g. a stone knife has 1.0x, tin bronze has 1.4x, steel has 1.7x) - arguably the most important bonus of these, given that the knife is the only tool used to harvest animals or monsters,
• significantly higher damage (e.g. a stone knife has 0.8, tin bronze has 2.5, steel has 4.0) - usually irrelevant if you have a proper spear or falx on yourself, but might occasionally help out in a pinch.

Edited yesterday at 11:01 AM by MKMoose

[Provider]

Well, they're easy to make and once you have the metal it's not expensive to make. 1 ingot for a knife that cuts faster and lasts longer so you don't have to repeatedly remake it. If you don't mind having to remake your knife over and over though, then there's no real reason to.

[cjameshuff]

And here's me carefully quenching my steel knives strictly for durability. Stone knives don't last long, and replacing them in the field means you have to either interrupt work to forage for sticks and flint or devote inventory to them. I might start quenching for speed instead...didn't know about the entity harvesting bonus.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, cjameshuff said:

And here's me carefully quenching my steel knives strictly for durability. Stone knives don't last long, and replacing them in the field means you have to either interrupt work to forage for sticks and flint or devote inventory to them.

This right here is why I prefer iron or steel over stone, when it comes to knives. Copper and bronze I tend to skip, because stone is cheap and more convenient.

[Trex_Crazy]

10 hours ago, MKMoose said:

Besides durability, higher-tier knives have a couple advantages:

• higher plant harvesting speed (e.g. a stone knife has 1.0x, tin bronze has 1.8x, steel has 2.4x) - doesn't matter all that much given that the axe and scythe are usually better for mass-harvesting of plants, but can be very useful occasionally,
• hidden bonus to entity harvesting speed (equal to half the plant harvesting speed bonus, e.g. a stone knife has 1.0x, tin bronze has 1.4x, steel has 1.7x) - arguably the most important bonus of these, given that the knife is the only tool used to harvest animals or monsters,
• significantly higher damage (e.g. a stone knife has 0.8, tin bronze has 2.5, steel has 4.0) - usually irrelevant if you have a proper spear or falx on yourself, but might occasionally help out in a pinch.

Ah I see, didn't know it actually sped up harvesting, thatalome makes it worth it.

[Vexxvididu]

To me the much higher durability of quenched iron/steel tools is worth it just for that.  I get tired of making a new stone tool all the time!

[Trex_Crazy]

I'm just an extremely cheap person and don't want to use things if I dont have to

1 hour ago, Vexxvididu said:

To me the much higher durability of quenched iron/steel tools is worth it just for that.  I get tired of making a new stone tool all the time!

 

[egole thompson]

I used to Make my Tools out of Meteoric Iron, since they have pretty high Durability and Meteoric Iron is not used for a lot of Things and is actually quite easy to get as soon as you get to the Iron age. 

I keep all the Iron i can find to craft it into steel.

The higher durability is really handy since you won't have to always carry flint or obsidian to make tools all the time.

I'd recommend skipping the Copper and Tin Tools though for the most part.

The Quenched Steel tools are really nice I usually only have to craft new Tools like two to three times a Year.

I'd recommend just Quenching twice, without tempering, for Durability since mining speed doesn't make that much a difference and most of the Tools survive being Quenched twice.

[Rainbow Fresh]

5 hours ago, Trex_Crazy said:

I'm just an extremely cheap person and don't want to use things if I dont have to

I get that mentality. Why waste single bullet when you can spend beating the boss in melee for 10 minutes for free. So I used flint knifes, spears and axes even when I was equipped with a (modded) tin bronze long sword (mostly for aesthetics, because did I use it? No, thing would just break eventually!). Why spend those precious ores you have worked so hard to get, smelt and smith for something that just break in a couple days anyway, when can just pick up 3 flints along the road and craft three knifes with that to last you over?

I have, however, since come to realize how really, really nice the durability increase is on any tool, if not the higher stats to boot. Used to take me three and then some flint axes to chop down one giant ass oak tree. Now a tin bronze axe shreds it barely breaking a sweat. My copper spears (which, granted, I just keep finding in ruins otherwise I'd use swords) last a fair while longer (and deal somewhat more damage) than the flint ones. And the knife? Haven'T had to replace my tin bronze knife once in all the time since I made it. Very convenient to just have at a ready without worrying about when to start gathering material for a new knife, and frees up the inventory slot for constantly carrying around flint.

[williams_482]

The epiphany I had that made me invest in better tools is that the only truly relevant cost for any equipment in this game is time. Time to find the material, time to mine it, time to process it, time to craft it. Flint tools are "cheap" in that the materials they use are easy to find and require no processing, but continuously crafting new flint tools is actually a major time suck, well in excess of the time spent mining out another impact crater, shoving the resulting meteoric iron chunks in a bloomery, and smithing out a few tools that last twenty times as long as flint equivalents. 

I will still occasionally craft bone-handle flint knives or axes for use in grid recipes like scraping hides or splitting wood, but for any tool that I'll be carrying with me and using regularly, give me the one I won't have to replace for a long time and I know I'll come out ahead. 

[Maelstrom]

14 hours ago, Trex_Crazy said:

I'm just an extremely cheap person and don't want to use things if I dont have to

So you want to wast 15 bones and flint for one steel ingot?   Not to mention wasting all the knapping time compared to the time to forge one steel knife.

Just sayin'

[Vexxvididu]

32 minutes ago, Maelstrom said:

So you want to wast 15 bones and flint for one steel ingot?   Not to mention wasting all the knapping time compared to the time to forge one steel knife.

Just sayin'

If you double quench that steel knife for durability like I do, that's over 20 flint/bone knives saved!