The first hour of a wipe, as a crafting list

Every wipe starts the same way, and every wipe I do it slightly differently, usually by forgetting something and walking back for it. So I wrote the order down, with the costs from the dataset, and then noticed that most of the ordering is not preference at all — it is forced by what needs what. You cannot make a box before you have fragments, and you cannot have fragments before you have a furnace. Here is that chain, made explicit.

Stage one: the rock and what it buys

You spawn with a rock and a torch. The rock gets you the first 400 wood and 200 stone, and that buys the tools that make the rock unnecessary.

Craft	Recipe	Time
Stone Hatchet	100 stones, 200 wood	15 s
Stone Pickaxe	100 stones, 200 wood	15 s
Hunting Bow	50 cloth, 200 wood	30 s

The bow is the one people skip, and it is the one that keeps you alive. It needs no workbench, it is the only ranged weapon on this list, and the fifty cloth is an argument for hitting hemp before anything else. All three of these go on one key:

Stage two: a place to die from

Now the tools are earning wood at a real rate, and the next thing that matters is a sleeping bag and a door, because until you have both, dying means starting the hour again.

Craft	Recipe	Time
Building Plan	20 wood	15 s
Hammer	100 wood	15 s
Tool Cupboard	1,000 wood	30 s
Wooden Door	300 wood	30 s
Key Lock	75 wood	15 s
Sleeping Bag	30 cloth	30 s

The tool cupboard is the single most expensive item in the first hour, a thousand wood, and it is also the least optional: nothing you build is yours until it is placed. The key lock at 75 wood is the early one; the Code Lock is 100 metal fragments and no workbench, so it replaces the key lock the moment the furnace has run. This stage is the second bind, and it is the one I press within ninety seconds of every spawn:

It queues in the order written — plan and hammer first, because they are fifteen seconds each and you can start placing while the cupboard cooks.

Stage three: the furnace, and the thing the furnace unlocks

Everything after this point wants metal fragments, and fragments come from a furnace. The furnace itself wants low grade fuel, which comes from animal fat, which means the bow in stage one was also the furnace.

Craft	Recipe	Time
Low Grade Fuel ×52 (13 crafts)	39 animal fat, 13 cloth	65 s
Furnace	200 stones, 50 low grade fuel, 100 wood	30 s

Low grade fuel comes out four per craft, so fifty is thirteen crafts and you get two spare. Thirty-nine animal fat is roughly three or four animals with a bow. This is the point in the hour where the crafting list stops being a wood problem and becomes a hunting problem, and the reason experienced players shoot the first boar they see rather than the first player.

Stage four: what the first smelt buys

The first 200 metal fragments out of the furnace go to exactly three things, and the order is a choice rather than a dependency: storage, the workbench, and the lock upgrade.

Craft	Recipe	Time
Large Wood Box ×2	500 wood, 100 metal fragments	60 s
Workbench Level 1	500 wood, 100 metal fragments	30 s

I put the workbench first, because it unlocks 175 recipes including gun powder and the first real tools, and a box only holds things. But if you have been lucky with loot, two boxes first stops you losing it to a full inventory. The loadout guide has a base-building bind that queues four boxes and a furnace in one press for the second base of the wipe.

Stage five: not dying to the first person you meet

Craft	Recipe	Time
Wood Armor Helmet	15 cloth, 150 wood	20 s
Wood Chestplate	20 cloth, 250 wood	30 s
Wood Armor Pants	15 cloth, 150 wood	20 s
Bandage ×5	20 cloth	25 s

The wood set is the only full armour set in the game that needs neither a workbench nor a sewing kit (the armour cost guide has the comparison), and it costs a fraction of the cloth that everything above it does. Five bandages are 25 seconds and 20 cloth and they are the difference between a bad fight and a respawn.

The whole hour, totalled

Eight minutes of queue is less than it feels, and the reason it feels longer is that most of it is spent standing next to a half-built base waiting for a cupboard. The binds move that waiting to the moments you are already standing still: press numpad 7 while walking to the first tree, press numpad 8 while walking back with the wood, and the queue is running before you have chosen where to build.

Base-building bind What workbench 1 unlocks Wood set vs everything else Why the cupboard takes 30 seconds