Beginner's Guide to Bushcraft

Because there are too many crafting/profession skills for each to have its own forum.
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Lexx416
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Beginner's Guide to Bushcraft

Post by Lexx416 »

As in all things, if you're going an ENTIRELY "lone wolf" route wherein you don't rely on ANYONE but yourself, Bushcraft will be much more difficult than if you make compromises to further your skills and goals. Folks new to Bushcraft seem to struggle a bit at times, at the start, so I wanted to write up at least one guide to getting started with Bushcraft - in an ideal world, I'll have other guides written out here too (as people request them, and as new facets/aspects of Bushcraft are released), and possibly even get them up on a player site down the road.

If you spot any inaccuracies in regards to skill ranges, commands, etc., please feel free to let me know so I can correct them! It's been a long time since I've had a basic bushcraft character, so it can be easy to overlook things like that. And if you have any specific requests for guides, please feel free to post here or send me a PM on the forums.


Your First Goal
Starting out it's a good idea to set a specific tool goal. For my characters that practice bushcraft, my first goal is ALMOST always a hatchet, so this first post of the guide will be about making your first hatchet. Hatchets can be used to break larger branches down, can be used to knap flint and hammer pitons, make decent weapons, can be hurled, and are needed in some woodworking recipes that Bushcrafters might find useful. Being able to make a hatchet also means you have a pretty good grasp of the crafting system, and you most likely know where to get the materials you need and what to do with them.

A hatchet is compromised of a small haft, a flint hatchet head, and two pieces of cordage, and requires a KNIFE as a tool - I'll break all of those out below into their own sections, starting with the knife.


Knife
While this IS a tool, I don't like to consider a "knife" as my first goal, since it's really a stepping stone to being able to do basic things with bushcraft. This is also one of the easiest things to make as it can be made with two pieces of flint and nothing else.

The first tool you'll need is a knife - you can either buy a knife in town to get you started, or if you REALLY want to rough it you can head out into the wilderness to forage for knappable lithics. As of writing this guide, Flint is the only readily available lithic and it can generally be found "near water sources such as creeks or streams that have cut into the rock layer of the ground upstream, or occasionally lakes fed by such" - that means you'll want to navigate yourself to a river that's close to mountain tiles in the wilderness or lake tiles being fed by a river near mountains, and try to FORAGE LITHICS in them.

If there's any flint in that room, you'll eventually get a chunk. If there's usually flint but the room has been foraged out for the moment, you'll get a special message encouraging you to come back later. If you forage for a decent amount of time (for me, this tends to be more than 3 to 5 minutes) and you don't get ANY updated messages or returns, I would assume flint cannot be foraged from that room.

A knife is made from a SMALL LITHIC CHUNK. Those can be foraged from the wilderness when you FORAGE LITHICS, but you can also knap MEDIUM LITHIC CHUNKS into 2 small chunks each, and you can knap a large lithic chunk into 2 medium lithic chunks. Once you have a SMALL LITHIC CHUNK, you just need a tool to KNAP with. This can be a hammer, a hatchet, antlers, bones or even another lithic chunk. I would suggest first timer Bushcrafters either bring a hammer or grab a few pieces of flint so that they can use one of the chunks as a knapping tool. You just need to KNAP SMALL LITHIC CHUNK MAKE KNIFE once you have at least one small lithic chunk (you can't use a stone to knap itself!) and another piece to knap with.

Hatchet Head
Next, since you already probably have a few pieces of flint by now, I would make my hatchet head! This will require a striking tool again (you can still use a flint chunk for this) and a MEDIUM LITHIC CHUNK. You need to KNAP MEDIUM LITHIC CHUNK MAKE HATCHET HEAD, and that's all there really is to it! As a note, knapping is a pretty time and energy intensive process, so be sure to do it in a place that you won't freeze, where you have some food! If you want to apply your craftmark to your hatchet, at this step you should hold the hatchet head in your right head and MODIFY BRAND.


Haft
Getting a haft: You can go out to a room with trees in it (check with the SURVEY command) and use the FORAGE command to FORAGE MEDIUM BRANCH. Once you have a straight medium branch and something to carve with, like a knife, you'll want to CARVE MEDIUM BRANCH MAKE SMALL HAFT. If you want to apply your craftmark to your hatchet, at this step you should hold the haft in your right head and MODIFY BRAND.


Cordage
This is probably the trickiest part for the new bushcrafter! If you're totally new to the game, I would recommend checking the local Market for some thread and using that in place of cordage to start with, just because it'll be a little while before you can make cordage. However if you want to go about this the lone-wolf hardcore bushcraft way, it's possible just trickier and takes a bit longer than finding some cheap thread.

You have three options for making hand-woven cordage, each with their hurdles to cross when it comes to collecting them - sinew, foraged plant fibers, and barkcloth.

Foraged plant fibers come in the form of Thornleaf around Shadgard and Stinging Nettle nearby to Mistral Lake - both of these plants require gloves to be foraged, since they're spiky! Both Thornleaf and Stinging Nettle can be found with the SURVEY command, and you must have 50 in the Bushcraft skill before you can CRUSH them.

Barkcloth comes from the bark of specific trees - in Cogg, as of writing this guide, that means Cedar Bark! You'll need to find a cedar tree with SURVEY, and then FORAGE CEDAR BARK or FORAGE BARK. Beware that Fir Trees also produce bark, which is used for tannins in the leatherworking process and cannot be used for bark cloth. Crushing the bark from cedar trees requires 100 Bushcraft.

Sinew requires you kill certain animals (elk, deer, foxes, coyote, for example) and use the BUTCHER command on them. You need 50 points in Skinning to be able to see and butcher sinews from beasts. (I'm unsure if these have a bushcraft requisite for crushing, but I'll update this guide if I learn that they do)

Once you've collected enough of a fiber (you need 11 fibers per cordage, and they must all be the same type) you need to take 1 fiber in a hand (with the rest in a container on your person) and WEAVE HAND-WOVEN CORDAGE. Once you have two pieces of cordage (or two skeins of thread) you can finish making your hatchet.


The Hatchet
Finally, now that you've got your small haft, your hatchet head, and your cordage or threads you can hold the head in one hand, the haft in the other, and (with the two cordage in an open container on your person) use the ATTACH command to attach the two pieces together, and then you'll have a versatile tool that can fulfill a handful of useful functions.


Once you've made your first hatchet, you should have the knowledge needed to pursue most other Bushcraft recipes as tools like Hatchets, Spears, and Javelins tend to be the most complicated bushcrafting recipes!
"You hear the Woses, the Wild Men of the Woods... Remnants of an older time they be, living few and secretly, wild and wary as beasts."
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