Gathering by Hand

Before your first drill runs, everything comes from your own hands: wood from trees, stone and coal from rocks, and a little ore from the fields. You need no tool item for any of it.

How it works

Stand in front of a tree or rock and hold left click. An axe or pickaxe appears in your hand. It is not an item and takes no slot in your inventory or hotbar. The crack on the block shows your progress. When the time is up, the whole tree or rock disappears and the yield goes straight into your inventory.

If you stop hitting for more than a moment, or turn to another object, the timer starts over.

Trees and rocks

Source	Time	Yield
Tree	2 s	2–8 Wood (random each time, 5 on average)
Rock	3 s	20 Stone
Large rock	5 s	30 Stone and 15 Coal

Rocks sometimes hide a bit of ore: each rock has a small chance (2 %) to also give 5–10 Iron Ore and the same chance for 5–10 Copper Ore. Large rocks have twice that chance.

Trees without leaves give the same Wood as leafy ones.

Nothing grows back

Wild trees and rocks are gone for good once you harvest them. Near the bunker you find a grove and many rocks, enough for a start. Later, Wood comes from a Tree Farm (Tree Farming research) and Stone from Stone Fields with a drill. See Hunting and Farming and Mining.

Ore by hand

You can also hold left click on a block of an ore field. Every 2.6 to 4.6 seconds (3.6 s on average) you get one item of that field, and the crack starts over. The field block stays where it is; fields never run out.

Field	Gives
Iron Ore Field	Iron Ore
Copper Ore Field	Copper Ore
Coal Field	Coal
Stone Field	Stone
Sand Field	Sand
Clay Field	Clay
Gold Ore Field	Gold Ore
Uranium Ore Field	Uranium Ore

Oil Wells give nothing by hand; oil needs a pumpjack.

Hand mining is a little faster than one Wooden Drill standing fully on a start field (one ore every 4 s), but a drill keeps working while you do something else. Use your hands to get the first plates for more drills, then let the machines take over.

Fuel at the start

Your first machines burn fuel. Both Wood (2 MJ) and Coal (4 MJ) work. Large rocks give 15 Coal each, and the Coal Field near the bunker gives as much as you mine. Put a Wooden Drill on the Coal Field early.

What you cannot gather

Soil, sand, stone and water of the ground cannot be broken, and mountain walls only give way to TNT. See Factory, Not Sandbox.

The Field Manual knows it too

The Field Manual lists hand gathering as a recipe: search for Wood, Stone or Coal and you see "By hand: tree", "By hand: rock" or "By hand: large rock" with the average yield.

See also

• Your First Hour
• Mining
• The World
• Crafting