Carpentry Station

The Carpentry Bench turns logs into the parts every other trade builds on. At 165 recipes it is the largest catalogue in the game — the Forge, in second place, has 84 — covering handles, barrels, arrows, weapon grips, and the headboards, bedframes and cushions behind almost all furniture.

It runs on planks: oak, fir and maple in small, medium and large, cut at the Logging Station, plus the oak wood scraps they leave behind. The Forge supplies metal loops and arrow heads, and the upholstered pieces want leather and cotton. Its output travels just as far — wooden handles into Forge tools and weapons, and a single oak barrel into every whiskey, vodka, sake and wine barrel in the game.

Crates are made here too, and they are the reason this bench now leads somewhere new. Twelve of them — oak, maple and fir, each in small, medium, large and huge — and they climb with the bench: the small crates are level 0, so a colonist can make one on their first day, then medium at level 1, large at level 2 and huge at level 3. A small crate is two medium planks and a metal scrap, a minute's work; a huge one takes nineteen lengths of timber, eight metal scraps and four minutes. Metal scraps come from the Forge, and are level 0 there as well. Pack a crate with your own goods, seal it, and it can be listed on the Trading Post — at a fixed price or as an auction — and sold for real Linden dollars. The seal is what makes that possible: it fixes the contents and publishes the manifest, so a buyer knows exactly what they are paying for before they pay.

You need a carpenter's hammer to work here, and that is forged at the Forge. Anyone may use the bench, but only a carpenter banks the recipes they discover and earns crafting experience for the work; everyone else is limited to the level-0 items and has to re-enter the ingredients every time.

The catalogue is steep rather than long. Seven recipes sit at level 0 — three of them the small crates — and thirty-seven at level 1, but 113 of the 165 are level 3, which is essentially the entire furniture range. Time is the other cost: 128 of the 165 recipes take ten minutes each. Start with the small wooden handle — level 0, two oak wood scraps, thirty seconds — keep the plank chain stocked, and queue the ten-minute work behind anything quick. Nothing here has a collection deadline, and nothing keeps a clock once it is in your bag, so there is no penalty for building ahead.