What iron tool would you make first?

[Sarudak]

For me it's somewhat variable. The pick is always first of course. Next I will grab shears if I found a good supply of leather. After that it's a hoe if I need to secure a food supply or a sword if my food supply is going ok and I want to pursue diamonds first. I love the fact that this has become a meaningful choice. :)

[mazer246]

For me it varies between a hoe and a pick. The way I see it, a hoe opens up a whole new variety things to do, with a hoe I can start setting up a sustainable food source and start progressing down the tech tree with hemp. A pick also opens up options, but not nearly as many. It allows me to mind diamonds, gold, and redstone but those are generally hidden down in caves that require lots of resources to explore. Usually I go for a hoe so that I can start getting the resources required to explore those caves and uncover the goodies that require and iron pick to harvest, but if I already found diamonds and what not, I go for the iron pick.

[Sarudak]

The thing is though that the mining efficiency offered by an iron pick speeds up getting more iron so much that I don't think there's any reason to grab something else first unless you're incredibly desperate to get farming started. Also it allows you to quickly grab all the cobble you need to making as many axes and shovels and furnaces as you'll ever need.

[DaveYanakov]

I worry more about the smelt times than the time it takes to mine the ore. It takes a long time to cook a full 27 nuggets when settling for 18 will get you rolling on a major project while you wait on the rest.

[topguy]

Depends. If I have a unexplored cave, chickens, and pumpkins, a Hoe. If I can't find a cave, a pick. But to be honest, it is hard to pick between them.

[BinoAl]

I love the fact that this has become a meaningful choice. :)

Heh, I was just about to say that. Before, in one trip, you would have enough iron to make everything. The changes to iron were a bit rough at first, but they really do make the game better in a significant way

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, shears are a viable first tool choice and would probably be mine as well if padded armor did not exist.

Glad I'm not the only one that thinks Padded Armor is the shit at a certain point in the tech tree. I don't think I've heard of or seen anyone else using it.

In my current world I've largely depleted the local animal supply around my base, so leather is in short supply. Without a Crucible I also can't afford iron armor at present, but have well developed manual Hemp and Chicken farms. I'm finding Padded to be extremely useful given that.

[Sarudak]

Hm. Personally I've never had motivation to build padded armor. I wonder if the difference is that I wander until I have some supply of leather before settling down and the time difference between when I get my windmill up and running and when I get a crucible up and running is rather short. Not long enough for me to wear out a suit of leather armor. I make a beeline for the crucible because I want to be able to recycle my iron and upgrade to chain mail ASAP. Granted I haven't played a game from the beginning since before the redstone latch changes so if I played again I might be forced to spend more time gathering the resources for a forge.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, if you go nomad, you likely won't encounter the same kind of issues with animal/leather depletion. However, if you haven't restarted in awhile, I've made a number of changes recently that make the nomadic lifestyle less desirable.

I've also been playing early tech tree in this world for a very long time, so I suspect my animal supplies are much more depleted than most. Leather has really become a luxury item for me.

[JakeZKAM]

It's gotta be farming equipment before anything else whenever I start up. I very much turtle my way through the tech tree and that usually means I end up with a very harsh time limit in terms of food. Once I can get that taken care of with a Hoe, Bucket, and Shears then I can slowly make my way section by section into the depths to light up more area/gather more minerals. I don't think I've ever used padding as leather has never been too much of an issue to get, wool has always been extremely cheap and my personal favorite to use. Then again I don't think I've ever made an Iron or Diamond Suit recently either.

[Stormweaver]

Recent changes in mind, my playstyle's gone from being largely nomadic to being...a little less? Each night I make a small base with it's furnaces and crafting tables to gather iron and coal, and now instead of picking them up and moving on I instead make it a landmark and...move on.

So obviously a pickaxe is my first tool; beyond that it depends on how quickly I come across seeds (pumpkins preferred) and a decent clutch of chickens. If I do it's a hoe, if it's not it's shears, then sword till I do.

[JiiKoo]

In my main world (started at 4.891) I went hoe first. I really wanted to get sustainable food before I went any deeper into the caves even though I had a few stacks of meat stored from the initial slaughtering and some hunting trips. I figured that if I ended up dying, the hoe would definitely make my base a place I'd want to return to as soon as possible. If I went pick first, I maybe could have progressed a bit faster but had I died it wouldn't have done me much good at all. ...and I had found pumpkins and had a chicken in my hidey hole. Without those I probably would have gone pick first, though.

And because of everything underground being terrible and terrifying thanks to HoD I wanted to do something that didn't involve me getting more and more stressed but still contributed to my progress. Setting up my farm gave me something to do while calming my nerves after caving, which otherwise might have been time I didn't spend playing. Those hoes sure are great for relieving stress.

[utakataJ6]

Hoe -> Shears -> Pick.

Why hoe? I don't have any problem trapping animals. I don't have any problem surviving under regular conditions. But man, since HCS went mandatory for servers, food just evaporates unless every last players is as skilled as you are. It's really beyond brutal, and makes me lean toward single-player. In the servers especially, you just have to have the hoe so you can stretch that single chicken and hemp seeds and far as possible, as soon as possible. Hunger is death.

As for avoiding the pick, by the time I've found 27 iron nuggets, I've usually passed up plenty of other iron and coal ores. Mining them isn't a problem, it's waiting for them to smelt. I see little reason to go Pick first.

EDIT: Just want to make it clear that I do like HCS on servers, it just couples much better with Anarchy play, which unfortunately is never common.

[jkievlan]

Glad I'm not the only one that thinks Padded Armor is the shit at a certain point in the tech tree. I don't think I've heard of or seen anyone else using it.

Yeah, I always make padded armor as soon as I can...it's not worth killing the cows for leather until I have wheat.

To answer the OP's question, I always get a pick first. Why? Because once you have a pick, all the other iron tools are hugely cheaper in terms of grinding time. Why get shears first, when I know I can have them in short order once I get my pick?

[myrkana]

in my current world (we started it just yesterday) we started with a hoe because of food needs fro two people. In his search for me my partner actually took a boat out and found 3 villagers xD he found all of the crops we needed so a hoe was right for us. Many times though it's between a pick or a sword.
sword- if we're doing a lot of traveling around a sword can be more useful for mob killing/animal slaying.
pick- if we are near a good cave, or especially a ravine we'll make a pick first in order to get what the ravine has to offer us :)



oh and padded armor is awesome, it's not unusual to see us in part leather part padded armor because thats all we have xD its better than nothing.

[Foxy Boxes]

To those that say they don't get a pick first because of the smelt times: Why?
Once you have an iron pick, cobble is in such rapid supply that you can simply build more furnaces. Each extra furnace effectively reduces the smelt time to x/(n+1), with n being the number of existing furnaces and x being the amount of ore you wanted smelted.
So even if you have only one furnace, you could speed up the smelting time by 9 times simply by mining a stack of cobble.

[Wibbles]

Once you have an iron pick, cobble is in such rapid supply [...snip!]

You can't make an iron pickaxe before you've smelted 27 nuggets, and 8 cobble per furnace is pretty expensive in the early game. Catch-22 and all that. So I can sort of see why people would consider a less expensive tool over an iron pick first due to the time it takes to smelt.

Then again it's not like you need to mine 27 iron ore all in one go. Find some, go back to base, and whilst the ore is smelting go out and find some more. You can fill your time with other activity whilst the ore smelts. I don't really think the smelting time is a biggie or even the fact it takes another iron bar; what's more important is that it might not be the most useful tool to have. You already have the functionality (albeit inefficient and slow) of the stone tools, but what you can't do with stone is farming, discombobulating creepers or cutting leather. Or cutting grass and getting cows to follow you, for that matter.

[Foxy Boxes]

My point is as soon as you have an iron pick, all your next items can be smelted 9x as fast, whereas if you don't have an iron pickaxe first that "smelt time" you're avoiding (not you specifically mind, you generically) is actually longer.

[DaveYanakov]

My point is that starvation while waiting for the additional 27 smelts if you go pick before hoe is an actual issue. The time and calories spent gathering the additional cobble and fuel somewhat negates the advantage of additional furnaces when you don't have food that grows back yet.

[Daisjun]

I would say pickaxe just because it speeds things up so much relative to any other tool. If I could impart a single word of advice to any new BTW player it would be 'DO NOT WASTE TIME!' In BTW, time is always against you, you should always be doing something to improve your efficiency and the iron pickaxe gives you the best efficiency boost. It means you can mine cobble/iron/coal in a fraction of the time and speeds you along to making every other tool.

Second tool to create? I would say hoe, just because you want a farm started ASAP. Then it's really arguable what should be created next. I've found shears to be a life saver,

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mainly for nullifying creepers.

[jkievlan]

My point is that starvation while waiting for the additional 27 smelts if you go pick before hoe is an actual issue.

I have a hard time understanding why people starve at all. At worst, you have to spend a lot of time staring at a fishing bobber...which is somewhat tedious but should supply your food needs well enough until you get a farm going.

On that note, I just realized a pick is *not* my first tool. My first tool is always a fishing pole :)

[TheGatesofLogic]

Regardless of fishing or farming, I never starve. In fact I usually don't even plant a farm until I have a cauldron. Meat is just so goddamn common that I've never had a problem going on hunting trips and getting enough food for several days plus some extra so I can go on another trip. By the time I find wheat carrots and potatoes my hemp hasn't even grown yet. And because of my journey to find wheat I'll usually have iron armor from blacksmith chests.

[DaveYanakov]

I have a hard time understanding why people starve at all. At worst, you have to spend a lot of time staring at a fishing bobber...which is somewhat tedious but should supply your food needs well enough until you get a farm going.

On that note, I just realized a pick is *not* my first tool. My first tool is always a fishing pole :)

Doesn't spending your entire day fishing in order to support the nights mining activities more or less completely destroy the 'iron picks mean more efficient time use' argument?

[the_fodder]

Doesn't spending your entire day fishing .....

If you are not fishing on nights with a full moon, you are doing it wrong.

[jkievlan]

Doesn't spending your entire day fishing in order to support the nights mining activities more or less completely destroy the 'iron picks mean more efficient time use' argument?

Day fishing is purely for food emergencies. Full moon fishing for a night will get you two full stacks of fish, if you have the bait...and if you can't survive for a week with two stacks of fish then you need to stop jumping so much :)