Woodworking Workbench I

The Woodworking Workbench is the busiest bench in the yard and the one most of your early build costs pass through. Seventeen recipes run on the first tier and twenty six on the second, and every one of them sits on the Building track. If a blueprint asks for planks, kits or a fishing rod, this is where it comes from.

Eight Board and four Bronze Nails

Woodworking Workbench I costs eight Board and four Bronze Nails, and it goes up from the Yard build desk. That is a cheap bench by the standards of what it unlocks, and the Board half comes straight off the Sawhorse you already have.

Build it early. Almost nothing in the mid game is reachable without the planks and kits that only this bench produces, and the two materials that upgrade it are both made on it.

What the first tier makes

The workhorse is the Wooden Plank, one Board in and one plank out at Building mastery two. Above it sits Oiled Plank at mastery four, which turns one Melted Fat and four planks into four oiled ones.

The kit line starts at mastery five. Wooden Kit I is three planks and one oiled plank and returns two kits, which is the only recipe on the bench that doubles. Building Kit I beside it takes a Stone Kit and six Brick and returns one.

Two more sit on the first tier that people go hunting for elsewhere. Polished Bronze is made here rather than at an anvil, and Supply: Iron is packed here rather than at the warehouse.

The fishing rods start here too. Basic Rod opens at mastery three and Amateur Rod at six, and the tier II bench carries the Advanced and Pro rods above them, so the whole rod progression lives on this one bench.

The upgrade is paid for with its own output

Woodworking Workbench II costs four Oiled Plank and two Polished Bronze. Both of those are tier I recipes, so the bench pays for its own upgrade and you never need a different building to get there.

What the second tier buys is nine more recipes, not better versions of the old ones. Every shared recipe keeps the same mastery lock, the same duration and the same output, so upgrading never speeds up the planks you were already making.

The nine are the Bronze and Iron Chisels, Oiled Beam, Furniture Kit I, Wooden Joint, Carved Wood, the Advanced and Pro Rods, and the Comfortable Chair. Chisels matter most of those, because Carved Wood needs an Iron Chisel and nothing else in the game makes one.

Every recipe here is Building mastery

All forty three recipes across the two benches read the Building track, and the locks run from one to fifteen. Wooden Sign opens at one, planks at two, rods and crosses at three, and the Comfortable Chair at the top wants fifteen.

That makes the bench the single best argument for carrying Building tools. An axe and a pickaxe both count toward Building, so the pair you hold while chopping is also the pair deciding which half of this grid you can use.

A greyed slot on this bench is almost always mastery rather than missing research. If the recipe is visible and the button is dead, the technology is already yours and the number is what is short.