Bronze Nails

Nothing about Bronze Nails looks important. They cost one coin, they stack to ninety nine, and the first time you make a batch you get twelve for a single ingot. Then you try to put up a building and find that thirty one of the thirty six things that want nails are buildings, and most of them are the ones you want first.

Woodworking Workbench I, Firewood shed I, Bellows, Simple Chest, Timber stockpile and Writing Desk all ask for nails before they will stand up. Nails are the tax on building anything, which is a different job from every other bronze product in the game.

The cheapest technology in the game makes them

Bronze Works costs 5 and nothing comes before it. It is the root of the Metallurgy branch, and it hands you the Wooden Anvil and the first nail recipe in the same click.

The anvil is one Short Log and one Stone, which is a morning’s walk rather than a project. Everything else in the branch stacks on top of this node, so 5 is the entire entry price to metalworking.

Where Bronze Scrap comes from

That first recipe takes one Bronze Scrap and returns six nails in four seconds, at three energy a tick, paying 1 per craft. No recipe makes Bronze Scrap, but you do not have to break barrels for it either: Herm stocks it from his first tier, and the Bishop, Harold, the Trademaster, the blacksmith and the jeweler all carry it too.

Nothing produces it, so it comes out of scenery you break. The game is consistent about which scenery: broken barrels, trash piles and collapsed shelves, all of which sit in the ruins you already walk through on the way to the village.

That makes the early nail supply a byproduct of tidying up rather than a production line. Clear the rubble around the yard and you will have more scrap than the first few buildings ask for, which is the point at which most players stop thinking about nails entirely.

The ingot recipe doubles the return

The second recipe appears with Bronze Melting at 10, the same node that gives you Furnace I and Firewood shed I. One Bronze Ingot becomes twelve nails in the same four seconds, against six from a scrap.

Whether that is worth doing depends on what else wants the ingot. An ingot spent on nails is twelve nails; the same ingot spent on Bronze Detail is six details. Details are the harder currency later, so once you are smelting properly it is usually right to keep feeding scrap into nails and save ingots for everything else.

Blacksmith moves these numbers unevenly. It adds four nails a rank to the ingot recipe and two to the scrap one, so a single rank takes the ingot route from twelve to sixteen and the scrap route from six to eight.

What eats them

Six recipes use nails and thirty eight buildings do. The recipes are minor, mostly Wooden Kit I and the wooden crosses and fences you put in the graveyard, plus a Supply: Iron crate that wants eight at a time.

The buildings are where the count comes from, and the numbers are small but constant. Firewood shed I is ten Stick and two nails; Timber stockpile is four Wooden beam and twelve. Nothing asks for a hundred, and nothing lets you skip them either.

They are spread across every part of the yard rather than one branch. Workshop equipment, both firewood sheds, the jewelry table, the spinning wheel and weaving loom, the church benches and shrine, the autopsy table and corpse pallet, the beehive and gardener stands, and every tier of barricade and archer tower.

There is no point in the game where you stop needing them, and no point where you need a large stockpile either. Two hundred covers a long building session, and the scrap you pick up while clearing ruins roughly keeps pace with that on its own.

Nails are what gets the fuel system running

The chain worth noticing is short. Bronze Works gives you nails, nails build Firewood shed I, and the shed is what turns Firewood into the Fuel that every furnace and oven draws on.

Bronze Melting unlocks the shed and Furnace I together, so the moment you can smelt is the moment you need a shed, and the shed wants two nails you can only make at the anvil. Keeping a handful spare is what stops that from being a second trip.

Iron Nails are a different item and barely matter

The iron version is rarer rather than useless. Only two recipes call for it, Wooden Cross II and Wooden Fence II, but twenty four buildings do, and one of them is the Circular Saw at ten a time. An Iron Ingot spent on nails is worth it exactly when the building list says so.

The two are priced like different materials: Iron Nails sell for sixteen coins against one, and stack to thirty rather than ninety nine. If a building is asking for nails, it almost always means the bronze ones. Read the icon rather than the word, because the two sit next to each other in the anvil list and the names are one letter apart at a glance.