Making Things

Everything on this page is built and you can make all of it. The bench, the hearth, planks, sticks, torches, six tools, a chest and four turf houses. The hearth lights, warms you and burns real wood — it did not when this page was first written, and that line is gone.

Press E, then Craft

The pack you already know opens with E. It has two pages: Pack, which is your things, and Craft beside it. Click Craft.

You will see a list. Each row is one thing you can make, with a picture of what it is made of on the right.

Click a row and it is made. One click, one thing.

The list is in tabs, and they matter

Under Pack and Craft there is a second row of smaller words. Those are the tabs, and each one holds a different kind of thing:

You only see the tabs that have something on them. In your bare hands there are two; at a bench there are six.

👉 If you cannot find a recipe, it is on another tab. Everything a bench can make is there somewhere, and no tab is ever longer than the screen — so nothing is hidden below the bottom.

Your first workbench, out of four pieces of wood

Go and break four birch trunks. The pale grey ones — the trunk is the wood, not the leaves.

Then open Craft. The Smíðabekkur — the workbench — will be lit rather than greyed, and clicking it turns your four trunks into a bench you can carry.

Put it down somewhere you will find it again. Near where you sleep is a good idea.

Almost everything needs the bench

The workbench is the one thing you can make with your bare hands, and it has to be, or nothing could ever be made at all.

Everything else is made at the bench. Walk up to one and right-click it, and the Craft page opens with more tabs on it than it had before — Wood tools, Stone tools, Houses, Home, Fishing and Livestock.

🏠 A smiðja works exactly as a bench does. It is the crafting house, and its door opens the same list — so once you have built one you do not need to carry a bench about.

⚠️ You cannot build a block by aiming at the bench — clicking it always opens it. Aim at the ground beside it instead. The hearth and the chest are the same — anything you use rather than build against behaves this way.

The screen tells you what you are missing

This is the part worth understanding, because it saves you wandering about.

A thing you cannot make yet is still on the list, greyed out, and it says why:

A greyed row still responds to a click. It will simply tell you the same thing again rather than doing nothing — because a button that does nothing when you press it is the worst thing a game can do to you.

Planks and sticks, in your bare hands

You do not need the bench for either of these, and everything else is built out of them.

There are two kinds of plank and they are the same as each other for everything you build. Birkiplanki comes from a birch trunk; rekaplanki comes from driftwood off the beach. Any recipe that wants a plank takes either.

⚠️ Birch does not grow back, and the birch here is scrub rather than timber. That is why the shore matters. Driftwood washes up on the beach on its own — aim at a heap and click, with either mouse button and no tool — and it saws into planks exactly as a trunk does. It is scarce and it arrives slowly, faster after a blow. The two planks are interchangeable everywhere, so a walk to the beach takes the pressure off the trees.

⚠️ The tide only runs where we started. Driftwood washes up on the shore in Hafnarfjörður and nowhere else yet. If you go and live somewhere far away, take your wood with you — the rest of Iceland's coast is there, but nothing comes in on it.

Six tools, and each one only works on what it is for

At the bench, from planks and sticks, or from stone and sticks:

Wood first, then stone. A stone tool is much faster than a wooden one.

⚠️ The wrong tool is no better than your bare hands — chopping stone with an axe works at the speed of your fists, and it still wears the axe out.

⚠️ Tools wear out and there is no repair. A wooden one lasts about a hundred blocks and a stone one about three hundred, and then it is simply gone. Carry a spare.

✅ You can see how worn a tool is. Once it has broken its first block, a thin bar appears along the bottom of its slot. It empties from the right as you work, and it turns from gold to a warm clay colour when the tool is nearly finished. A new tool has no bar at all — an empty slot and a fresh axe look the way they always did.

The hearth

Four stones and one piece of wood, at the bench.

The picture on the row shows you the shape of it: four stones around a hole, with the wood in the middle. That is a real Viking-age hearth — a fire in a pit with a kerb of stones around it — and it is the shape a settler would have built.

Any stone will do. Móberg, apalhraun and grágrýti are all just stone as far as the recipe is concerned, which is why the row says stone and not the name of a particular rock.

Put it down and right-click it while holding wood, and it lights. It gives light, and the wood burns down over time. Right-click it with an empty hand and its own screen opens: two slots for wood, four for the charcoal the fire leaves behind.

⚠️ A lit hearth only keeps the weather off you if it is burning inside a room — a fire under open sky is a campfire in a gale and changes nothing. A hearth indoors is the only thing in the game that switches the cold off completely. See Cold, Wind and Rain.

🏠 And lighting one makes it your home — it is where you wake up if you die. See Food, Health and Berries.

Any wood burns — birch trunks, driftwood, planks. ⚠️ Charcoal does not, and the fire will tell you so rather than quietly refusing. Charcoal is not fuel here. It is a material — and what it is for is the torch, below.

The torch — kyndill

Four sticks and one charcoal, at the bench, and you get four torches.

The charcoal is the part that costs. It only comes out of a hearth: put wood in, let it burn, and what is left in the four bottom slots is charcoal. One log burns for about five real minutes.

So four torches are two logs and five minutes of burning — one log sawn into the sticks and a second one burnt down to charcoal. Half a log each. Light is expensive here on purpose. Iceland has no coal, and in Minecraft it is everywhere, which is why a Minecraft night is solved in ten minutes.

Put a torch on the ground or against a wall and it burns, gives off light about eight metres in every direction, and smokes. It never goes out and it never needs anything.

⚠️ A torch is not a fire. It lights the dark and it does not keep the weather off you — only a hearth burning inside a room does that. See Cold, Wind and Rain.

The chest

Six planks at the bench — either kind — in a ring with nothing in the middle. Boards on every side and a hole in the centre is what a chest is.

Right-click one and it opens: twenty-seven slots, with your own pack underneath so you can drag things between the two.

These are the same four rules as your pack, so there is nothing new to learn.

⚠️ Food will not keep in a chest, and it will say so when you try. Food goes in the storehouse — the býtibúr — below.

Breaking a chest gives you back everything inside it, so a chest in the wrong place is never a disaster. ⚠️ But it has to fit in your pack. A full chest holds more than you can carry, so it will refuse to break until you have taken some of it out. That is the game saying “empty it first”, not a chest that cannot be broken.

The storehouse — the býtibúr

A whole building, made at the bench and placed as one thing. It costs 24 stone, 16 planks and 48 turf — any stone, either plank, and turf is what you get when you dig grassland, moor, heath or scrub with a shovel. Turf across the top, stone at the corners, planks up the middle: the picture on the bench is a little gabled house, and that is what you get.

Hold it, face a clear, flat stretch of ground, and place it. A turf-roofed stone house with a driftwood gable stands up in front of you — five metres wide, nine long — with its door facing you. If the ground is not clear or not flat the game says so instead.

Right-click it with an empty hand — anywhere on it, not only the door — or press O, and it opens: fifty-four slots, and only food keeps in them. It is the mirror of the chest, which takes everything but food. The same four click rules as your pack.

Ten hits take the whole building down and give it back, food and all. You can hit it anywhere — a wall, the roof or the door, it is all one building.

⌨️ O opens any menu you are looking at — the bench, a hearth, a chest, or anywhere on a turf house. A right-click with an empty hand does the same. With a block in your hand, a right-click on a búr or skemma wall builds against it instead — and the smiðja always opens, so to build against a smiðja aim at the ground beside it.

Four houses, and a row of them is a farm

There are four of these buildings. They are the same house, made from the same things and costing the same, and the carved board on the wall beside the door is how you tell them apart.

It is a small thing — three rough driftwood planks with split ends, hung on the wall to the left of the door, about chest height. Walk up and look at it.

So you need more than one. The býtibúr keeps your food and nothing else; the skemma keeps your stone, wood and tools and will not take a berry. That is the same rule as the chest, pointed both ways.

Býtibúr is a real word for a real room. In an Icelandic turf farmhouse it was the little store off the baðstofa where the food was kept and portioned out — so it is the name of the job, not a name we made up.

Put them side by side and they snap together. Hold a house, aim near the space beside one you have already placed, and it jumps flush against it and turns to face the same way. Three in a row is a burstabær — the old Icelandic farm, where each part of the house had its own gable facing the yard.

⚠️ The smiðja does not replace your workbench. It is a bench you can walk to, in a building that keeps the rain off.

The vefstofa — where wool becomes thread

Open it and there are two slots: wool on the left, thread on the right. Put wool (ull) in, and the house spins it.

• One thread (þráður) every minute, and one wool makes four threads.
• No fuel. Spinning needs hands, not a fire.
• It keeps spinning while you are away. Come back and the thread is waiting.
• It stops when the thread slot is full — take some out and it carries on.
• Only wool and thread go in. It is not a store.

You get wool by shearing a sheep — see The Controls.

What thread makes, at the workbench — on the Livestock tab, except the line, which is on Fishing:

And for a pen, also on Livestock:

How to build a pen is in The Controls.

And to feed them, also on Livestock:

How to cut hay is in The Controls.

And the rod itself:

The lead and the peg are explained in The Controls; the rod in Food and Health.

Spinning was the work of every Icelandic farm, done by hand on a drop spindle (halasnælda) — a wooden shaft with a weight on it. A good spinner made thirty to fifty metres of yarn an hour, which is about what the vefstofa makes in a minute of your time.

The bench can see into your chests

You do not have to fetch things before you build.

Anything in a chest, a býtibúr, a skemma or a vefstofa within a hundred metres counts towards what you can make, and making it takes the materials straight out of them. It spends what is in your own hands first, then reaches to the nearest container and works outward.

🏘️ So a row of turf houses becomes a workshop. Keep your stone and your wood in the skemma, put the bench where you like, and build without walking back and forth. A hundred metres is your whole farmstead.

And the list knows. A recipe counts what is in your chests as well as what is in your hands, so a row lights up when the stone for it is in the skemma across the yard. ⚠️ It looks when you walk up to the bench — if somebody else fills a chest while you are standing there, close the screen and open it again.

Why there is no grid

If you have played Minecraft you will be looking for a three-by-three grid to arrange things in. There is not one, and that is deliberate.

You do not have to work out where anything goes. The list tells you what you can make, and you click it. The little picture beside each row is there to teach you the shape of the thing — four boards in a square, four stones around a fire, six boards round a hole — but it is a picture, not a puzzle. Getting it wrong is not possible, because there is nothing to get wrong.