Workbench
| Workbench | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Type | Collection |
| Location | Carpenter's Shop for 2,000g |
The Workbench ends the tedious part of crafting. Standing one in the middle of a bank of chests lets it reach into all of them, so a crafting recipe can be made without first pulling wood, stone, ore and fibre out into the backpack. Robin sells it at the Carpenter's Shop, and it is one of the few purchases that makes an existing farm feel better organised rather than bigger. The crafting list it offers is exactly the list already in the inventory menu: the difference is purely in where the materials come from, which turns out to be most of the work.
Overview
The bench looks at the eight tiles around it, diagonals included, and reads any ordinary chest or Big Chest standing on them. One of those eight tiles has to be left empty, since the farmer has to stand somewhere to use the bench. That leaves room for seven containers, which between them hold far more than any backpack ever will.
Materials can be drawn from several chests at once in a single craft, including several part-stacks of the same item. Repeated crafting carries on as long as the surrounding chests still hold enough of everything, which is what makes the bench so good for making a hundred of something: sprinklers, fences, bombs or kegs come out in a steady run instead of a series of trips to the chest.
The order the chests are read in is fixed rather than arbitrary, and it is worth knowing for anyone fussy about their storage. The bench starts to the south-west, then works through due south, south-east, due west, due east, north-west, due north and finally north-east. Where the same item sits in two chests, the earlier one in that order is emptied first, which gives a tidy way to control which stack gets used: put the pile meant to be spent in the chest below and to the left, and keep the reserve in the one above and to the right.
One exception catches people out. Junimo Chests are invisible to the bench. They are the most convenient storage in the game, since they all share a single stash, which makes them exactly the chests a late-game farmer wants to build a crafting corner from, and the bench simply will not read them. Ordinary chests and Big Chests are what it wants.
Notes
The bench rewards a little planning. Sorting the surrounding chests by type, with wood and stone in one, ores and bars in another, and foraged goods and monster drops in a third, makes almost every recipe craftable without a single item moving by hand. A farm that does this once rarely goes back to opening chests at all.
One irritation survives. The bench will craft from the ring of chests happily enough, but it does not show how much of each material is left in them, so judging whether there is enough stone for another twenty fences still means opening a chest and looking. Players who use the bench heavily tend to keep one material to a chest for exactly that reason.
Placement wants a spot that is already on the daily route. A workbench in the farmyard near the tool shed or the shipping bin is used constantly; one in a far corner of a shed is a nice idea that gets visited twice. Several benches are perfectly possible, so a second one beside the mine supplies and a third in the greenhouse are both reasonable once the gold is there.
All Collections
Every entry in this group, with its key details.
