I "rolled" an oak tree!

[Faceplant]

Started a new game and wanted to see if I could build a finewood bow as my first bow, so I grabbed some flint and wood, made a flint axe, and set out to find a good spot to "roll" a birch or two.

I had a couple birch on the ground and split when I decided to see if I could bring a couple more beech trees onto the birch. I didn't notice or pay attention to the nearby oak that was surrounded by beech, but I set off a domino of trees falling, with the last one being the oak!

Had a great time for 10 minutes or so rolling it around, almost getting killed a couple of times with it's rollback, until it split. It wasn't long after that that I had a pile of almost 40 finewood (I think there was some of the original birch mixed in there). A couple of campfire sites later and I'm sporting a finewood bow!

I'm sure others have done it, but, given that oak a fairly rare and tend to spawn in clearings, I had never even considered it before.

[Frank Dunn]

Congrats! It's also good to up the rested buff early too with better furniture.

[Sephiroth]

Another way: Find a shipwreck and destroy it, they also give fine wood.

[MisterMonk]

Originally posted by Sephiroth:

Another way: Find a shipwreck and destroy it, they also give fine wood.

lol never thought of destroying the shipwrecks nice tip buddy

[karphead]

felling an oak that early in the game is good haul for any player, n1

[Faceplant]

The problem with shipwrecks is that they spawn in black forest. I have lucked onto one or two early game, but generally only find them when I don't care about them anymore.

FWIW, I went back later to clean up the mess and take some wood for bronze, and noticed another oak that was surrounded by beech trees, one of them was one that I had cut previously, and was leaning on the oak. When I chopped at that one, it caused the rest of them to fall along with the oak!

I had a bronze axe by then, so I just chopped it up, but maybe it's not as difficult/rare as I thought. You just have to find the right tree.

[Mharr]

Don't forget baiting trolls into gathering resources for you! You can get a fair way into this game without fighting a single forsaken.

[Kaery]

I'd say you can get all the way to the plains without fighting a forsaken with a bit of luck. Trolls can break tin and copper, you only need enough for a bronze pickaxe, then you can start digging without a troll.
Iron does exist outside of crypts, keep kiting an abomination around and have it pound the ground. Some spaces will give you a damage number. Dig there for scrap piles. Not nearly as lucrative as crypts, but if you insist, you can get quite a bit that way.
Silver can, with luck, be found spawning in places that expose the vein partially.
Dark metal from the plains is something you need the artificer table for, so that's the first time you absolutely 'have' to slay a forsaken to progress. Others just make it easier.

[Faceplant]

You can find the scrap piles in swamp with a stagbreaker, but it's a real slog for not much reward. It works to get an iron pickaxe, but I haven't been able to push it much past that. It's actually fairly easy to do the same with silver in the mountains. That's normally how I find silver anyway.

I recently did a run where I got most things that you can get in Mistlands prior to defeating Yag by just sticking to the non-mist areas. You can get significant amounts of iron in Mistalnds, and I got excited for a minute thinking that you could do more than that, but I think pretty much evereything in Mistlands requires black metal in one form or another (directly, or requiring the BM axe) so Moder (at least) is a requirement for endgame.

[Zombits]

I've also done it multple times lately in playthoughs . Both with oak trees and birch . It's the best way early in game when a charcater is so weak .

I dont mine ores with a troll though . The amount of ores needed to upgraded so many items isn't worth the risk to me