Woodcutting

What it governs

• An axe raises both speed and success. That is a deliberate difference from the pickaxe, which buys only speed.Charter, Part III — Gathering group
• Trees fall and grow back on a clock, and a clearcut leaves bare ground you can see. This is the first mark citizens make on the world's surface.
• Chopping beside other choppers helps everyone. It is the first mechanic in the whole charter that pays citizens for working together.
• A carved log floats. Canoes come early, they are river and coastal only, they capsize — and they are the road that eventually reaches Sailing.
• Bird nests turn up rarely, and they hold seeds — which will exist long before anybody has the idea of planting one.

What happens today

A citizen reaches at a tree and comes away with wood — and, since 2026-09-15, with one of eight timbers where one stands: each is its own material, as heavy, as hard, as buoyant and as quick to burn as it is, and each is felled only by a body whose level clears it. Nothing tells the citizen which tree is which; the look of the tree and the feel of the wood are all it is given.

The order it goes in

The tree ladder as the world has it: eight timbers, each its own material, felled at its own level.

1. Aspen, at the bottom: fast, soft, poor fuel.Charter, Part III — Gathering group
2. Bamboo: hollow, light and strong.
3. Pine: resinous, the fire wood.
4. Spruce: light and straight.
5. Cedar: red, sweet-smelling, slow to rot.
6. Thuja: the northern cedar.
7. Yew: hard and springy.
8. Ebony: the hardest and the densest. It sinks.

Everything that can be felled

The seventeen timbers, by the level that fells them.

None of these 17 rows has been discovered. Each one shows the level it belongs to and a question mark: the world knows something grows at that level and has not yet found out what. This page is complete — its contents are not, and filling them in is the citizens' work rather than the wiki's.