A house is four walls until a carpenter gets inside it. Then it has a forge, a loom, a bar, a bookcase, a dartboard and a throne, and suddenly the family has somewhere to come home to.
A carpenter turns trees into everything made of wood, and that list is longer than anyone expects: furniture, bookcases, chests, doors, bars, thrones, the loom and spinning wheel the tailor needs, the training dummy the fighters practise on, wooden shields, staves and clubs, and every musical instrument a bard ever plays. If the family has a house, the carpenter is the one who makes it feel like a home.
The gathering half is Lumberjacking, and it is the gentlest resource job in Britannia. You use an axe on a tree, logs appear, you saw them into boards, and boards are what the menu actually wants. Trees are everywhere, nothing in a forest is trying to kill you, and the whole loop is about as relaxing as this game gets.
Two things lift it above pure decoration. First, special woods — oak, ash, yew, heartwood, bloodwood, frostwood — which make better gear and carry properties ordinary logs don't. Second, Lumberjacking quietly gives a damage bonus with axes in combat, which means a carpenter with a big axe is far more dangerous than any other crafter in this magazine.
You get 700 skill points in total, which is seven skills at 100 (Grandmaster). Here is a sheet that works, and why each line is on it. You can load this exact spread on the hero sheet in the magazine and slide the numbers around.
| Skill | Points | Why it's here |
|---|---|---|
| Carpentry | 100 | The craft: furniture, house add-ons, containers, instruments, wooden shields and the other trades' workshop gear. |
| Lumberjacking | 100 | Logs, the special woods, and a real damage bonus when you fight with an axe. The rare resource skill that's also a combat skill. |
| Bowcraft/Fletching | 100 | Same logs, different menu: bows, crossbows and arrows by the thousand. The cheapest extra trade any crafter can bolt on. |
| Arms Lore | 100 | The exceptional bonus, which applies to the wooden weapons and shields you make as well as to the furniture. |
| Tinkering | 100 | Saws, axes, hatchets and the rest of your own toolkit, forever. Also the dovetail saw Carpentry wants. |
| Magery | 100 | Mark and Recall. Boards are heavy and the good trees are never near the house. |
| Meditation | 100 | Mana to keep the travel running. Swap both of these for Blacksmithy and Mining if you'd rather be the family's only crafter. |
| Total | 700 | of 700 |
The axe damage bonus from Lumberjacking is real and large. A Grandmaster lumberjack swinging a two-handed axe hits harder than most characters who actually trained to fight. If you want to turn that into a proper combat character, add Tactics and Anatomy in place of Magery and Meditation and you have a genuinely frightening woodsman.
The loom, the spinning wheel, the training dummy and much of the house's useful furniture are carpentry work. Make these for the family early — it's the fastest way to be the most popular crafter in the house, and they're cheap at any skill level.
Skills go up by using them, and they go up fastest on a task that is just barely hard for you. Climb the rungs in order — each one stops paying off, and that's your cue to move up.
An NPC carpenter takes you to 30 and sells you a saw. Then walk outside and hit a tree — Lumberjacking needs no trainer and no technique, just an axe and about four minutes.
Boards are free and limitless, so this is the most forgiving grind in the game. Make the simplest item on the menu hundreds of times standing next to a pile of boards. Failures cost you boards you can replace by walking into a forest.
Pick the hardest item you can land about half the time. Start paying attention to which trees you're chopping — oak, ash and yew are worth collecting separately from plain logs, so carry separate bags.
This is where you become useful to other people: bards want instruments, fighters want wooden shields, and the house wants proper furniture. Exceptional pieces start showing up and Arms Lore makes them show up more.
The last ten points are slow for every crafter, so spend them making things the family will actually keep — a fully furnished house, a set of instruments, a rack of shields — and fill bulk order deeds from NPC carpenters while you do it.
Close to free. An axe, a saw and a forest is the entire profession, and the forest is renewable. The only line here with a real price is the house add-on deed, and that's optional until you're good.
| What | Where | What it's for |
|---|---|---|
| A hatchet or axe | Any provisioner or weaponsmith | For the trees. A two-handed axe doubles as a serious weapon once Lumberjacking is high, so consider buying the big one. |
| A saw and a dovetail saw | Carpenter shop | Logs into boards, boards into furniture. Buy spares; tinker your own later. |
| A fletcher's tools | Bowyer shop | For the arrow half of the sheet. One cheap purchase unlocks a second trade off the same logs. |
| Several bags | Provisioner | One per wood type. Mixing plain logs in with your heartwood is the classic carpenter's mistake and it is maddening to sort out afterwards. |
| A runebook | Mage shop | Runes to the house and to a forest with the trees you want. That's the commute. |
| A house, eventually | House deed | The thing your whole trade exists to fill. Nothing motivates Carpentry like having somewhere to put it. |
The right room makes training three times faster. These are the spots worth a rune.
Literally any of them. The woods between Britain, Yew and Minoc are endless and completely safe, which makes them the best resource ground in the game.
Named for the trees and surrounded by them. The traditional lumberjack's home town, and a short walk to the abbey if you want the scenery.
Workshop and showroom in one. Put the saw, the board chest and the finished furniture in the same room and the trade runs itself.
For the bulk order deeds. Same system the smiths and tailors use, and the rewards include runic tools for the woodwork.
Boards weigh less than the logs they came from. Convert on the spot and you'll carry far more per trip — the same trick the miners use with smelting.
Low skill, enormous goodwill. The tailor can't make cloth without a loom and the fighters train faster on a dummy. Two cheap items and you're the most useful character in the house by Tuesday.
Special woods look almost identical in a pack and get spent on practice furniture by accident. One bag per type, labelled, from the day you start collecting. Everybody learns this by ruining a stack of heartwood.
Lumberjacking's damage bonus makes you genuinely dangerous, which tempts carpenters into dungeons. You still have no Healing, no Parrying and no Resisting Spells. Being strong is not the same as being hard to kill.
Britannia runs on favours. These are the people you want in your party and on your friends list.