Stick

Sticks are a crafting material and fuel material in The Long Dark.

Fire Starting info

Products

												Item	Skills	Materials
												Tinder Plug	None	1 ×  Stick
												Torch	None	3 ×  Stick 1 ×  Cloth 0.10 L ×  Lantern Fuel
												Snow Shelter	None	15 ×  Stick 5 ×  Cloth
												Fire Hardened Arrow	None	5 ×  Stick 5 ×  Crow Feather
												Fishing Tip-Up	None	2 ×  Stick 1 ×  Cloth 1 ×  Scrap Metal 1 ×  Fishing Tackle

Tips

Torches (including Ruined Torches) may be harvested into a stick, for just 2 minutes (in-game).

Sticks can be found near trees on the ground. They can also be obtained by breaking down branches or scrub brush. It takes 10 minutes (5 with a hatchet) to break branch into three sticks.

While sticks have one of the worst burning time to kg ratios (second only to books), each stick adds 1°C to the fire, with each hour's worth of burn time adding 8°C to the fire. This causes large numbers of sticks to produce hot and relatively short-lived fires (most fuel sources yield 6°C per hour of burn time, firelogs yield 10.5°C and coal yields 20°C).

Sticks' short burn time gives control over a fire's duration, minimizing waste of fuel or matching timed tasks such as melting snow and boiling water, or to extend a fire to harvest a torch.

Sticks can also be used as a basic compass, because when dropped they will point towards the "north" of the map when outdoors. Not all maps have a properly represented north as "up", but dropped sticks will always point in the same direction on the same map.

It's commonly believed that sticks respawn after strong winds or blizzards, but this is untrue. Radial spawns (sticks, branches, coal, stones ect.) simply spawn on a randomized timer, independent of any weather conditions.

Gallery

An arrow for navigation purposes made out of four sticks.

Update history