Beginner's Guide

Starting out in Better than Wolves can be challenging - indeed it is intended to be so! However, you are not without recourse. This guide will help you in understanding key Better than Wolves features.

Before we embark on this journey of learning, it pays to mention an important caveat of this guide: it will not attempt to explain vanilla Minecraft features. Since many of the mobs, blocks and mechanics in this mod were already present at the time of the 1.5.2 release of Minecraft, it may behoove you to read up on any mechanic not explained in this wiki. The following link is provided for that purpose.

Minecraft Wiki.

Preparation

Better Than Wolves is a total overhaul of Minecraft. It adds many advanced features like Wind Mills while tweaking standard gameplay to be harder and more rewarding. With the addition of Hardcore Spawn, maintaining one single homestead is no longer a feasible option. In the early game, it is better to concentrate on surviving, creating landmarks and expanding. Many renewable resources are no longer readily cultivated and may require traveling long distances to obtain. Some of the more unique features of the mod like the Light Block and Soulforged Steel require access to the Nether and the End, respectively. Many of the items and blocks that will be obtainable on the first day of a Minecraft game will take much longer to obtain in a Better Than Wolves playthrough.

Changes of Note

1. Hardcore Spawn
2. Animals do not re-spawn.
3. Hostile mobs target and kill animals.
4. Many low tier tools have been removed, replaced or weakened. See Hardcore Tools and Weapons.
5. It takes longer to break blocks when using basic or no equipment.
6. When broken without a proper tool (i.e., punched or exploded), most blocks drop a portion of their derivative parts:
7. The lower your health or food level, the slower you move and break blocks.
8. Wheat seeds and pumpkin seeds can only be obtained from below-ground exploration.
9. Unlit caves are now completely dark no matter your brightness settings.
10. Complete darkness must be avoided.

For more information look at Changes From Vanilla

Pre-Mechanical Survival

Starting with nothing and surviving through the first night can be difficult. It may take a few attempts and failures before you find a strategy that works for you. Go ahead... try for a bit. Failing helps keep the game interesting and won't hold you back in the long run. Assuming you're starting a new world, you will have no resources available other than what is procedurally generated. Some early game freebies such as villages and temples near the spawn are now abandoned, leaving little to no helpful resources.

General Practice

1. Every morning look for cobwebs to break, even if you don't break them that moment, take a mental note (they arent going anywhere). Remember you can break down any bows into string too

2. Look for bones, you can make bone clubs and they are just as strong as axes for attacking animals, after day one I recommend switching to bone clubs or axes to kill animals, you use too much hunger chasing after them with wooden club. With an axe/bone club and with practice, you can kill pig on the spot over 75% of the time, sheep are weaker and much easier to kill.

3. Try to learn how to force creeper explosions without taking much damage, the amount of dirt you can get is invaluable in the first couple of days. Or consider killing them if food is tight, Nitre can be used to cure meat, albeit at reduced efficiency (doesn't restore as much hunger so use it as a last resort).

4. Gather wood; stone can be gathered at night if you have enough exposed stone in your little cave, don't expand the cave too much because you dont want to have to light it with a torch

5. Gather clay as you go, and dig a rudimentary 4x4x2 ditch. Later you can build a pedestal to protect from mobs when you have enough logs to spare

6. Keep an eye out for surface iron as you go, and save it to mine later if food is an issue. You need 8 iron for a chisel and this should be your goal after you have a clay oven.

7. Once you have a chisel you get access to stone picks and then you can start aiming for an iron hoe for hemp seeds... chickens... sustainable food.

Day One

On your first day in an area, all you can reasonably do is collect enough supplies for a campfire and build/dig an enclosure from hostiles. This will require tediously punching any tree of your choosing until it spits out one shaft. Make sure to punch anything but the trunk, as trunks take longer to destroy and do not drop shafts. Don't be discouraged if it takes a while. The first couple of log transitions will likely only spit out bark and sawdust. You will not need to destroy more than one log to get a shaft.

Shaft obtained, go to the nearest available stone. Dig down or into a hill if you have to. Take the shaft in your inventory and place it into the 2 by 2 crafting grid. This should craft a pointy stick for you. Use the pointy stick on the stone block to get one stone. Similarly, put the stone in your crafting grid to get a sharp stone. With the sharp stone, you can now more quickly get shafts from logs. It makes more sense, however, to first use the sharp stone to get more sharp stone.

If nightfall is already setting, don't worry. Just distribute any stone you have obtained into the four slots of the crafting grid. This will give you loose cobble slabs, which can be placed in the overworld and picked up using any tool (including your fist). Peppering these around the map before dying will give you a good headstart the next time you spawn or wander into that area. If you still have time before nightfall, go back to a nearby tree and use your supply of sharp stones on the logs to build up your desired amount of shafts. I recommend leaving at least one sharp stone as a spare at all times. The amount needed to start a campfire is 6 (4 for the campfire and 2 for the fire plow). Campfire recipe is one shaft in each grid space; fire plow is the two shafts distributed horizontally. Now that you have your camping set, find or make a hideyhole (possibly where you dug into dirt to find stone). Place your campfire in a spot you won't be walking onto.

Campfire Usage (As a Light Source)

Point the fire plow at it and hold left-click until it lights. It takes a long time, so keep holding. Once it does, feel free to stop and feed it any bark or sawdust you might have on you. There are five obvious states that a campfire can be in. Just after lighting, it will be at a modest flame. This stage can be walked over without any damage to you. After a few seconds, it will pick up and become medium flame. This is the desired stage for most uses. Feeding it enough to bring it to high flame is a good indicator that you have enough fuel to last while you do other things. Keeping it at high flame produces a better radius of light, but (and I'm not quite sure about this) it might be less efficient fuel-wise. If you leave the campfire unattended long enough, it may produce a hissing sound, indicating that it is almost out. This will be evident from it having no flame and only showing dying embers. You can still rekindle it from this point, but any item cooking (we'll get to that later) will have its progress reset. If you ignore the campfire long enough, it will go past that point into burnt out. At that point it cannot be recovered.

Other Things to Keep in Mind

• At this point, hunger may have set in. If you did a lot of jumping or killing things, it probably reduced your food meter considerably. Jumping can be avoided using dirt slabs (created from two dirt blocks side by side). Wait until you have a weapon or axe before killing nearby animals for food, as it is much more efficient and less hunger intensive than doing it bare-knuckle.
• Keeping an eye on the sun can keep nightfall from surprising you. Basic stuff, I know. The sun rises in the East and sets in the West (as in real life). The moon in Minecraft does the same. When nightfall hits, unless you have prepared a modest shelter already, make a terrible one quick! Dig a deep hole in the ground if you need to. As you won't be able to build a log cabin or anything nice on the first day, just digging into a mound of dirt is a better goal.
• When the first night has fallen and hostile mobs roam free, your only forms of protection are your shelter and your tools. By the start of initial spawn nightfall, the only weapon likely obtainable will be a wood club (made with two shafts aligned vertically in the crafting grid. These break easily. So, unless you're only using it for knockback, you might need a few.

Day Two

At the start of the second day, you may wish to wait for any skeletons or zombies nearby to keel over. You may have to just listen for the sound indicator. When ready, destroy whatever barricade you placed and run the heck out of your base before looking back. Reason being that creepers love to surprise you right outside your house. Unless you are in close proximity for about a second, they won't have a chance to do you much damage.

Depending on your situation, now may be a good time to either cut your losses or look for food. Less than four shanks, and you should just do more slab planting for the next go-around. Shafts can be placed onto dirt as well if you care to. Just collect and plant and die. It's fine. You'll come back later and be glad you did all the extra prep-work.

Four or more shanks on the food bar should be enough to gather more shafts and find some cute little animals to kill (as long as you don't run and hop around like crazy). For this purpose, you should get about three clubs (can also be made from bone for an upgraded version). Along the way, you may encounter spiderwebs. These are great finds, as string is required now for making stone tools. Use your sharp stone four times on each one to snatch up some string.

Stone Tools

• Axe: 2 stones, 1 string, 1 shaft
• Shovel: 1 stone, 1 string, 1 shaft
• Pickaxe: 3 stones, 1 string, 2 shafts

As the pickaxe requires more slots than are in the inventory crafting grid, this will be locked off until you get a crafting table later on. For now, get used to not really mining yet in Minecraft.

Hunting

1. Hunt as many animals in the general vicinity of your cave first, the few remaining animals will not be there for long (ignore cows obviously)

2. Head in one cardinal (N,S,E,W) direction and hunt as you go, take note of the time of day and turn back at a little past midday, you need time to re-light your campfire/oven

3. I use the animal availability as a cue of when to move on. Early game I'd recommend moving from cave to cave going where the animals are. However don't just move out in to the middle of an animal rich area as you'll waste them come night time, you want to move gradually, move into an area you have cleared out, but nearer to the places you haven't been.

4. Even after attaining a hoe you still will need to keep up the hunting. Ideally, you never want to let yourself have less than three stacks of food on you.

Campfire Cooking

Now that you hopefully have some meat, it's time to make another campfire. This time you'll need an extra shaft (7 total). If you still have your old fire plow around consider it useless. Since it takes so much of the durability just to start a fire with it, any remaining will not be enough to start another. Just craft it into sawdust for later use. If you have a spare piece of string, consider making a bow drill instead of a fire plow (1 string, 2 shafts). It takes less time to start, thus consuming less of the food meter. You'll multiple uses out of it too!

With your new campfire, pointy stick, and a fire starter; light it up, apply the stick and apply the meat. Make sure you feed the fire long enough for your meat to cook. It may take almost the entire night. If you run out of your normal fuel, try experimenting with anything you don't need. If you have plenty of food, fuel and shafts, try cooking on two campfires at once. It's less efficient than the oven you'll get later, but if you need to replenish your food meter now, it's worth the expenditure.

Everything That Follows

From the second day onward, survival is pretty freeform. There are goals you should have for sustainability, but many of them can be done in any order. Initial goals are as follows:

• Find enough sugarcane to farm and make baskets out of (one-stack storage).
• Dig up clay from shallow water areas (looks different now, as the blocks are a mix of dirt and clay).
• Place clay on top of dirt or logs to sun-bake into bricks.
• Use a total of 16 bricks to make four brick slabs.
• Use four brick slabs to make an oven.
• Find and collect exposed coal using sharp stones.
• Create coal from coal dust.
• Create primitive torches from coal and shaft. They burn out after about a day of use.
• Light and use torches for cave exploration.
• Find and mine at least eight iron ore blocks.
• Craft iron ore into chunks of iron.
• Place chunks of iron into oven.
• Completely fill (stuffing with extra flammables if available) and light oven.
• Store smelted iron nuggets in basket for later retrieval.
• Craft a chisel from four iron nuggets.
• Stumped on what to use it for? You'll figure it out.
• Get yourself a pickaxe and start mining

Sustainable Food

Since animals do not re-spawn, Hunger become a major threat to the player.

1. Fishing: For Bait use spider eyes, rotten flesh, Creeper Oysters, and Bat Wings. Best Times to Fish are dawn, dusk, full moon, or rain. Fishing is less effective at night. Also, be sure you're fishing in a large body of water! Unlike in vanilla, you won't catch anything if you fish in a tiny puddle.
2. Chickens are a good source of indirectly renewable food. If you find and seeds and have enough to spare from farming, use them to lure and feed chickens. Find a chicken, trap it, feed it. As long as they are hungry, chickens will even eat seeds dropped nearby. If fed before nightfall, chickens will reliably poop out an egg the following morning. Now throw that egg at something. You'll get either a raw egg (cook to avoid food poisoning) or a baby chicken out of it. Obviously, keep doing that until you have a chicken farm, and you will then have a pretty good renewable food source.
3. Mushrooms: In addition, you can try looking for brown mushrooms and start a farm for those underground. Adding three per raw egg will give you a raw mushroom omelette to cook and boost the value of your food source. Farming mushrooms is considerably slower and requires more space than traditional farming. It does not, however, require water, dirt or light.
4. Cow Milk: Craft shears to cut tall grass which will allow you to herd cows and sheep. Cows can be milked as long as they have tall grass to eat. Milk plus Raw Eggs equals scrambled eggs.

Beginning To Mine

Once you have a stable base with a renewable food source and a bunch of torches, you should try exploring deeper caves. Your main aim is to light your way down as far as possible, hopefully finding gold, diamonds and redstone. Due to Hardcore Stratification, it is not possible (or at least ridiculously unfeasible) to dig far enough down to hit diamonds using only an iron pickaxe. Instead, look for existing cave systems or abandoned mines to find your first source for redstone and diamonds. Once you have these, a large portion of the tech tree will be opened unto you.

Alternate Technique: FC mentioned on the forums a good alternative to branch mining is to hit the 2nd layer of stone then dig a long hallway just above it. Listen for water or monsters which will indicate a 2nd layer cave system, then carefully make an opening into the cave system. This cave system will most likely be a deeper system than surface caves - and it is much safer than trying to go down a trench/ravine.

Hemp Processing

Ok, in your first real stage with this mod you will get your first look at Hemp, a Hand Crank, and a Mill Stone. Step number one is to put together an iron Hoe (since you can't craft wood or cobblestone one) and start tilling a large tract of grassland for hemp seeds. Once you have 10+ Seeds go ahead and plant them at a good handy location with a fence around to keep out the pesky wandering animals. Remember that the soil needs to be hydrated!

Now move on to making and preparing your Hand Crank and Mill Stone.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Gear	Shafts and Wooden Plank

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Hand Crank	Shafts, Cobblestone and Gear

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Mill Stone	Stone and Gear

Since hemp has a VERY long growth time here are some objects you will need soon that you can go get while waiting for more hemp: Gratuitous amounts of wood, a steady food source while you build up, and finding wolves are VERY important activities that will help you progress not only through the early game but also help propel you through the midgame. On this list, however, food is by far the most important of the three, and also the hardest to sustain. The wolves will be put to good use later on. Put them in a corner and forget about them for now.

Now, back to your hemp Farm. Hemp has several growing stages, the first 3/4 of which occur in the first block with the final "ripe" stage being the appearance of a second block of hemp on top of the initial plant. Optimally, you should not cut the entire plant down, but instead harvest the top portion of the plant as it grows (somewhat similar to sugar cane), because the top of the plant regrows far faster than the whole. Once you get some hemp from the plants you can take it over and throw it in your mill. Place the hand crank on the ground next to the mill and hold down the right mouse button.... for a very long time. To make a windmill(your first mechanical power source) you will need 24 fabric, each fabric consisting of 9 hemp fibers. Each hemp makes 4 fibers, so you need a total of 216 hemp fibers or 54 hemp PLUS one Rope for every axle you'll use (Usually around 10), each rope using 6 fibers. At the slow rate of a hand crank it takes quite a while to get all the fiber you need. You can grind multiple millstones at the same time to double your grinding rate, although that will make you twice as tired. Be careful and keep an eye on your food bar while you crank.

Once you have 216 Hemp Fibers (3.5 stacks approximately), you can move on to the next stage!

Windmill

Goals for this stage are to build a Windmill, Axles, and Gearboxes, and bring power to your mill without standing there hand cranking it.

Before you go any further you can watch this video of Mechanical Power, especially the section from 5:50 to ~8:00 that explains how gearboxes and axles work (you may want to turn your sound down a lot before you hit play. You've been warned!)

[Tutorial]Better than Wolves 101 #2 Mechanical Energy & Hemp : How to start, how to use on YouTube

The recipes for the devices you need for this stage are:

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Fabric	Hemp Fiber

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Sail	Wooden Planks, Fabric

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Wind Mill	Sail

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Gear Box	Wooden Planks, Gear, Redstone Latch

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Axle	Wooden Planks, Rope

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Rope	Hemp Fiber

Keep in mind that gear boxes and axles will become the basis of all mechanical power systems you will construct in the future. You should make lots of them, especially when you start automating things.

Now, to build a functioning windmill you will need around 5 gearboxes to bring the power down to ground level and approx 20 axles. Another option would be to connect the millstone straight to the windmill (using 1 gearbox and 2 axles), although it is useful to bring the power to the ground/floor level if you want to build more mechanical contraptions there. You will probably want to build a structure to house the windmill as well. Windmills take up a huge amount of space; they are 13x1x13 (LxWxH). So any tower you build to house it must be at least 10 blocks high. The windmill is set up by placing an axle over the edge of your tower, turning it with a right click with empty hands so that it points out and away from the wall (unless it's already pointing in the right direction), and right clicking with the windmill in hand on the axle. The windmill should be placed. If you get an error message, you should make sure the 6 blocks above, below and to the sides of the windmill aren't taken. Remember - even torches and vines can stop you from placing the windmill. You will then run the axles back to your gearbox and down and away to your mill. NOTICE: Every axle can only transport power up to a length of 3 blocks. Placing more axles will just break them when the device is powered.

Leather Processing

Remember back when we said it would be very handy to get some cows and wolves together for later? This is later. Things you will need to start this stage are: a productive wheat farm (or just a decent supply of wheat), cows (at least 2, or else you won't be able to get more), a pack of wolves (two would be a minimum), at least 1 netherrack (probably want to grab glowstone and soul sand while you are there, and way more than 1 netherrack (up to 9), that's just the minimum) 7 iron, a bone, and a bucket of water. This stage is very short and simple once you get all the materials, the only new device is the Cauldron.

Now, put a block of Netherrack and ignite it. Above the flames (exactly 2 blocks above the Netherrack) there should be a Cauldron. It is very recommended to place 9 blocks of Netherrack (in a 3X3 formation, with the Cauldron above the center), because that will greatly increase the speed of the Cauldron.

You have successfully created a Cauldron. You can use it to heat many different food items at once, unlike the Furnace, and it is also capable of creating other things. Also, any items that are thrown into it will get inside. That means you can put it in the bottom of your traps, farms and toilet to effectively store items.

Now, farm some leather from your cows, feeding them wheat to breed, and thinning the herd as they mature. Simultaneously breed your wolves (feed them raw meat till they get hearts over their heads, while they aren't sitting) and once you have around 10 have them sit down in a little area and feed each one, beef or any other meat besides rotten flesh. Just sit around and wait. They will poop out dung, which you need to collect (be careful with that, you don't want to spill it). Once you have a few Leather pieces go over and put it in your mill at the base of the windmill from earlier. It gets processed into Scoured Leather, once you have that put it and the dung into the cauldron. Wait a few seconds and voila: Tanned Leather!

!Tanned Leather | align="center"| Scoured Leather,
Dung,
2 Jungle Bark or
3 Spruce Bark or
5 Oak Bark or
8 Birch Bark
8 Blood Bark |

Tanned leather is really your next step in building devices, much like hemp fiber, and will be used in a LOT of your upcoming stages, as such it is very important and you will probably want to maintain occasional hemp and leather processing as you go about the next few stages. Since you cannot yet fully automate anything.

Wood Processing

This stage has some very easy goals. You will first need to place your new tanned leather on a crafting table and grab some straps. Then construct a belt to use in making your first saw. Immediately after that you will be able to create a Hopper, and then the world of automation is busted wide open. Recipes used in this stage:

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Cut Tanned Leather	Tanned Leather Shears

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Strap	Cut Tanned Leather Shears

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Belt	Straps

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Saw	Iron Ingots, Gears, Belt and Wooden Planks

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Hopper	Wooden Sidings, Gears, Wooden Pressure Plate, Wooden Corner

First build the saw, then take it over next to your mill at the base of your windmill. Now run another axle out of one of your gearboxes and into your saw. To use the saw, place a block of wood in front of it, and it should be cut down into 2 pieces of wood called Panels. You can also cut a panel to get an even smaller one (1/4 of a wooden block) called Moulding. You can further cut the Moulding into Corners (1/8 of a wooden block). You can also cut corners into gears which is a very efficient way to make them. Continue until you have all of the blocks you need for the Hopper (2 panels, 2 gears, 1 corners). Hoppers are used to collect and sort things that pass over them. Using a combination of hoppers and water flows, and in some cases such as the nether, you will use pistons to automate all of your farm collection areas easily, and with more clever work you can automate just about anything in the game.

Hibachi + Bellows

After much thought and planning, the next section is going to be very short and really not accomplish very much because this is simply a needed step on the way to pottery. First step in this stage is to collect a lot of netherrack. 216 is again the magic number needed to make the 9 Hibachi that will be needed for our Kiln. Once you have 216 Netherrack you will need to place them in your mill and grind them down into Ground Netherrack. After that they will need to be dropped onto(hint hint, first semi automatic opportunity here) a hopper that has soul sand in the filter slot and Hellfire Dust will appear on top of the hopper in the place of the ground netherrack. It is important to note that you will need to run mechanical power to the side of the hopper you are using to filter the ground netherrack or your hopper will overload on the souls being filtered out(which are invisible) and explode, spawning a very bad friend. Hellfire dust is then placed in your Cauldron and 8 dust turns into 1 Concentrated Hellfire. Add an Element, some stone, and a redstone and you get a hibachi. You need 9 of those.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Concentrated Hellfire	Hellfire Dust

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Element	Blaze Powder, Redstone Dust, Hemp Fiber
Element	Blaze Powder, Redstone Dust, String

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Hibachi	Concentrated Hellfire, Stone, Element, Redstone Dust

Hibachi are actually very easy to use. All you need to do is run redstone power to them, and they create fire. If you are like me and simply leave them burning all the time then the easiest way to do this is to place a redstone torch immediately below each hibachi. The next piece you will need to complete your preperation for building a kiln is your Bellows. This is very easy to make and I will simply show you the pattern and move on to the next stage.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Bellows	Wooden Sidings, Tanned Leather, Gears and Belt

Ok, once you have at least one hibachi (though 9 is optimal) and a bellows in your inventory you are ready for the next stage.

Pottery

The pottery process is started with at least one but preferably several Turntables. When a turntable has mechanical power supplied to the bottom it rotates the block on top of it at varying speeds controlled by the indicator on the side of the turntable. Right clicking with empty hands will change to a slower rotate speed.

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Turntable	Sidings, Stone, Clock, and Gear

Your first step is to create 8 clay blocks. Then place the clay block on top of a turntable that is powered by an axle. It would be very handy to have a nearby lever that turned on and off the gearbox nearest to your turntable so as to stop the turning at the correct stage of the clays' shaping into Unfired Pottery. As a clay block turns on a turntable it goes through 4 stages that become the following items if placed in a kiln: Crucible, Planter, Vase, and Urn. For now you will need to stop the turntable at the first stage and collect the item once for a crucible, then go to the last stage for 7 urns.

Now we need to build a Kiln with the hibachi underneath and the bellows to stoke it. Your Hibachi are placed in a 3x3 square much like your netherrack under your cauldron but with 9 redstone torches under the hibachi. You will then take at minimum 4(but more makes it look better) brick blocks and place them as shown in the picture below. One block above the hibachi.

The kiln (on the right) with hibachis underneath it.

Your bellows must be placed against the center and one block above your hibachi facing the fire. Then you need to run mechanical power to the back of the bellows. Now power needs to be alternated to the bellows for it to expand then contract, the easiest way to do this is to use a turntable with redstone torch on the block above it. I'll leave the rest for you to figure out.

Now you have your kiln, to fire your unfired pottery from the turntables above you simply need to place the block in the center of your bricks and wait a few seconds. If nothing happens make sure you have your kiln only one space above your lit hibachi and that your bellows has alternating mechanical power to keep it expanding and contracting. Also check that your bellows is facing the right direction :P.

To move to the next stage you simply need to fire your 7 Urns and 1 Crucible.

Soulforged Steel and Anvil

Your first step in acquiring steel, along with the more advanced blocks that come with it, is placing a urn under a hopper with a soul sand filter, BE SURE THE HOPPER IS POWERED! Else you will get a bit of a surprise, along with a broken hopper, after placing 8 souls of the damned into the urn, place the urn into a crucible with some extract of carbon (coal dust), an iron ingot, and soul flux, like so

Name	Ingredients	Input » Output
Soulforged Steel	Soul Flux Coal Dust Soul Urn Iron Ingot

now you have your first soul forged steel ingot, now repeat 6 more times, then craft them into an anvil, like so: ! Anvil | align="center"| Iron Ingot |

Ok, now that you got an Anvil, you can now use the 4x4 crafting grid, for stuff like block dispensers and the like

Rendering

now you may be asking "why can't I make tools from steel?" the answer is quite simple, really, the shafts that you use normally are too weak to make steel tools out of, you need something tougher, such as a Haft, which is made like so:

Now you may be wondering what that orange stuff in there is, it's Glue, which is made from rendering leather. You may be asking "how do I turn leather into glue?" it's quite simple really, all you need is a cauldron and a fire. Now you may be asking why it doesn't work, well you know the bellows you made earlier? Now it's time to use them again, the fire needs to be hotter in order to render items down, and I'm pretty sure you know how to use those bellows... I hope.

Rest to be completed later -- slango20, Egger3rd