Hearth and Hamlet Wood: Gathering, Lumber Camp & Uses
Hearth and Hamlet wood is the first resource you gather. Learn how lumber workers harvest it, its base trade value, and every system that consumes it.
Hearth and Hamlet wood is the first resource you learn to gather and the material that carries you through the opening hours of the game. You harvest it by hand, then hand the job to lumber workers, and it flows into construction, research, item crafting, and trade for the rest of the run.
The short answer
- Role: first gathering and construction material, consumed everywhere
- How to get it: click to gather, then assign lumber workers at the lumber camp
- Base trade value (build 0.80): 1
- Starting worker cap (build 0.80): 3
- Data footprint: 232 research records and 7 shop entries consume or reference Wood
What Wood is for
Wood is the raw material behind almost every early decision. The build 0.80 catalogue lists Wood as gathered by hand and then by lumber workers, with a spread of uses that runs through construction, research, item crafting, and trade — which makes it the single most cross-cutting material in the game. Where Stone arrives later to share the construction load, Wood is there from the first click.
The demo makes that role concrete in its opening minute. The very first goal is to gather 50 Wood to build the camp, and only after that milestone does the game unlock fishing and the rest of the early building list. In other words, Wood is the gate that opens the settlement.
Because so many systems draw on it, Wood is also the resource most likely to be over-committed early. A new player can easily spend every log on the next building and then discover a research node or a trade order that needs the same stockpile.
How Wood is gathered
Wood starts as a manual job. In the demo you hold down the gather button to chop trees yourself, and the opening task of collecting 50 Wood is done entirely this way. It is simple, but it is also temporary — the game expects you to automate it quickly.
The automation comes from the lumber camp, a building that lets you assign workers to chop Wood in the background while you manage other tasks. With a worker assigned, Wood production runs passively, and you can still click to help speed it up, so manual gathering and worker output stack together.
The build 0.80 data gives Wood a starting worker cap of 3, the same figure as Stone and Gold. That suggests the lumber camp opens on the same small-team footing as the other gathering sites and scales later through the worker tier system.
Wood’s numbers in the game data
Wood’s base trade value in build 0.80 is 1, the same baseline as Food and Stone. That is not a sign that Wood is worthless — it means the game prices basic materials equally and reserves the higher values (Gold at 2, Iron at 1.5, Magic at 3) for the economy and late-game layers.
Its footprint in the data is the real story. Wood appears in 232 research records and 7 shop entries, which puts it among the most-referenced materials in the catalogue. That breadth reflects a design where basic construction material is consumed everywhere rather than held for a narrow late-game set of systems.
The full resources guide places those numbers next to the other five resource types, so you can see how Wood’s spread compares with Food, Stone, Gold, Iron, and Magic.
Where Wood gets spent
Wood’s biggest consumer is construction, where it pairs with Stone to pay for buildings and their upgrade tiers. Every structure from the camp onward draws on the same Wood stockpile, so a build-heavy phase can drain a reserve that looked healthy minutes earlier.
Research is the second sink. Wood appears across blueprint design upgrades, storage expansions, and a wide spread of technologies, which means a player who funnels all Wood into buildings can starve the research tree that would make those buildings cheaper or stronger.
The shop list adds a few specific items, including the Expert, Master, and Legendary Blueprint Design entries and the “Stone Breaking Powder” item. The blueprint entries are notable because they suggest a crafting or unlock loop that consumes Wood rather than just storing it.
Wood in the early progression
The demo’s opening loop is a clean illustration of Wood’s place. You gather 50 Wood by hand, build the camp, unlock fishing, then assign a lumber worker so Wood keeps flowing while you turn attention to Food and the next buildings.
That sequence repeats with every expansion: a new building asks for Wood, a worker shift produces it, and the leftover decides whether research or trade gets the surplus. Learning to keep Wood flowing without starving Food is the core skill of the first hour.
It is also why Wood and Food are usually the first two levers a player moves. Both are cheap to produce and both are consumed constantly, so the opening game is largely a conversation between the two — see the beginner guide for how that conversation plays out.
Wood and trade
Wood is one of the resources traded at all eight destinations in the build 0.80 data — Ankhet-Nar, Ashenholt, Crimsonvale, Fangmire, Ironrend, Rubescairn, Sephirah, and Sniktcrag. Two of them, Ankhet-Nar and Sephirah, list Wood among their strongest demands, which makes those towns the natural outlet for a Wood surplus.
That matters because a full Wood storage is wasted production. If the stockpile is capped and no building or research is pending, sending Wood on an expedition can convert an overflowing reserve into income or a resource your terrain cannot produce.
The exact multipliers and travel times are later-game data and may change in future patches, so use them to understand route planning rather than to memorise a profit ranking. The trade guide breaks down all eight destinations in detail.
Wood’s video situation
Wood has no dedicated gameplay video worth embedding. The public footage that shows Wood is mostly full-demo playthroughs where chopping appears only as an opening step, not as the subject, so there is no focused walkthrough of the lumber camp or its upgrades to point to. For that reason this page embeds no video; the resources guide carries the closest general look at gathering.
The scarcity of Wood-specific material reflects the limited source coverage. The confirmed facts are the gathering method, the trade value, the worker cap, and the research and shop footprints above; deeper details like exact per-worker output rates remain To be confirmed until verified against the released game.
Demo v1.0.46 vs build 0.80 data
Two versions sit behind the facts on this page. Demo v1.0.46 is the final pre-release demo and the source of the opening 50-Wood goal and the lumber-camp loop, while build 0.80 is a later static data package that supplies the trade value, worker cap, and research counts quoted above. Build 0.80 data is not presented as final full-game data.
Because Wood-specific sources are thin — a general resource page, a demo playthrough, and the community database — treat any number here as a structure to learn rather than a formula to trust. Exact production rates and full-release costs are To be confirmed.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get Wood in Hearth and Hamlet? Gather it manually by clicking, then build the lumber camp and assign workers so it keeps flowing in the background.
What is Wood used for? Construction, research, item crafting, and trade. It is the most cross-cutting material in the game.
What is Wood’s trade value? Build 0.80 lists a base trade value of 1, the same baseline as Food and Stone.
Where does Wood sell best? Ankhet-Nar and Sephirah list Wood among their strongest demands in the build 0.80 data. See the trade guide for all eight towns.
Is there a dedicated Wood video guide? No. Public footage shows Wood only inside full-demo playthroughs, so no focused walkthrough exists yet (To be confirmed).
Wood is the backbone of early construction. Pair it with the resources guide for the other five materials, the buildings guide for the lumber camp and its tiers, and the research tree guide for the upgrades that keep it cheap.
Sources: Steam store page · Steam announcements · Hearth and Hamlet Wiki — Wood