Garden Fork in Build 42 — Pickaxe-Floor Damage in a Weight-2 Blade

The Trade in One Line

The garden fork is the dependable-floor weapon: 1.0 minimum damage — the highest guaranteed swing among non-rare finds — at weight 2 with a solid 30% crit. The two columns that hurt it are knockback 0.3, which buys no space, and condition 10, which does not last a long day of swinging.

What the Numbers Mean in Play Cross-Verified

• Damage 1 – 1.5. A floor of 1.0 that no light blunt weapon reaches; the bat bottoms at 0.8. The ceiling of 1.5 sits under the fire axe’s 2 and the machete’s 3.
• Weight 2. Normal two-handed cost — same as the shovel, bat, crowbar and machete; nothing you must park in a vehicle.
• Condition 10. The short fuse: the durable common set holds 15 (bat, crowbar, nightstick, chainsaw). Maintenance slows the drain — skill leveling guide.
• Knockback 0.3. Nudge tier with the machete, wrench, hatchet and fire axe; against a line of zombies it gives nothing back.
• Crit 30%. Middle-strong — the shovel and bat crit higher (40%), the hunting knife at 50%; 30% is a good rate on a 1.0-plus base.

When Not to Use It

• When you want the bigger ceiling and the shove. The spade out-damages and out-pushes it at the same weight — the fork only wins the guaranteed-floor column.
• In a crowd. 0.3 knockback does not flatten lines; the sledgehammer’s 1.0 is built for that fight.
• On a long, un-supplied run. Condition 10 is real; the bat’s or nightstick’s 15 outlasts it when you cannot resupply.

How It Compares

The fork’s niche is floor value: a 1.0 minimum in a weight-2 slot. But the spade shares that slot and adds a higher ceiling, 0.5 knockback and a 40% crit — it simply out-performs the fork on everything but the floor. The pickaxe raises the whole package a tier (2.2 ceiling, condition 13) at one more weight. Ranked class-wide in the weapon tier list, the fork is a very good find and rarely a keeper.

Sources & Verification

Every figure on this page is agreed by two independent sources we can read today, matched by the in-game item ID Base.GardenFork:

What this is not. Neither source is our own measurement, and PZwiki stamps most item pages against an older 42.10-era build while flagging that they may lag the current release. Treat these as 42.20-era agreement rather than 42.21-verified, and expect a patch note to change them eventually. Spawn locations are deliberately absent from this page: we could not source them twice, so we do not print them.