Gardening Trowel in Build 42 — A Tiny Blade With a Surprising 0.3 Shove

The Trade in One Line

The gardening trowel is the hand fork with a spine: same 0.2–0.4 damage, same 1 weight, same 6 condition, but knockback 0.3 and a 30% crit where the fork has 0.01 and 10%. On an otherwise-forgettable weapon, those two columns are the whole difference between a swing that nudges and one that does nothing.

What the Numbers Mean in Play Cross-Verified

• Damage 0.2 – 0.4. Bottom-of-table band, matching the hand fork and the rolling pin’s floor; two-to-four swings per kill.
• Knockback 0.3. Its rare merit for the weight: real stagger in line with the meat cleaver and machete, triple the cutlery’s 0.01.
• Crit 30%. Knife-tier luck — the garden fork and frying pan share this rate; the scalpel and hand fork sit at 10%.
• Weight 1. A free item in the pack, lighter than every common weapon’s 1.5–2.
• Condition 6. Fragile — just above the steak/fillet tier’s 5, far below the bat’s 15. Drain is Maintenance-gated — skill leveling guide.

When Not to Use It

• When a real blade is at hand. The hunting knife (0.6–1.2, 50%) and even the kitchen knife out-hit it; the trowel only beats them on weight-for-stagger.
• Past one scramble. Six condition is disposable; the crowbar’s 15 is a weapon you keep.
• When 0.3 is not enough. If you need a crowd off you, 0.3 is a nudge; take the bat or shovel at 0.5.

How It Compares

The trowel-versus-hand-fork row is a perfect control: identical damage, weight and condition, and the trowel wins purely on the stagger-plus-crit columns. Against the meat cleaver it gives up damage and life for the same 0.3 shove. The honest use is the one the weapon tier list allows the whole garden-tool class: a found fallback that is better than nothing precisely because it pushes.

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.HandShovel:

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.