How to get wood and cut down trees in Terraria

Last Updated on: 29th June 2022, 06:31 pm

One of the earliest and most basic resources available in Terraria is wood, making knowing how to get it in large amounts very important.

How to get wood in Terraria

Wood can be obtained by chopping down any trees using an axe-type tool. Trees exist as a sort of background object in Terraria, making it impossible for a pickaxe to hit all typical trees, with very few exceptions.

To gather wood, you will need to find a suitable tree, then take an axe to it. A new character starts with a copper axe that can handle this. You’ll then to click where to cut from on the tree and hold the mouse button down or click until the cut is complete.

To efficiently obtain wood and cut down trees in Terraria, it is recommended to target the lowest tile of a tree, as this removes the support for the rest of the tree and converts the entire thing to wood immediately, rather than only part of it.

Given how much wood you’ll need in the average playthrough, that’s a good habit to pick up as fast as possible.

Wood can be useful for a wide variety of purposes in Terraria, such as making the ever-essential torches, throwing together a first-night shelter as fast as possible, or making yourself a basic set of armor to reduce the total damage you take from attacks.

What about other types of wood?

There are indeed other types of wood in Terraria too. The trees in the starting forest biome provide ‘wood’, the initial and simplest variant of them all.

There are in fact up to 8 more types of wood you can find in Terraria outside of this standard one, including Rich Mahogany, native to the jungle biome; Boreal wood, native to the snow biome, and palm wood, from the ocean biome. All of these examples can be found pre hardmode just by exploring the world surface, while others are specific to hardmode.

Each of these wood types has its own distinct look both as a tree and when placed as a block. They are also all be used in their own respective furniture sets.

More generally, other crafting recipes call explicitly for the ‘standard wood’ found in the forest biome, or simply any wood at all, in which case wood from any source is acceptable.

There are even newer tree types than those shown here, though the latest additions are largely cosmetic and do not possess unique wood types.