Crossbow
Weapon · WeaponCrossbow4★Sends an Arrow off with no effort at all. Loading eats time, but the shot lands hard.
Crossbow is the strongest crossbow in the game by attack, at 490.
No recipe takes it as an ingredient. Whatever you build is the finished article, so there is no reason to hoard spares.
Details
At 13 weight each it eats carry capacity fast, so bring a mount or park a chest nearby.
Crossbow Crafting Recipe
Wood×100
Stone×80
Ingot×20
Nail×5
Ancient Civilization Parts
Ore×42Crafting it takes 206 materials across 5 types.
Where to Find Crossbow
The recipe is not on the Technology tree — it is locked behind a schematic you have to find first. The best single source is crates on the small oil rig at 2.0% per container, and the table below lists every tier and where each one drops.
The dig row in the table above is only half a route, because a treasure map is itself something you have to find. Tier 1 maps come out of enemy camp boss stashes at 40% in the Grasslands and 35% in the Forest, out of grade 5 chests at 20% in the Desert and on Mount Obsidian and 12.5% in the Snowfields, and off Mount Obsidian dungeon technology-book stands at 10.1%. That first line is the one that matters: clearing a Grasslands camp rolls the schematic pool directly and hands you a 40% shot at a map on top, so the same fight pays into both routes. One quirk of the dig pool before you plan around it — it carries Crossbow Schematic 2, 3 and 4 at 4.808%, 1.923% and 0.769% but never Schematic 1, so a dig always starts you a rung up the ladder.
Rank the pools by what a single roll is actually worth and the order is not the order of the headline odds, because schematics fuse five-to-one and every lower copy is a fifth of the tier above. Counting the whole ladder, 100 crates on the small oil rig are worth about 4.43 Legendary copies, 100 rolls of Grasslands enemy camp loot — land camp or sea base, the numbers are identical — about 2.56, 100 tier 1 digs about 1.35, 100 Grasslands supply drops 0.64, and Forest or Grasslands chests and fishing 0.31 and 0.17. The rig also breaks the pattern that governs everywhere else: in the camp, chest, fishing and supply pools each rung is exactly five times rarer than the one below it, so no tier is a better buy than another and no spare copy should ever be scrapped, while the rig runs 24, 16, 8 and 2 percent — the top tier is only four times rarer than the next, which is the one place hunting it outright beats fusing.
Using Crossbow Well
Every rarity of this crossbow is built at the High-Quality Workbench, which the Technology tree sells at level 11 for 3 points — one rung below the level at which it offers you the plain crossbow. A schematic therefore skips the queue entirely: the bench, 100 Wood, 80 Stone, 20 Ingot, 5 Nails and a single Ancient Civilization Part are the whole bill, and every alpha in the game hands over parts at 100%, so even the weakest one you can beat covers that line. Two cautions. The schematic has to be riding in your own inventory when you walk up to the bench — leave it in a base chest and the Legendary option simply never appears in the menu, with nothing to tell you why. And the work figure is 480,000 against 15,000 for the tech-tree build, thirty-two times the labour for double the wood, stone, ingot and nails plus the one part, which is a very long queue for the Handiwork Pals you have at level 11. Stack the bench before you start the craft, not after.
Do not chase the elemental versions. The Fire Arrow and Poison Arrow Crossbows have exactly the same 490 attack and 1,400 durability, cost 2 Ancient Civilization Parts instead of 1 and 800,000 work instead of 480,000, and their schematics appear in no loot pool anywhere in the game — no chest, no camp, no dig, no merchant. The plain build loses nothing for it, because every crossbow rarity accepts all three arrow types, and the burn and the poison live on the arrow rather than the weapon. Flame Organ or Venom Gland, one each, added to the ordinary 2 Wood and 2 Stone, turns a batch of ten into elemental ammunition at the same Primitive Workbench.
The High-Quality Workbench is the floor for this recipe rather than the whole of it. The crossbow sits in both crafting families at once: the general ladder of High-Quality Workbench, Production Assembly Line at tech 29, Production Assembly Line II at 42 and Advanced Workshop at 62, and the weapon ladder that opens at the Weapon Workbench at tech 20 and runs on through Weapon Assembly Line at 32, Weapon Assembly Line II at 47 and Advanced Weapon Assembly Line at 63, with the Ancient Workbench at 67 accepting it as well. Nine benches in all take the schematic, which is the thing to remember on the day a Legendary copy finally drops: 480,000 work does not have to go back on the level-11 bench in your starter base. Queue it at whichever of those your best Handiwork crew is already assigned to.
The ladder is not priced the way the drop tables alone suggest, because the build bill climbs with the stats. Against the tech tree's 280 attack, 300 durability, 15,000 work and 50 Wood, 40 Stone, 10 Ingot and 2 Nails, the four schematic rungs run 364 attack and 800 durability for 62 Wood, 50 Stone, 12 Ingot and 2 Nails at 60,000 work; 406 and 1,000 for 75, 60, 15 and 3 at 120,000; 448 and 1,200 for 87, 70, 17 and 4 at 240,000; and 490 and 1,400 for 100, 80, 20 and 5 at 480,000. Two things fall out of that. The work doubles at every rung while the weapon gains a flat 42 attack and 200 durability, so the Legendary is thirty-two times the labour of the tech-tree build for seventy-five percent more damage. And the Ancient Civilization Part is charged only on the top rung — Schematics 1, 2 and 3 ask for nothing but wood, stone, ingot and nails — while the first rung is far and away the biggest single jump on the chart, 84 attack and 500 durability against 42 and 200 for each of the three above it. A Schematic 1 is therefore something to build the evening it drops rather than bank for a fuse: it costs no part, it queues in an eighth of the time, and it nearly triples the durability of the crossbow you are carrying.
Know the window you are buying. After the crossbow at 13 the Technology tree offers no ranged weapon at all until the Musket at 21, so a Legendary copy is the hardest-hitting bow or gun a player can hold through the whole of the early game — and then it keeps earning its slot, because 1,400 durability is seven times the Musket's 200 and well over four times the Makeshift Handgun's 300 at level 24. Ammunition is the other half of the argument: arrows are 2 Wood and 2 Stone for ten at the Primitive Workbench, unlocked at level 3 for a single point, with no furnace, no gunpowder and no supply line behind them. That is what makes the crossbow the weapon you can fire without thinking while every gun in your bag is rationed. The honest ceiling is the Compound Bow at level 42, which starts at 1,100 — grind this schematic in your teens, and by your forties spend the Ancient Civilization Parts on something else.
Every Tier of Crossbow
The same piece exists at 5 rarities, and the gap is not cosmetic: attack runs 280 to 490, a 1.8x swing. Which one you end up with is decided by the rarity of the schematic you built from, not by the recipe — so a legendary copy of this is worth more than the next item up built from a common one.
Ammunition Crossbow Uses
Crossbow takes 3 kinds of ammunition — Arrow, Fire Arrow, Poison Arrow — so the damage you actually deal depends as much on what you loaded as on the weapon itself.
| Ammo | Yield | Craft cost |
|---|---|---|
 Arrow | ×10 | Wood ×2, Stone ×2 |
 Fire Arrow | ×10 | Wood ×2, Stone ×2, Flame Organ ×1 |
 Poison Arrow | ×10 | Wood ×2, Stone ×2, Venom Gland ×1 |
Schematics That Unlock Crossbow
The Technology tree hands you the plain Crossbow at level 13 for 2 Technology points, but nothing above that base version — the rarer builds are schematic-only. One schematic grants the recipe, and they are world loot — chests, boss Pals and the late-game pools — rather than anything you research. Higher-rarity copies of the same schematic raise the quality of what you end up crafting.
Fastest route. The fastest route is crates on the small oil rig, and the reason is the ladder rather than the top rung: that pool stocks every tier, so the common copies it hands you fuse upward into the one you want. Counting them, a top-tier Crossbow schematic works out at roughly 23 containers against the 50 the 4★ drop rate alone suggests. Spare low tiers are progress, not clutter. Schematics fuse five-to-one, so a lower tier with better odds can beat the top tier outright. Counts are containers of that source, not time.
| Schematic | Rarity | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|
 Crossbow Schematic 4 | 4★ | Crates on the small oil rig, Treasure map digs (tier 1), Grasslands camp loot +5 more — best 2.0% (grade 3/4/5) · Supply drops in the Grasslands (0.16%) |
Alternatives and Upgrades
Nothing in the crossbow class beats it on attack. The next one down is Fire Arrow Crossbow at 490, so if you are still using that, this is the upgrade worth the materials.
Other crossbows at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
