Meat Cleaver
Weapon · WeaponMelee0★Butchering knife for Pals. With it equipped the Pet command becomes Butcher, and a butchered Pal never comes back.
Meat Cleaver is an early melee weapon: 74th of 79 by attack, so treat it as a stepping stone, at 25 against the 2,400 of Laser Sword.
It feeds no other recipe, which makes it a terminal item: craft what you will actually carry and stop there.
Details
At 10 weight each it eats carry capacity fast, so bring a mount or park a chest nearby.
Meat Cleaver Crafting Recipe
Ingot×5
Wood×20
Stone×5
Ore×10Crafting it takes 30 materials across 3 types, and the bottleneck is almost always the 20× requirement — line that up first and the rest follows.
Where to Find Meat Cleaver
Meat Cleaver is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Using Meat Cleaver Well
Butchering is not just a delete button — the Pal hands over its normal drop table on the way out, the same items it would leave if you had killed it in the field. That makes a captured duplicate a bundle of materials you can cash in at base instead of going back out to farm the wild version.
The target has to be your active summoned Pal, not one sitting in the box or working at the base. Equip the cleaver, send the Pal out, then open the command wheel — the first slot flips from Pet to Butcher. There is no second confirmation after that, so check which Pal is actually out before you press it.
What drops is fixed per species, so the copy you feed to the cleaver makes no difference to the haul. Butcher the worst duplicate of a species and keep the one with the passives you want — a level 1 catch and a fully raised one give the same materials.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Step up from here and you get Metal Pickaxe at 30 attack; step down and it is Wooden Club at 25. The size of that step is what decides whether the crafting bill is justified yet.
Other melee weapons at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
