Clover Time Tools: Which Tool Is for Woodcutting, Crops, Mining, and Fishing

Clover Time keeps its utility roster small and tidy: exactly four tools, each tied to a single gathering activity. The Axe handles woodcutting, the Rake handles crops, the Pickaxe handles mining, and the Fishing Rod handles fishing. None of them are weapons — they're "tools in the game mainly used for side missions," as one early review puts it, and everything they collect feeds quests and crafting rather than combat.

Axe — woodcutting

The axe chops down trees to collect wood, and it isn't picky about the target. As one tool walkthrough puts it: "With this, you can chop down any tree or log you see on the ground." Trees have a small HP bar above them — playthrough footage shows each hit removing about one point, so you simply keep swinging until the tree falls. Size changes the workload, not the method: "The bigger the tree, the more logs you get," and the more HP it has, the longer it takes to drop.

Two timing rules matter in practice:

• Logs fall to the ground when a tree goes down and disappear if you're slow to collect them. Grab them the moment the tree breaks.
• The wood isn't just for early quests. One player's sword upgrade required 55 wood, and wood keeps feeding crafting recipes as you progress.

Rake — crops

The rake is the crop tool, used for harvesting activities like the potato-collection quests. (A couple of translated playthroughs call it a "hoe" — it's the same crop tool; written guides and most videos call it the rake.)

It's the simplest of the four to operate. Harvestable crops are marked with a green leaf indicator: stand next to the plant with the rake equipped and press E. One press rarely finishes the job — expect roughly two to three presses before the potato pops out for collection.

The growth requirement is the part players miss:

• Fully grown plants only. Small, immature plants can't be harvested at all — one playthrough shows a press on a young sprout doing nothing.
• A grown plant can still come up empty. The same playthrough had a harvest produce no potato, so if nothing drops, just move to the next plant.

Harvested potatoes go straight to your inventory, where they serve quests and cooking rather than combat.

Pickaxe — mining

The pickaxe breaks rocks to collect ore and stone, and it works on any rock. Mining reuses the woodcutting loop with a different trigger: walk up to a rock and press E to mine — one playthrough kept expecting a click before finding the action on E. Like trees, rocks have an HP bar that chips down about a point per hit, and when the rock breaks, collect the stones or ore on the ground quickly, because they vanish on the same decay rule as felled logs.

Ore types documented so far include sulfur ore, stone ore, and metal ore. Mined ore feeds the crafting system — an item-guide walkthrough shows ore smelting into refined sulfur, metal bars, stone bricks, and coal at a furnace.

Fishing Rod — fishing

The fishing rod is the one tool you won't use in your first minutes: fishing becomes available through progression rather than from the start. No source pins down the exact level or requirement, so treat it as an early-to-mid unlock you'll reach by following quests.

Once it's available, the loop works like this:

1. Equip the rod and press V to fish.
2. Press V again to select bait. Bait comes in common, uncommon, epic, rare, and legendary tiers — one early recording also shows a mythical bait, so the top of the ladder isn't settled. Whether rarer bait actually improves catches isn't documented anywhere, so don't stockpile legendary bait on that assumption.
3. Attach bait, wait for the bite, then play the catch minigame. "Wait for it to bite. Minigame. Very simple, okay? Just keep clicking."

Most fish can be sold to the fish-seller NPC, but fishing also feeds progression directly: the Golden Marlin yields mana crystal fragments, which — alongside potatoes — go into crafting mana crystals for grimoire spins at the tower. The fishing guide covers the activity in more depth.

Which tool for which activity

Tools are for gathering, not fighting

Every source frames the roster the same way: side-activity equipment whose output feeds the crafting loop. Wood and ore turn into weapons, equipment, fishing rods, armor, and consumables like stamina and luck potions at the crafting bench, and materials only become more important as you progress — so the standing advice is to chop, mine, and harvest while you're already out exploring instead of skipping the side activities (see the materials list).

Two boundaries round out the picture. One playthrough picked up a "cool big axe" and found it couldn't hit enemies — a single-session observation, but it matches how every guide describes tools as non-combat gear. And if you spot a scythe in item showcases, that belongs to the weapon roster, not the utility tools.

One caveat on all of the above: these observations come from Clover Time's launch window, when the game was new and actively updated. Tool behavior can change with a gathering rework, so treat anything that stops matching in-game as a patch, not a mistake on your end. These four are the tools documented so far; more may exist as development continues.

Get the tools you need

Knowing which tool an activity needs is half the job — the Clover Time how to get tools walkthrough covers where each one comes from, and the crafting page shows what your wood, ore, and crops can become once you have them.