Why Melee
The Weapons & Attachments guide covers guns; this one covers blades. Melee weapons are silent, cheap, need no ammo, and several of them double as farming tools or even cheap raiding gear -- so the right blade earns its inventory slot all game long, not just on day one.
You find the better ones (machete, mace, longsword, salvaged cleaver, salvaged sword) in barrels, toolboxes, crates, and high-tier loot, or craft them at a high-tier workbench. (Exact damage numbers get rebalanced often, so this guide focuses on each weapon's ROLE rather than figures that drift between patches.)
Combat Blades
For a straight fight, a few stand out:
- Salvaged Sword: the best all-round PvP melee -- high damage, fast swings, cheap to make, and only ~20 scrap to research. If you carry one blade, make it this.
- Longsword: the raw-damage king -- the single hardest-hitting melee in the game, a tier above the rest on pure damage per hit.
- Machete: criminally underrated -- fast attacks plus heavy BLEED, so a couple of hits leaves an enemy bleeding out even if they escape. Cheap, too.
- Salvaged Cleaver: a strong slasher with high slash damage in the machete's league.
- Mace: a 2-handed heavy whose design makes it easier to actually LAND hits, even if it swings slower.
Most of these sit in the mid damage tier; the Longsword is the lone high-tier outlier.
Farming Blades
Melee weapons are also your barrel- and component-smashers, and the speed differences are real:
- Barrels / components: the Longsword and Salvaged Cleaver are the fastest, with the Combat Knife close behind -- carry one of these on road runs to clear barrels quickly.
- Roadsigns (for armor crafting): the Mace is the clear #1, with the Salvaged Hammer second -- if you're farming road signs for a roadsign kit, bring a mace.
- The Machete is the balanced pick: strong at barrels AND roadsigns, very cheap -- but weak on WOOD (about half a hatchet's yield), so don't use it to chop trees.
- The Salvaged Hammer is the great early-game multi-tool (harvests rock and wood faster than a rock, smashes barrels), and the Pickaxe is the WORST melee for both fighting and farming -- keep it as a mining tool only.
Melee Raiding
One blade crosses over into raiding: the Salvaged Sword is the fastest and cheapest MELEE way to break deployables and the soft (and even hard) side of WOODEN walls and doors.
It's a real budget-raid tool -- a handful of salvaged swords will chew through a Tool Cupboard or a wooden door in a few minutes for just metal fragments and no gunpowder at all. The catch is durability: a sword wears down as it hits, so you repair it with metal fragments until it finally breaks, and you'll burn through several to finish a wooden base. Against stone or metal it's hopeless -- this is strictly a wood-tier, no-boom raiding option for early-wipe targets.
Picking Your Blade
A quick decision guide:
- One do-everything blade: the Salvaged Sword -- cheap, strong in PvP, and a soft-side raid tool.
- Maximum kill damage: the Longsword.
- Cheap bleed-based fights + balanced farming: the Machete.
- Roadsign farming for armor: the Mace.
- Early-game multi-tool: the Salvaged Hammer.
- Leave the Pickaxe for mining -- it's the weakest melee for everything else.
Keep a combat blade AND a farming blade if you have the slots, and remember melee's quiet advantage: no gunshot to give away your position. (Always sanity-check current damage on the live wiki, since Facepunch tweaks melee stats between updates.)