Fir, oak and maple are gatherables: rez one on your land and you have a tree that colonists can fell for logs, and that grows back on its own. The harvest is the same for all three — what changes is the wood you end up with, and that matters a long way down the chain.
What it is
A tree comes in two parts, a top and a stump. Rez it where you want it and it is ready; there is nothing to configure before someone can chop it.
The tool
You need a lumberjack axe, which comes from a smith. Attach it to your avatar, left-click the tree, and you start chopping. Each tree you take down spends some of the axe’s durability, so a woodsman working all day is a customer of the forge whether they like it or not.
Felling
When the chopping finishes, the top of the tree turns physical and falls over, and the logs are handed to you. In the video that was two logs.
The felled top is a temporary object and clears itself away. The tree respawns quickly — quickly enough, in the video, that the new tree was standing while the old top was still lying on the ground. That is not a bug; the respawn is simply faster than the temporary takes to vanish.
Spawn points, for owners
This is the part that makes a tree worth rezzing rather than decorating with.
Hold left-click on the tree and let go after about a second to open the owner menu.
- Set point — records the tree’s current position as a place it may respawn. Move the tree, set another, and repeat. Points can be anywhere on the same sim, at any altitude, as long as they stay inside that sim.
- Removing one — open the same menu and pick the location you want gone out of the list. Useful when you have set a point by mistake.
- Done — closes the menu.
When the tree is felled it respawns at one of the points you have set, chosen at random. It may well pick the same spot twice in a row, and it may well pick the far side of the sim. That is the point of setting several: a forest that moves.
Picking the tree up and re-rezzing it clears every spawn point stored in the script. If you are rearranging a region, set your points last.
Fir, oak and maple
The chopping is identical for all three, and so is the owner menu. The difference is the timber.
Logs go to the Logging Station, which needs no tool of its own — one is built into the station. From there each step halves the size and multiplies the count:
1 log → 2 large planks → 4 medium → 8 small → 40 wood scraps
Planks are the Carpentry Bench’s entire diet — handles, arrows, barrels and the frames, headboards and legs behind almost all furniture — and the Carpentry Bench and Furniture Station both care which wood a part was cut from, because harder woods make furniture that survives more hits. Oak also feeds the drinks chain: oak barrels, and the oak, maple and fir chips that aging barrels take.
So plant a mix. A region with only one species gives its carpenters only one kind of furniture to build.