Knife

The knife is a primitive melee weapon, it that does a low amount of damage, has a short cooldown, and deals sharp damage. As is typical with any sharp weapon, knife attacks cause bleeding, and generally fares poorly against armor when compared to blunt weapons. Due to its low cooldown, knives are skill-friendly weapons; even if a pawn equipped with a knife misses their attack, another attack will follow not long after.

Acquisition

Knives can be crafted at the crafting spot, fueled smithy or smithy with 40 units of any metallic or wooden material, and 4,000 ticks (1.11 mins) of work. As well as purchased from any outlander and orbital combat suppliers, or from outlander and pirate raiders drops.

Analysis

Knives are lower-tier melee weapons with a slightly below average damage output, but knives are also cheap to produce. That being said, the gladius offers significantly better performance for little more in the way of resource costs, so you're better off making gladii than knives unless you're somehow in an exceptional circumstance where you urgently need melee weapons and can't obtain any more resources. Plasteel knives are somewhat better as melee weapons, handily out-DPSing a steel longsword.

Against armor, a steel knife actually performs slightly better than its gladius counterpart, probably owing to the shorter cooldown. That being said, a stone club still performs considerably better. When talking about plasteel, the knife continues to outperform its gladius equivalent, but the steel club is still better here.

Knife vs. Comparable Weapons

This section goes over how well the knife fares against comparable weapons (similar value, tech level or similar characteristics) in 1 vs. 1 combat.

Methodology

All testing is semi-automated which allows for large sample sizes to be gathered per set of results with ease
All pawns have a skill level of 8 in melee
No pawns have any traits that affect combat performance
All pawns are of 18 years of age and completely healthy

Results in the table below are the percentages of battles that knives either won or tied against the weapon listed in the first column of said table, with a sample size of 1,000 battles per result. Higher percentages are better.

The following armor categories are: