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 30 Stuff (Metallic, 300 for SMVs)s (Metallic or Woody), and 1,800 ticks (30 secs) of work. It can also be purchased from any outlander and orbital combat suppliers, or obtained from outlander and pirate raiders drops.

Analysis

Knives are low-tier melee weapons with a slightly below average damage output, but are cheap and fast to produce. That being said, the gladius offers significantly better performance for little more in the way of resource costs and more time to craft.

If all your colonist have bad crafting skill, the knife is a decent option. When you have a colonist with good crafting skill, (crafting level <7) and can build Fueled smithy or Electric smithy, then this is the moment to upgrade to the gladius or Longsword. The fact that you can make knives at an crafing spot, makes this weapon very desirable in the early game, especially in hard scenarios, like Naked Brutality.

A plasteel Knife can be as good as a steel longsword, deals less damage, but with less cooldown between attacks, yielding an overall little more DPS, but have lower penetration, making it good for colonist with low melee skill but great potential (e.g. kill <6 but with passion in melee and/or brawler trait and low shooting skill with not passion).

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 2,000 battles per result. Higher percentages are better.

The following armor categories are:

Unarmored - Plainleather button-down shirt and plainleather pants
Flak - Steel simple helmet, flak jacket, flak vest, plainleather button-down shirt and flak pants
Marine - Marine helmet, marine armor, plainleather button-down shirt and plainleather pants

Steel knife vs.	Unarmored	Flak	Marine
Fists	87.90%	70.90%	48.53%
Wood	78.10%	55.30%	29.05%
Steel club	56.55%	32.40%	15.05%
Steel gladius	42.75%	43.85%	43.35%
Steel ikwa	47.05%	46.00%	42.85%
Plasteel knife	26.00%	31.45%	29.90%

Plasteel knife vs.	Unarmored	Flak	Marine
Fists	96.50%	86.50%	68.55%
Wood	91.10%	76.06%	53.80%
Uranium club	47.50%	28.05%	9.80%
Plasteel gladius	42.30%	42.60%	39.05%
Plasteel ikwa	44.30%	44.15%	42.45%
Steel knife	74.00%	68.55%	70.10%