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) 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.