Knife

The knife is a melee weapon in RimWorld 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.

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.

Thanks 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.

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.

Obtaining

Knives can be purchased from any outlander and orbital combat suppliers, or obtained from outlander and pirate raiders. Knives can also be crafted at any smithy once the smithing research has been completed; from 40 of any metallic or wooden material, and 4,000 ticks (1.11 mins) of work.

Scenarios that start with a knife:

Crashlanded (plasteel)
Lost Tribe (jade)

Combat Performance per Material

Materials	Wood	Steel	Plasteel	Silver	Gold	Uranium	Jade^[1]
Damage	3	9	11	5	3	10	7
Cooldown	1.44s	1.6s	1.28s	1.6s	1.76s	2.16s	1.76s
Base DPS ^[2]	2.083	5.625	8.594	3.125	1.705	4.63	3.977
Armored DPS ^[3]	1.25	2.813	4.219	1.688	1.023	2.083	2.045

↑ Only obtainable with the 'Lost Tribe' scenario, or through save editing.
↑ Damage per second
↑ Normal quality armor vest (50% sharp damage reduction and 10% deflection; 20% blunt damage reduction)