Salvaged Cleaver

A road sign in your inventory is a decision. You can turn it into this cleaver, a melee weapon that drops a naked in very few swings, or you can put it into a road sign kilt and walk around with real protection. Early in a wipe most players take the kilt, and they are usually right.

The cleaver starts making sense once road signs stop being scarce. Say you have looted the barrels along the main road for a day, the kilt and the road sign jacket are already on your back, and one more sign sits spare in a box. Now a Level 1 bench and some frags give you a weapon that hits about as hard as melee gets this early. A worn-out cleaver only sometimes hands the sign back in a recycler, so treat the sign as spent.

The swing is slow and heavy, which makes it a door weapon, or something for a fight against a player with no gun, never a chase. For the same bench, a salvaged sword swings faster and lasts longer, though it costs a metal blade instead of a sign.