Stones

Most of the stones you ever farm end up inside walls. Wood buys you a night; stone is what makes a group with spears and torches give up and walk on to a softer base. So the first real evening of a wipe tends to look the same: a twig 2x1, a door, and then every stone in your pockets goes through the hammer before you log off.

You get them at the plain grey nodes. The stone pickaxe is the first tool after the rock in your hand, and it costs a hundred stones itself. Move to the metal pickaxe as soon as a Level 1 bench stands, because every node you hit with it pays more and the trips get shorter.

Your smelting is built from stone too. A furnace takes 200 and a large one 500, and the high external stone walls around a compound eat thousands more. Groups that plan to cook a lot of ore usually send one player to farm nothing but stone on the first day.