Fire Axe in Build 42 — Damage, Weight and Where It Loses to the Pickaxe

The Trade in One Line

The fire axe is the compromise heavy weapon: everything the sledgehammer does violently, it does moderately, at half the weight and longer life. 0.8–2 damage kills in one clean swing at the top of the roll and two swings at the bottom; weight 3 and condition 13 mean you can actually carry it and keep using it. The one thing it never buys is knockback — 0.3 is machete territory.

What the Numbers Mean in Play Cross-Verified

• Damage 0.8 – 2. A wide, swing-dependent band: the floor is baseball-bat territory (the bat runs 0.8–1.1) while the ceiling nearly reaches the sledgehammer’s 2–3 floor-plus.
• Weight 3. Half the sledgehammer’s 6. Light enough to be a travel weapon, one unit over the crowbar/bat/machete class at 2.
• Condition 13. Tied with the machete and the pickaxe, above the sledgehammer and katana at 10. Drain is gated by Maintenance — the skill leveling guide covers the loop.
• Knockback 0.3. The heavy weapons’ lowest tier. The sledgehammer’s 1.0 is what you are not getting for the 3 weight you saved.
• Reach 0.61 – 1.2. Shortest maximum of the heavy set — under the sledgehammer’s 1.35 and far under the pickaxe’s 1.6.
• Crit 20%. Floor of the interesting group: the bat does 40%, the pickaxe 25%.
• Door damage 8. PZwiki infobox — crowbar-level, not axe-of-war level. The sledgehammer does 40 and the pickaxe 35.

When Not to Use It

• When the pickaxe is in front of you. Same weight, same condition, better on every other sourced number. The fire axe’s claimed edge — swing speed — comes from the weapon tier list, not from either data source, and we say so on the record.
• When you need a crowd on the floor. 0.3 knockback with a 0.8 floor is a weapon that can panic-clamp (the flat −0.1-per-level penalty in the tier list formula bites the floor first — see mood and panic). The sledgehammer exists for exactly this fight.
• When doors are the mission. 8 door damage is prying-crowbar work. If entry is the objective, the page for the 40-damage answer is the sledgehammer’s.

How It Compares

Door figures are PZwiki infobox values. Machete row included because it is the uncomfortable comparison: same knockback as the fire axe, a full tier of weight saved, and sledgehammer damage. The fire axe earns its slot over the machete only if the Axe-class skill loop is the one you are running.

Sources & Verification

Every figure on this page is agreed by two independent sources we can read today, matched by the in-game item ID Base.Axe:

What this is not. Neither source is our own measurement, and PZwiki stamps most item pages against an older 42.10-era build while flagging that they may lag the current release. Treat these as 42.20-era agreement rather than 42.21-verified, and expect a patch note to change them eventually. Spawn locations are deliberately absent from this page: we could not source them twice, so we do not print them.