Tools Earn Their Place: Pickaxe & Axe Slots, and a Simpler Lock

Shipped 15 July 2026, the same day as the smithing rebalance — a good day for the working wanderer.

Tools get equipment slots

Your pickaxe and your woodcutter's axe have spent their whole lives loose in your pack, taking up slots that loot wanted. No more: the character panel now has two dedicated tool slots, one for each.

The details were designed around one hard rule — never interrupt anyone's mining:

• Gathering works from pack or slot alike. The game always uses the best tool you own, wherever it lives. Equipping is pure upside: two freed pack slots and a tidier character sheet.
• Your best tools equip themselves at login — upgrade-only, login-only. If you're wearing a better tool than you're carrying, nothing moves; if you smith a better pickaxe mid-session, it takes the slot at your next login (or equip it yourself from the pack row).
• Equipped tools are safe from Sell All by construction — they're not in the pack, so no sale can touch them.

Forged a new tier at the anvil? The Equip button is right on the tool's pack row. And yes — the fishing rod question has been asked. It's on the considered list.

The lock means one thing now

Item locking has been through some soul-searching this month. We tried a version where locked material stacks reserved a protected floor; we tried a version where a lock froze the stack entirely — no selling, no spending, no topping up. Both were clever. Both confused people, each in its own special way. Players kept telling us the same two things: my ore should stack into my locked pile, and I locked it so I wouldn't sell it — not so I couldn't use it.

So the lock is now exactly that, and nothing else:

A locked stack can never be sold — not by a mis-tap, not by Sell All. Everything else about it is normal.

New ore merges into your locked stack instead of forking a second one. The furnace counts it, the anvil spends it, the house build consumes it. When crafting does draw on your reserves, unlocked stacks drain first, so the protected pile is always the last touched. Gear locking is unchanged — a locked sword still can't be sold, and that's still the whole point of locking a sword.

Sometimes the right design is the boring one. The 🔒 now says one sentence, and it's always true.

Both changes are live on browser and Android. As always: defeat still costs position and never items, and nothing in this patch touches your existing progress.