The short answer
The bow is not locked behind a skill level. It is locked behind a recipe unlock that fires the first time you produce coarse thread. The chain is short:
- Harvest flax — the blue flowers growing around the starting area. Harvesting flax is what makes the Spinning Wheel appear as a buildable option.
- Build a Spinning Wheel. If you cannot see it in the build menu, tab across from the general category to the crafting-construction category.
- Spin the flax into coarse thread. This is the step that matters: producing coarse thread is the trigger that unlocks the bow recipe.
- Craft the bow at the Fletching Bench — the official wiki's station for every bow in the game.
- Make arrows. Killing chickens for feathers unlocks the arrow recipes.
Why the guides disagree — and why they are mostly both right
This is the part that sends people in circles, so here is the reconciliation, source by source, with dates.
| Source | Date of the source | What it says | Which bow it is describing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Official wiki, Weapons page | read 2026-09-17 | Ash shortbow: 12 Ash Logs + 3 Coarse Threads. Crafted via fletching bench | Ash shortbow (power 2) |
| Official wiki, Weapons page | read 2026-09-17 | Adventurer's longbow: 16 Ash Logs + 6 Coarse Threads. Recipe learned from "a simple broken bow" found in Finn's Cave | Adventurer's longbow (power 2) |
| 1.0-era community bow tutorial | captured 2026-09-17 | Spinning wheel from flax; 12 ash logs and 3 coarse thread; crafted "at your crafting table" | Ash shortbow |
| Earlier community bow tutorial | captured 2026-09-17 | Flax → spinning wheel → thread → unlock; 3 coarse thread + 12 logs at the crafting table | Ash shortbow |
| Community range-weapon video guide | captured 2026-09-17 | "Adventurer's Longbow… in order to unlock the recipe we'll first need to grind to level 20 woodcutting", then a cave near the Wise Old Man, and 16 ash logs and 6 coarse thread | Adventurer's longbow |
| Reddit thread, "how do i make a bow" | replies from ~9 months before capture, read 2026-09-17 | "seems like with new update you cant get the bow till fletchers table"; a people-also-ask summary on the same page gives a fletching table at 8 ash logs + 4 stone + 1 coarse thread | Fletching bench (station, not bow) |
Read the table down the "which bow" column and the confusion dissolves: two different bows were being described, and the numbers 12/3 and 16/6 are both correct for their own bow. The Ash shortbow is 12 ash logs and 3 coarse thread; the Adventurer's longbow is 16 ash logs and 6 coarse thread. A reader who tries to reconcile one guide's "12" against another's "16" without knowing which bow each names will never make them agree, because they are not describing the same item.
What is genuinely still open: the station
The sources disagree about where a bow is crafted, and unlike the recipe numbers this one does not resolve:
- The official wiki says the fletching bench, for every bow in its tables.
- The 1.0-era community tutorials say the crafting table — one of them walks through the crafting table's category list to show where the bow entry sits.
- A Reddit reply from roughly nine months before capture says the recipe now requires the fletcher's table, described as a change.
Both readings are defensible: the station a recipe surfaces under can move between builds, and a wiki reflects the current build by definition. We are not adjudicating it. Check your own crafting menu — whichever station currently lists the bow is the right answer for your build, and if your game shows it at the crafting table, the tutorial you are following is not wrong, it is just describing a build. The batch's design notes flag this as one of the site's three live cross-source disagreements, which is exactly why it is printed here rather than smoothed into "build a fletching bench".
The bow table
The official wiki splits ranged weapons into three families, and the split is the useful part, because it tells you what each family is for:
- Shortbows do the lowest damage per shot and have moderate range, but they can be quick-fired — drawn shots versus quick shots, where quick-firing trades range and damage for the fastest fire rate in the category. They are the all-rounder.
- Longbows must be drawn to fire. They have the highest damage and range per shot and the lowest fire rate, and they are described as difficult to use at close range. They are the ambush and opening-shot weapon.
- Crossbows are one-handed and do moderate damage, but are only effective at relatively short range. The one-handed property is the point: a shield in the other hand.
A selection from the wiki's tables, with the crafting station it lists:
| Bow | Family | Power level | Crafting requirements (per the official wiki) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ash shortbow | Shortbow | 2 | 12 Ash Logs, 3 Coarse Threads |
| Adventurer's longbow | Longbow | 2 | 16 Ash Logs, 6 Coarse Threads — recipe learned from "a simple broken bow" found in Finn's Cave |
| Wild scout's shortbow | Shortbow | 3 | 10 Oak Logs, 2 Antlers, 2 Wool Threads, 2 Dwellberries — special effect: small draw-time reduction; recipe learned from a dragonkin statue in the Fractured Wild's vault |
| Oak shortbow | Shortbow | 3 | 9 Oak Logs, 3 Wool Threads, 1 Bronze Bar, 1 Opal |
| Oak longbow | Longbow | 3 | 12 Oak Logs, 6 Wool Threads, 2 Bronze Bars, 2 Opals |
| Crystal bow | Shortbow | 3 | 18 Opals, 4 Wool Threads, 4 Bronze Bars, 4 Anima-Infused Bark, 8 Vault Shards, 1 Vault Core — special action Scattershot; recipe learned from the quest Heartstrings |
| Blightwood shortbow | Shortbow | 4 | 8 Blightwood, 3 Swamp Threads, 1 Iron Bar, 1 Jade, 4 Vault Shards |
| Hunter stagbow | Longbow | 4 | 18 Antlers, 6 Ram Horns, 4 Swamp Threads, 4 Jades, 4 Vault Shards — special effect: +10% draw time; recipe learned from "a string of sinew" dropped by garou hunters |
| Undead ranger's bow | Shortbow | 5 | 16 Undead Bones, 4 Fine Thread, 2 Steel Bars, 2 Sapphires, 6 Vault Shards — increased damage, reduced durability |
| Willow longbow | Longbow | 5 | 16 Willow Logs, 8 Fine Thread, 4 Steel Bars, 4 Sapphires, 6 Vault Shards |
Three notes on that table, because they are the kind of thing that makes a table trustworthy or not:
- Everything is credited to the official wiki, read on 2026-09-17. These are the wiki's figures, not ours and not a community guide's, and recipe quantities in a live game change.
- One wiki entry carries its own defect note. The Oak shortbow's arrow damage multiplier is footnoted on the wiki as "Due to a bug, this is currently 0", and the Undead ranger's bow's figure carries a note that it was previously 43, "which was probably the correct value with its special effect". We reproduce the defect notes rather than silently printing a clean-looking number.
- Do not read the power level as a strict order within a family. The Adventurer's longbow is power 2 with 23 damage and the Crystal bow is power 3 with 20 — a higher power level with a lower number, because they are different families with different damage models.
Arrows
Arrows are a separate unlock from the bow, and the community tutorials agree on the route:
- Collecting feathers from chickens unlocks the arrow recipes. One contributor notes they unlocked arrows well before they could make a bow, which is normal.
- Stone arrows: 1 stone, 1 ash log, 1 feather.
- Fang arrows: 1 fang, 1 ash log, 1 feather, and they do "significantly more damage" than stone arrows.
- The Crystal bow's wiki entry notes that its special action does not require arrows to use, which is a real ammunition saving on that one weapon.
Was Ranged nerfed at 1.0?
Players report a Ranged reduction in the Early Access period, and the numbers they give are their own measurements: one account says "more than 50% reduction", another "up to 60% reduction". These are player self-tests from a community thread, not a published figure, and no patch-note value for a Ranged change appears in any source we read. We print them as player reports with their source, and we do not restate them as a balance change.
The same thread contains an observation worth knowing before you invest in a bow: a player describes bow combat as "a little awkward atm, being forced to move when you attack". That is one player's read of one build, and the combat system was overhauled at 1.0, so treat it as dated.
What this page does not claim
We do not print damage numbers for any bow beyond the wiki's own figures, we do not rank bows by damage per second, and we do not state that the fletching bench is definitively the station for your build. We do not print a Ranged nerf percentage as fact. And we do not tell you which bow to make: the wiki's family descriptions plus your own engagement range decide that, and this site has no damage model to justify a recommendation.