There is no class to pick
Search around and you will find people asking for the best starting class in Nightingale. There isn’t one.
Nightingale runs on a Tier system. Realms, resources, recipes and enemies all carry a tier, and progression means unlocking recipes with Essence at the Progression menu. Your character has no class, no archetype and no starting profession.
So the actual opening decision is simpler and more consequential: which Tier 1 Simple tools do you craft first. That decision has a clear winner, and it is not the weapon most people pick.
The beginner guide covers the first hour of the loop. This page is about the four items you make before anything else.
The four Tier 1 weapons, by the numbers
All four are crafted at the Simple Workbench and sit in the Simple set, which contains 16 Tier 1 tools in total.
| Weapon | Damage | Critical | Magick Power | Durability | Weight | Slot | Damage type | Recipe |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simple Maul | 80 melee | none listed | 10 | 250 | 4 | Two-handed | Blunt | Ingot x1, Wood Bundle x1 |
| Simple Short Bow | 75 ranged | x2 | none | 250 | 2 | Two-handed | Missile | Wood Bundle x1, Animal Fibre x1 |
| Simple Sword | 38 melee | x2 | 10 | 300 | 1 | Main hand | Slashing | Ingot x1, Wood Bundle x1 |
| Simple Hunting Knife | 20 melee | x3.5 | 10 | 300 | 1 | Main hand | Slashing | Stone Block x1, Wood Bundle x1 |
Read the top two rows again. The maul deals 80 damage and the sword deals 38, and they cost the same Ingot plus Wood Bundle. That is 42 points of damage for free if you only look at the number.
The bow’s 75 looks close to the maul until you notice it is ranged and two-handed — and the knife’s 20 looks terrible until you notice the x3.5 critical multiplier, which is the highest of the four.
The maul wins, and the reason is the damage type
Raw damage is only half the story. The other half is what each type does to what you are hitting.
| Damage type | Weapons | Effective against | Ineffective against |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bludgeoning | Hammers, Mauls | Bug enemies, Automaton | none listed |
| Slashing | Sickles, Swords, Throwing Knives, Wood Axes | Azazel, Beelzeboar, Eoten | Automaton |
| Missile | All Firearms, Bows, Slingbows | none listed | Automaton, Eoten |
Bludgeoning is the only melee type listed as effective against Automatons. Slashing is explicitly ineffective against them. Missile is ineffective against them too.
So against an Automaton the choice is not close: maul, or nothing. This is the single most useful fact on this page, because Automatons are the enemy that makes new players conclude their gear is broken.
The mirror case matters just as much. Missile is ineffective against both Automatons and Eotens, which means the bow is dead weight in exactly the two fights where you would want range. Slashing is effective against Eoten, Azazel and Beelzeboar, so the sword and knife are the Eoten answer.
Put together, the maul and a slashing weapon cover every enemy family the game lists as having a weakness. The bow covers one and is penalised against two. That is why the standard “sword plus bow” opener is the wrong shape.
What the maul actually costs you
The maul is not free. It has no critical multiplier listed at all, while the sword and bow get x2 and the knife gets x3.5. Its durability is 250 against 300 for both one-handed weapons, and it weighs 4 against 1.
The heavier cost is the slot. The maul and the bow are both two-handed; the sword and knife are main-hand. And there is a third constraint that decides the argument: charms attach to clothing, umbrellas or ranged weapons, and not to melee weapons.
That means a maul build cannot take a charm at all. The bow can. There are 40 charms in the game, and every one of them is locked out of a pure melee setup. If a charm like Charm of Brutality or Charm of Ferocity is doing work in your plan, the maul is not the weapon that carries it.
So the honest answer is a pair, not a single pick: maul for Automatons and bugs, a slashing one-hander for Eotens and everything with a Blade weakness. The bow is the third slot, not the second.
Why the bow still belongs in the plan
The Simple Short Bow does not earn its place through damage. It earns it through what learning the recipe unlocks: the ability to craft Arrows.
Arrows are the ammunition for every bow and slingbow you will ever make, and the recipe arrives attached to the bow. Skipping the bow entirely means delaying that unlock, and delaying it means the Slingbow later costs more set-up than it should.
Its recipe is also the cheapest of the four in metal terms — Wood Bundle and Animal Fibre, no Ingot. If you are short on Ingots, the bow is what you can actually afford, and the maul and sword both want one.
The knife is the one people underrate
20 damage is the lowest number of the four, so the knife gets skipped. It should not be.
Its x3.5 critical multiplier is the best in the tier. 20 times 3.5 is 70 on a critical hit, which puts it within reach of the sword’s 76 while costing Stone Block instead of Ingot. It has 300 durability, the joint highest, and weight 1, the joint lowest.
More importantly, the knife is the harvesting tool for stripping skin and meat from creatures. It is the only one of these four that is both a weapon and a gathering tool. A sword that kills well but cannot butcher the kill is a worse opening purchase than a knife that does both.
One caveat worth knowing: the weapon’s own page lists its damage type as Slashing, while the damage type overview lists hunting knives under Piercing. The two wiki pages disagree. Treat the knife’s type as unresolved before you build a whole plan around it.
The rest of the starting kit
The Simple set is 16 Tier 1 tools, and the weapons are four of them. The others are the ones that actually gate your progression: Wood Axe, Mining Pick, Hammer, Sickle, Climbing Picks, Watering Can, Umbrella, Fishing Rod, Torch, Throwing Knife Sheath, Slingbow and Explosive Grenade Satchel.
Priority order that holds up: the Workbench first, then the gathering tools, then one combat weapon, then the second combat weapon. A crafting guide plan that starts with weapons will stall the moment it needs Animal Fibre or a mined ore it has no pick for.
Tier 1 realms are Abeyance only. Tier 2 opens Sylvan’s Cradle, Welkin’s Reach, Antiquarium and Astrolabe realms. Tier 3 holds Magwytch Marshes, Gloriana’s Tears, The Hollowed Moor, The Gauntlet, plus Provisioner, Herbarium, Gloom and Hunt realms. You are not going to Tier 2 on Tier 1 weapons, so the starting kit only needs to be good enough for Abeyance — which is another argument against over-investing in the bow.
If you would rather buy than craft, the Simple Hunting Knife can be purchased from the Abeyance Essence Trader for 70 Tier 1 Essence.
Charms and workstations, briefly
Charms go on clothing, umbrellas or ranged weapons, and they add a passive perk. That is the charm guide territory, but the loadout consequence is worth stating here: a melee-only opener forfeits the entire charm system. Take one ranged item for that reason alone if you intend to use charms.
Augmentations are buildings that attach to a nearby workstation and unlock extra recipes. Two rules bite new players. First, owning the augmentation is not enough — the recipes still have to be unlocked by exploring realms. Second, a workstation has a fixed number of augmentation slots, and a new augmentation takes priority over an older one, which means you lose the old bonus. Higher quality workstations carry more slots, so upgrading the bench is what stops the juggling.
The loadout that survives Abeyance
Make the Simple Workbench. Then the Wood Axe, Mining Pick and Hammer, because without them you cannot feed the bench. Then the Simple Maul, because 80 Blunt damage is the cheapest answer to the Automaton problem. Then the Simple Hunting Knife, because it is a weapon and a butcher’s tool for the price of one Stone Block.
Take the Simple Sword when you have an Ingot spare and something with a Slashing weakness in front of you. Take the Simple Short Bow when you want Arrows unlocked and a charm slot open.
That ordering costs two Ingots, one Stone Block and a handful of Wood Bundles, and it leaves you able to hit every enemy family in the tier. The gear guide covers what to do once tier upgrades start arriving, and the resource guide explains where the Ingots come from in the first place.