Lightyear Frontier Resources Guide

Resource families and what they feed

The resource economy has four practical families: wood and plant fiber for early construction and feed; stone, coal and ore for tools, frames and machines; crystals for advanced tools and upgrades; and region-specific plants or seeds for farming and paint. The wiki also groups items into raw materials and refined resources, which is useful when a recipe asks for a bar or frame rather than ore.

Each region has its own signature set. Clearing the region is what makes its native seeds, animals and rarer resources available, so a resource page is also a region-clear page in practice.

Clay and Fractalite sit outside the three-biome signature table. Clay is used in building recipes such as the House; Fractalite Ore appears in later 2024 recipes and was found in Lowland Plains and Tornado Rock Isle. 1.0 reshuffled placement, so scan for the current node instead of following an old pin.

Signature resources by region

The three-biome table is the clearest planning view. It does not replace the old six-restore-region names, which are covered on the map page, but it does show which biome to visit for a material.

The 1.0 areas Sandswept Highlands and Hollow Marsh are separate additions; their complete deposit tables were not available.

Gathering tools and actions

Wood comes from trees with the Spike Saw’s Saw Swipe; plant fiber also comes from bushes and shrubs. Stone uses Spike Punch on boulders, and the same action handles coal and ore deposits. Crystal needs a sufficiently upgraded Spike Saw before it can be harvested. Use the Vacuum Harvester for seeds, flowers and other delicate plants instead of cutting them down.

The 1.0 mech rework removes the old Power cost from tools, so a tool is no longer unusable because of a loadout budget. The tool still needs its upgrade tier for harder deposits; the removal of Power did not remove the tier gate.

Processing chain: logs, ore and chunks

Raw logs go to a Sawmill for usable wood. A Grinder breaks down plant and mineral inputs; a Furnace smelts ore into bars; a Mineral Crusher turns chunks into resources with a better yield than breaking them by hand. The wiki describes these constructs, though its recipe data still carries old milestone names.

Build the processing line near the storage and the first plots. A machine that is far from both inputs and output creates a walking loop that cancels the time it saves. Automation pipes can move materials later, but the first processing area should still be laid out by hand.

What 1.0 changed for resources

The official patch notes increase wood dropped from every log type from 4 to 6, make large trees drop ordinary Wood instead of Hardwood, add a Resource Scanner to the map menu, add trailer and animal markers, and reshuffle world resource placement. Storage capacity is ten times larger, so the old “build many crates” advice is less urgent.

The scanner is the main 1.0 quality-of-life change: it lets you search from the map instead of walking a route from an old guide. The exact deposits in Sandswept Highlands and Hollow Marsh remain the largest evidence gap on this page.