This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood.
The wood barely moves after it's split. If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side (they're pushed outwards by the axe).
You can't just randomly split it across the grain into slices like you're slicing bread.
I guess mostly: it's not tiring, which sort of sucks when you're doing it for real, but it is satisfying. This doesn't scratch that itch for me, but I guess it's fun in a way, similar to that cleaning simulator thing.
For players who are new to the game, there should be a 1/4 chance you go to bed proud of an honest day's work with your hands, and wake up the next morning having strained a muscle you didn't even know you had, and you can't chop wood for the next couple weeks.
There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.
I had to take down two absolutely enormous Douglas Fir trees on my property (> 36" base), and asked them to leave the wood rounds for me. I knew it was going to be a lot of wood, but even then, I was not prepared. I spent about a fair bit of my free time over the next 1-2 months just out there slowly working my way through the pile, and you're absolutely right - you get substantially better at it. For me, it looked something like this:
Stage 1: At first, I could chop essentially nothing, probably 60+ minutes per round as I mostly puzzled about how to make progress and got lucky from time to time with a round that split easily (fortunately, I had a nice splitting axe)
Stage 2: Then I bought some splitting wedges, and I used a handheld sledgehammer to drive them in to what I thought were the weak spots, and then ultimately pried open the log, to pieces that I could split more readily.
Stage 3: I bought a massive demolition sledge hammer (essentially a two-handed battle hammer) and used that to drive the wedges in after getting them started, and made a bit more progress on actually splitting the rounds.
Stage 4: After doing this countless times, you just a knack for reading the wood, and where it will / won't split. I reverted back to using just the splitting axe, since if you hit the wood in the right spots, it really just splits on its own.
Here's where I ended up, if it helps any of you:
- Start by establishing the fracture line that will be used to split the round in half. I would eyeball any existing line on the round towards the center, and use the axe head to mark a line, away from any knots , from the center to the edge. These two center-to-edge didn't necessarily need to be inline. They could be slightly offset, like hands on a clock.
- With moderate force, just repeatedly strike that line, working from the center outwards. You'd be shocked out how quickly repeated strikes widen the line, and eventually the wood's own weight almost causes it to fall apart.
- Recursively do this with the two halves: Draw the line from (what was the center), radially out to the edge. Repeatedly strike until these pieces have been halved.
- Continue this process until you have proper pizza wedges. At this point, it's pretty trivial to just chop the pizza wedge, from the wedge to the base, into 4 or 5 smaller firewood-sized logs.
I know y'all probably didn't care to read this, but this was quite honestly weeks of my life in learning this, and I couldn't find a great guide on YouTube or anything, especially for rounds this big.
Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC872sqjMNC8kHU0GU0ShZFw while cautioning that she seems to be genetically engineered to split wood. Her technique is like watching an Olympic athlete. No wasted motion at all, all energy delivered to the maul straight down. She’s a muse.
My grandfather was like this, and not with soft wood. We try to burn Australian hardwoods and that takes quite a bit of force to split. He could pound through it like a knife through butter. There’s a definite art to hardwood, looking where the slightest fault might be. You can’t just smash it in the middle, your block splitter (preferred) or axe just bounces off it.
It's a combination of technique and the type of wood. Even with perfect technique, some wood is simply too hard to split. I've got the bottom 5 or 6 rounds of a bigleaf maple sitting in my yard that I simply can't make a dent in. You're welcome to take it if you can split it :)
In former times you had to serve a twelve year apprenticeship before you could be trusted to split wood for barrels, you can do a PhD in rocket science in less time.
As a very novice wood splitter the thing that most jumped out to me was the wood splitting in one swing every time. That's one or two orders of magnitude off from my experience.
> I miss the part where the axe gets stuck and you hsve tovturn it over.
Hit it around the edges, like taking a chord from the edge of a circle, and try to use the top half of the bit to do cutting. Good ax technique depends on accuracy, on top of which you can slowly add strength as your accuracy improves. If there's a crack in the end of a round, you should be able to put the bit of the ax directly into it, which will normally split it wide open without much effort. Different species of wood have different characteristics though, so terms and conditions apply.
As someone who spent a teenagehood doing the same, I agree it was far too (un)satisfying to be able to cut the pieces and not having them fall to the side. But if you have an excellent axe and true flat surface you could get pretty close to the game. But for better reality it needs more indication of splinters and blisters after a few runs. I suggest adding a cast iron wedge splitter as a next level option.
I dunno, what are you splitting? For full rounds or the large chunks that first split off them, I often do have stuff go flying when it finally splits. Typically I am splitting on top of another round so that adds to the distance.
Was just doing this literally the other day! But with a hydraulic log splitter which made it pretty easy and fun. The hardest part was lifting and stacking all the logs!
For anyone reading the above comment and wanting to see what the commenter might be referring to, here is the first YT video I found on that channel that is relatively brief but has an example of the techniques involved:
I find it much easier to use AI to vibesplit my firewood. Sure, it costs me lots of money to buy axe tokens, and sometimes all I end up with is a useless pile of splinters or sawdust, but it's the way of the future; just imagine how efficient it'll be when the tech has matured?
Not if you also want to get excellent exercise. It would take me no time at all to build a splitter for my tractor if I wanted one, but I plan on chopping by hand until I can't because otherwise I will either be significantly less fit or have to take out additional non-productive time to workout.
I'm right there with you. I've manually split wood with wedges when I was a kid. It was tedious. Now I just use the wedges for felling the trees. I get enough exercise from the stacking.
I've always felt the attraction to manual splitting was some idyllic vision of country life, backed up by the movie trope where characters are having "alone time" but still "being strong". I'd be interested to hear if anyone in this thread burns a significant amount of wood (say 4 cords), and actually splits it all by hand.
I only like splitting perfectly seasoned wood ( I do about a face cord every summer/fall). Otherwise it’s just too much work. Got any tips in to tooling? I use a maul.
I have a couple diamond/ grenade wedges, a rescue wedge and a traditional wedge I barely ever use. I have the big Fiskars maul and that is great for a lot of stuff. Bigger things, whole rounds I use two wedges near each other and hit them in concert with the sledge side of the maul.
Most wood is easier to split when dry/ aged, but I recently learned that does not apply to elm and a few others, so it’s worth checking. Elm is awful no matter what.
People here seem a little confused. This is a simulator in the same way Goat Simulator is a simulator. It’s from a collection called “screen toys” and it’s meant to be mindless fun.
The proper term is a shortened form of "hear him, hear him," which was necessary because British Parliament didn't allow clapping or cheering. Instead, if you wanted to show agreement with a speaker's point, you'd shout out that everyone else should "hear" him.
Not to be confused with "hear ye," which evolved from the French "oyez," which is the imperative form of "to listen," which was shouted at a crowd before an important announcement.
Mocking too nerdy gripes on "simulator" accuracy, sharing some real world experience with physical things beyond the screen frames, and on in the same vein.
A breath of fresh air, really, in the prevailing AI smog.
Looks like its coded by someone who has never split firewood.
The challenge is not deciding where to split, its executing the split. Like hitting the same gap if it doesn't split, deciding orientation to aoid knots, figuring out how to put it on end if it wasn't cut straight.
And some of the cuts it allowed me would hit the ax handle on another part, the shock from that damages the ax handle and is painful on the hands.
And then there's the lifting the stuck block by the axe and hitting it axe side down to finish the split instead of pulling the stuck axe out.
So the simulation handles none of the challenges of splitting wood.
I love it also, but I think the comments are pointing to an unmet need for firewood splitting simulators.
The comments are suggesting that someone could go to town adding different kinds of hatchets, mauls, axes, woods, and different swings, and people would eat it up.
Yes, but obviously this toy faces a challenge when folks who take this stuff seriously walk by. I immediately want a bungee to put around it so the wood doesn't go everywhere. I also want to split it finer than in quarters. Had to nope out.
Well, what about when you get into a piece of apple wood, and as soon as you hit it, carpenter ants boil out of it, all over your chopping block, up the handle of your axe, and you don't even realize 3 or 4 of them got up your pant-legs until suddenly your shins feel like they've been hit with white phosphorous rounds?
That would be pretty hard to simulate. Guess they had to stop somewhere
Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.
> I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing.
Is it really that difficult? Maybe my memory is vague, but chopping wood in autumn/fall for the winter just took a bunch of time, and wasn't very fun, but wasn't that bad, especially compared to other things like harvesting veggies stuff where you have to be on the ground. I'm not sure how you'd manage to ruin a axe handle before understanding how to do it well-enough, takes a couple of swings at max.
It's perfect because the kind of people who will enjoy it shouldn't be allowed near an axe, anyway.
As someone with a wood stove, for my first few chops I rotated the log to orient the checking. Then it dawned on me that the simulation likely wasn't that sophisticated, and I came here to meet up with you guys.
There was this old Piers Anthony short story about a little kid who likes playing with his dad's wood-splitting kit. He's a little kid so he doesn't handle an axe, but he does use adzes, hatchets, I dunno stuff I don't remember now[1]. Anyway he gets kidnapped by aliens and gets to join a great intergalactic wood-splitting competition. I won't ruin it but maybe if you get really good at this simulation you could be next.
If this triggers your interest in IRL firewood splitting it’s a very meditative and satisfying yard job. Also great mild to moderate workout between the splitting and stacking, especially on a crisp Fall afternoon.
I have a lot of splitting to do right now, and you're welcome to it. I'll only charge a low nominal fee. But let me know before September, because that's when I usually go rent a hydraulic splitter from the local hardware store. Then I spend a very long day splitting so that I can return it the next day.
I've spent a lot of time splitting with a big maul, but for me it's harder that it looks. I've broken two mauls by striking to far. And even with "soft" wood, I have stacks of green rounds that I couldn't split at all, the maul just bounces off. But I'm glad that you enjoy the process, I'd probably enjoy watching you work.
If the hydraulic splitter could be electric, so it would not be so loud, I could see that task being meditative. Preferably if the rounds could on a raised platform, so they could just be rolled onto the thing.
Next request, the wood could stack itself somehow.
This reminded me when we I was a kid we had to split the wood for the whole winter and that was actually a huge job all day or few days and way harder than just a moderate workout.
I hated it then but actually now I miss the time I spend with my father and brother.
I hated cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, all of it. We ran a potbelly stove in the living room when I was a kid for heat. I hated the stove too.
The only thing I don't miss is rolling a piece of piss elm over to my city living "tough" cousins after two or three pieces of oak and watching the maul just bounce off. Always funny.
I absolutely hated it as a kid, but once I got into my late 20s I started loving it. A great workout and you can go at your own pace as long as you don't wait until the last minute to get it done.
Good workout and satisfying, I totally agree. I actually really enjoy it.
But the long term effects on your joints, even if you think you have perfect technique, its better to just get a wood splitter. We can do a whole winters wood in less than a day now, with minimal effort.
Gotta agree with you there, log splitters rule. We got a little 4 ton electric one for my mom, and on some pieces it would stall. I thought, what a wimpy thing, but then hitting those pieces it wouldn't split with an axe, I realized, those were really hard to split pieces.
Just growing up in the 80s we didn't have one cause my dad didn't believe in them.
Nope, splitting green wood is much more difficult than splitting dried logs, so I often cut a tree in the spring, stack the rounds, then split those rounds in the fall.
People overestimate how dry wood needs to be to burn correctly. Just have some ultra-dry kindling (seasoned for 2+ years) and you won't have any problems.
On the contrary, I know some folks who let all their wood dry too far, and it burned way too hot and ruined their stove (and almost burned their house down).
Don't listen to this noise; it fucking sucks, it's kinda dangerous, and it's not at all meditative. It's the exact opposite of meditative. My parents made me do it because they certainly didn't want to, because it sucks. I'm so glad I don't have to split firewood ever again.
If you're looking for a meditative exercise try yoga.
Well, it's the kind of "meditative" you get when training martial arts forms. It gets good after a few years of preparation; before that, it's not as fun as spars and way less useful than general conditioning.
Coming from a kendo background, when I had to chop firewood for a few years while living in the countryside, I generally focused on accuracy. The swing is completely different than with a sword, and getting the chop to land at the exact spot (I drew lines with a marker) tens of times in a row was very satisfying, but required a lot of conscious effort to get there. It's not trivial to land a chop at the exact spot you want, and it's also quite hard to ensure the axe travels at its fastest exactly at the moment of impact.
It can be fun, but you need to be into things like that in the first place; plus, having to do it no matter the weather and all the other things you need to do can kill all the joy instantly.
I enjoy trying to get the maximal number of pieces from the log. My record is 16. The game is slightly annoying about forcing a rotate when i'm trying to shave thinner sections out of the log, so it's somewhat constrained.
The pieces look like they retain the shapes I cut them in when stacked. I started cutting them as pie slices, but then tried a few as parallel chops, and they get stacked in those shapes.
Also interesting is the shadows of leaves that stay consistent on the scene as the pile grows, but they don't appear on the splitting area itself.
Lots of engine noise too, I guess that's the ambience in this person's back yard! Probably true for lots of us.
After the first cord or two, the ground around the block should be covered in chips and splinters. That might be easy to add to the sim. Otoh, it's a fun little sim as is.
I have warm memories of splitting wood at my uncle’s with a sledge hammer and wedge. It is that right mix of physical activity (but not too much) and a little brain work. Great to do early while my aunt is making breakfast.
Advice: WEAR STEEL-TIPPED BOOTS! It saved my toes.
I once lived in a giant country side house in Estonia and nothing matched wood splitting when it comes a morning exercise. You start a bit drowsy and cold but after a few splits you warm up, your mind starts to wake up and body becomes engaged to take on the day. It's a very good exercise that I miss dearly so this simulator is a lovely reminder!
In case anyone is wondering, the quote "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" is an ancient Zen Buddhist proverb. It speaks to how the life you live, and actions you perform, before and after enlightenment are not materially different. But how and why you do and experience them changes, becoming more mindful and less mired in “attachment” and overthinking.
It bothers me that I can split a log in 3 parallel pieces, rotate 90 degrees and then magically can split the middle piece. That's physically difficult!
Besides that it was fun.
This task has what I'd call asymmetrical reciprocity.
That is, it's probably easier for the development professional to code a pretend version of chopping wood, than it is for the professional axeman to chop out a pretend version of a computer.
The most satisfying part of splitting wood is doing it in temperatures well below freezing. The wood is crystalline in hardness and really does tend to split as it does in this over-optimistic simulation. "Split your own wood and it will warm you twice".
CSB: I had no idea my uncle was unaffected by poison ivy. He invited me over to harvest some dead ash trees on his property. I was destroyed for a month by rashes and he didn't even know the wood was covered in urushiol.
Beautiful sim. Looks like red oak. As someone who has split a lot of wood, wish it could incorporate more of the struggles of splitting logs.
- missing your spot by 6” or more and creating a tiny shard that goes flying
- the log you’re aiming at falling as you are in your backswing
- getting your maul stuck halfway down the split
Could do with a difficulty setting that includes when you inherit someone else's log pile, someone who really enjoyed making every cut on a new and more inventive angle than the last.
Normally a wedge is used to split the wood, but it also doubles as a wedge to be wedged underneath just so you can get the log to stand up.
Also, Y sections (ycombinator mode?). 40 hits later and you might have a nice pile of woodchips, very rarely will it actually split in any clean way.
Yeah this needs pieces with knots, and having to swing at least 3 times before the initial split works. Very unrealistic, 3/10. Need some wedge + sledgehammer modes.
Also how do I simulate my shoulder and lower back hurting?
With your additions, it probably could be a really neat mini game to have in a survival-crafting game... Game, so, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
But the axe could wobble a bit, depending on some combination of chopping skill and how tired your guy is (simulating shoulder pain and lower back pain). Number of hits required depends on character strength and how straight on the hits are.
I’m not sure how the game would track the pieces of various sizes, though. I guess this would just be for firewood (building wood might have to be handled separately) so maybe it would be fine to just calculate the volume of each slice and have it provide fuel based on that…
The page was developed by Claude, maybe you can share the prompt(s) so we can develop variants of it ? I was surprised to see it handles 3D like that so well
Used to watch the competitive wood chopping at my local agricultural show all the time.
The highlight was always the tree felling competition. Each competitor has an axe and four springer boards, and it's a race to basically chop the top off a standing telegraph pole.
It's all very satisfying: the animations, the chopping, the graphics, and the sounds. I spent more time than I should have chopping splitting firewood.
This is cool, but I just got incredibly sidetracked by the fact that author Gavin Shapiro has a fake museum in the arctic (museumzoetrope.org). Half as a ploy it seems to raise the value of his penguin NFTs, half as quite a little prank on the internet.
If you like this, then try playing Red Dead Redemption 2. While just a tiny part of the game, you improve your relationship with the rest of the gang by doing chores like splitting wood, and also carrying hay to feed the horses.
This is fun and looks amazing, however there seems to be quite a bit of texture in the out of focus blur. There's also a lot of aliasing on the grass. Also, I think the camera shake could do with a very slight delay after the axe hits, and maybe a slightly slower decay curve.
Delightful little experience. Very nice. What would be even cooler would be if the axe only went partway down sometimes and then you have to lift the log up with the axe inside a couple of times to finish it off with that satisfying full split.
Nice sim, there's one thing missing though: splitting two sections at the same time. It do this all the time as it can almost double splitting speed when dealing with mid-size logs. Split the log in two halves, making sure to keep the halves close together. Rotate around the splitting block by about 60°, split again hitting both halves at the same time. Do this once more and you've split the log into 6 60° sections, a good size for stacking in the fireplace and also a good section size to be able to light a fire. I split between 5 m³ and 7 m³ of firewood per year which is enough to heat our house and cook our food, have been doing this for about 20 years now so I have some experience. The double-split is a good time saver.
That and the fact that you can rotate w/ left click as well. Turns out I naturally drag the mouse a little. So having rotate on right click only would be way less annoying, especially when combined with the momentum.
Gaussian splat based game will probably become popular. This game is not gaussian splat rendered 3d, but it is pretty close. Next step is gaussian splat and animations.
Small nitpick (not of the neckbeard type): if you split the wood in slices then rotate it so the cut strikes perpendicular to the slices, it tends to split horizontal pieces of wood without touching the rest, even if it's "sandwiched" between the other slices, which seems odd since it makes the axe edge feel like a surgical strike rather than something with length.
I think it would feel better if it modeled the length of the edge, which should disturb the other horizontal slices.
This is oddly satisfying. Only weird part is it seems to split whichever piece I click, even if it's behind another piece or in between two other pieces, where it would be difficult or impossible to hit just that one piece and not the others around it.
Fun but hugely unrealistic simulation, so many "bugs":
- Able to split log into unrealistically thin slices and they remain perfectly upright
- Split a log into two, rotate 90 degrees, and by some miracle you can split the half further away from you whilst the piece nearest to you doesn't get hit or move an inch
This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood.
The wood barely moves after it's split. If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side (they're pushed outwards by the axe).
You can't just randomly split it across the grain into slices like you're slicing bread.
I guess mostly: it's not tiring, which sort of sucks when you're doing it for real, but it is satisfying. This doesn't scratch that itch for me, but I guess it's fun in a way, similar to that cleaning simulator thing.
For players who are new to the game, there should be a 1/4 chance you go to bed proud of an honest day's work with your hands, and wake up the next morning having strained a muscle you didn't even know you had, and you can't chop wood for the next couple weeks.
Yes, and possibly a constellation of little cuts and bruises on your shins.
As someone who recently did some hand splitting of firewood I can directly relate to this.
There's a surprising amount of technique and knowledge that goes into splitting firewood. It isn't rocket science, but I know a 75 year old who can chop wood faster than any young guy who works out at the gym.
I had to take down two absolutely enormous Douglas Fir trees on my property (> 36" base), and asked them to leave the wood rounds for me. I knew it was going to be a lot of wood, but even then, I was not prepared. I spent about a fair bit of my free time over the next 1-2 months just out there slowly working my way through the pile, and you're absolutely right - you get substantially better at it. For me, it looked something like this:
Stage 1: At first, I could chop essentially nothing, probably 60+ minutes per round as I mostly puzzled about how to make progress and got lucky from time to time with a round that split easily (fortunately, I had a nice splitting axe)
Stage 2: Then I bought some splitting wedges, and I used a handheld sledgehammer to drive them in to what I thought were the weak spots, and then ultimately pried open the log, to pieces that I could split more readily.
Stage 3: I bought a massive demolition sledge hammer (essentially a two-handed battle hammer) and used that to drive the wedges in after getting them started, and made a bit more progress on actually splitting the rounds.
Stage 4: After doing this countless times, you just a knack for reading the wood, and where it will / won't split. I reverted back to using just the splitting axe, since if you hit the wood in the right spots, it really just splits on its own.
Here's where I ended up, if it helps any of you:
- Start by establishing the fracture line that will be used to split the round in half. I would eyeball any existing line on the round towards the center, and use the axe head to mark a line, away from any knots , from the center to the edge. These two center-to-edge didn't necessarily need to be inline. They could be slightly offset, like hands on a clock.
- With moderate force, just repeatedly strike that line, working from the center outwards. You'd be shocked out how quickly repeated strikes widen the line, and eventually the wood's own weight almost causes it to fall apart.
- Recursively do this with the two halves: Draw the line from (what was the center), radially out to the edge. Repeatedly strike until these pieces have been halved.
- Continue this process until you have proper pizza wedges. At this point, it's pretty trivial to just chop the pizza wedge, from the wedge to the base, into 4 or 5 smaller firewood-sized logs.
I know y'all probably didn't care to read this, but this was quite honestly weeks of my life in learning this, and I couldn't find a great guide on YouTube or anything, especially for rounds this big.
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Highly recommend https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC872sqjMNC8kHU0GU0ShZFw while cautioning that she seems to be genetically engineered to split wood. Her technique is like watching an Olympic athlete. No wasted motion at all, all energy delivered to the maul straight down. She’s a muse.
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My grandfather was like this, and not with soft wood. We try to burn Australian hardwoods and that takes quite a bit of force to split. He could pound through it like a knife through butter. There’s a definite art to hardwood, looking where the slightest fault might be. You can’t just smash it in the middle, your block splitter (preferred) or axe just bounces off it.
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It's a combination of technique and the type of wood. Even with perfect technique, some wood is simply too hard to split. I've got the bottom 5 or 6 rounds of a bigleaf maple sitting in my yard that I simply can't make a dent in. You're welcome to take it if you can split it :)
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It takes understanding rotation and momentum to do right. Also different to bet chops in different ways.
In former times you had to serve a twelve year apprenticeship before you could be trusted to split wood for barrels, you can do a PhD in rocket science in less time.
As a very novice wood splitter the thing that most jumped out to me was the wood splitting in one swing every time. That's one or two orders of magnitude off from my experience.
this is the most hacker news comment possible
So many of the top comments look like parodies of HN comments
I miss the part where the axe gets stuck and you hsve tovturn it over. I found it well made and deeply satisfying
> I miss the part where the axe gets stuck and you hsve tovturn it over.
Hit it around the edges, like taking a chord from the edge of a circle, and try to use the top half of the bit to do cutting. Good ax technique depends on accuracy, on top of which you can slowly add strength as your accuracy improves. If there's a crack in the end of a round, you should be able to put the bit of the ax directly into it, which will normally split it wide open without much effort. Different species of wood have different characteristics though, so terms and conditions apply.
As someone who spent a teenagehood doing the same, I agree it was far too (un)satisfying to be able to cut the pieces and not having them fall to the side. But if you have an excellent axe and true flat surface you could get pretty close to the game. But for better reality it needs more indication of splinters and blisters after a few runs. I suggest adding a cast iron wedge splitter as a next level option.
> If you split it perfectly, the two halves will almost certainly both fall to each side
Just put it in a old small tire :)
Use a nice large maul. Will go through most wood like a butter knife.
I stupidly used a axe for a long time.
TIL about existence of (non-game like) mauls and that they might be used for splitting firewood.
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That's because the AI that generated this doesn't know what splitting wood is like.
I dunno, what are you splitting? For full rounds or the large chunks that first split off them, I often do have stuff go flying when it finally splits. Typically I am splitting on top of another round so that adds to the distance.
Was just doing this literally the other day! But with a hydraulic log splitter which made it pretty easy and fun. The hardest part was lifting and stacking all the logs!
There should be a "hickory" option where the axe just bounces back at you or gets stuck in the round.
You missed the best part: analyzing what to do around knots. There's a skill and artistry to it. Those who are good at it make it look absolutely effortless: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsIFvStf9Oz99GMitW4vD_g
For anyone reading the above comment and wanting to see what the commenter might be referring to, here is the first YT video I found on that channel that is relatively brief but has an example of the techniques involved:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=G_QZIGVYX_4
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> This is kinda fun, but doesn't match most of my experience splitting firewood.
Neither mine, I have a machine that does it for me. Much safer and efficient.
I find it much easier to use AI to vibesplit my firewood. Sure, it costs me lots of money to buy axe tokens, and sometimes all I end up with is a useless pile of splinters or sawdust, but it's the way of the future; just imagine how efficient it'll be when the tech has matured?
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Not if you also want to get excellent exercise. It would take me no time at all to build a splitter for my tractor if I wanted one, but I plan on chopping by hand until I can't because otherwise I will either be significantly less fit or have to take out additional non-productive time to workout.
I'm right there with you. I've manually split wood with wedges when I was a kid. It was tedious. Now I just use the wedges for felling the trees. I get enough exercise from the stacking.
I've always felt the attraction to manual splitting was some idyllic vision of country life, backed up by the movie trope where characters are having "alone time" but still "being strong". I'd be interested to hear if anyone in this thread burns a significant amount of wood (say 4 cords), and actually splits it all by hand.
I only like splitting perfectly seasoned wood ( I do about a face cord every summer/fall). Otherwise it’s just too much work. Got any tips in to tooling? I use a maul.
In my experience, fresh wood splits much easier. I prefer a big splitting axe. But mostly the wood I use isn’t terribly gnarled or wide.
I have a couple diamond/ grenade wedges, a rescue wedge and a traditional wedge I barely ever use. I have the big Fiskars maul and that is great for a lot of stuff. Bigger things, whole rounds I use two wedges near each other and hit them in concert with the sledge side of the maul.
Most wood is easier to split when dry/ aged, but I recently learned that does not apply to elm and a few others, so it’s worth checking. Elm is awful no matter what.
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Just fucking relax and enjoy!
yeaa https://i.imgur.com/Uc60Y2z.png
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People here seem a little confused. This is a simulator in the same way Goat Simulator is a simulator. It’s from a collection called “screen toys” and it’s meant to be mindless fun.
Here here. This was a joy to wake up to and wish I hadn’t stumbled into the comments.
For future reference, the phrase is “hear, hear”.
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Then you're really going to love this.
The proper term is a shortened form of "hear him, hear him," which was necessary because British Parliament didn't allow clapping or cheering. Instead, if you wanted to show agreement with a speaker's point, you'd shout out that everyone else should "hear" him.
Not to be confused with "hear ye," which evolved from the French "oyez," which is the imperative form of "to listen," which was shouted at a crowd before an important announcement.
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All those virtual desk toys in the Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard. You had to be there.
And this is HN, its acting as its meant to xD
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This is HN I'd like to see more of.
Mocking too nerdy gripes on "simulator" accuracy, sharing some real world experience with physical things beyond the screen frames, and on in the same vein.
A breath of fresh air, really, in the prevailing AI smog.
FWIW, the creator’s Insta post for this thing says #vibecoding
@shapiro500
No shade if so, I think it’s an awesome little toy.
I don't think I could have vibe coded that.
At the very least, he photographed and built models of logs and his own yard.
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"in the prevailing AI smog"
How do you know AI was not used in the making of this?
(personally I don't care, the result seems nice to me)
This I don't know, but at least the topic is not related!
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Looks like its coded by someone who has never split firewood. The challenge is not deciding where to split, its executing the split. Like hitting the same gap if it doesn't split, deciding orientation to aoid knots, figuring out how to put it on end if it wasn't cut straight.
And some of the cuts it allowed me would hit the ax handle on another part, the shock from that damages the ax handle and is painful on the hands.
And then there's the lifting the stuck block by the axe and hitting it axe side down to finish the split instead of pulling the stuck axe out.
So the simulation handles none of the challenges of splitting wood.
I swear this forum needs to embrace their inner child more some days. My four year old loved this.
Well executed fun.
I love it also, but I think the comments are pointing to an unmet need for firewood splitting simulators.
The comments are suggesting that someone could go to town adding different kinds of hatchets, mauls, axes, woods, and different swings, and people would eat it up.
Both can be true. It's cool and fun but simulation is a well defined term.
Yes, but obviously this toy faces a challenge when folks who take this stuff seriously walk by. I immediately want a bungee to put around it so the wood doesn't go everywhere. I also want to split it finer than in quarters. Had to nope out.
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to be fair this wasn't being shared to a site filled with four year olds
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The "beer drinking simulator" we all had on our phones in 2010 wasn't a very accurate representation of drinking beer either
I am shocked that tapping a touchscreen is nothing like splitting wood with an axe.
I'm exhausted by all this tapping! Who knew cutting firewood was such hard work!
/s
Man, don’t ever play Goat Simulator, then. You’ll be all day typing a wall of text about that.
"So the simulation handles none of the challenges of splitting wood."
Ha ha, that's why we like it.
Well, what about when you get into a piece of apple wood, and as soon as you hit it, carpenter ants boil out of it, all over your chopping block, up the handle of your axe, and you don't even realize 3 or 4 of them got up your pant-legs until suddenly your shins feel like they've been hit with white phosphorous rounds?
That would be pretty hard to simulate. Guess they had to stop somewhere
FYI Tree Simulator is coded by someone who has never been a tree too.
Oh you guys are all gonna hate Sim Ant.
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Experienced wood splitter here. All your points are valid. I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing. However, the sim is still a lot of fun.
> I had to ruin one perfectly good axe handle before I learned how to swing.
Is it really that difficult? Maybe my memory is vague, but chopping wood in autumn/fall for the winter just took a bunch of time, and wasn't very fun, but wasn't that bad, especially compared to other things like harvesting veggies stuff where you have to be on the ground. I'm not sure how you'd manage to ruin a axe handle before understanding how to do it well-enough, takes a couple of swings at max.
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I might print out this quote and put it on my wall! :-)
"Looks like its coded by someone who has never split firewood. "
And the domain expert has build how many playable wood splitting games?
It's perfect because the kind of people who will enjoy it shouldn't be allowed near an axe, anyway.
As someone with a wood stove, for my first few chops I rotated the log to orient the checking. Then it dawned on me that the simulation likely wasn't that sophisticated, and I came here to meet up with you guys.
It's obviously not an accurate simulation. I'm sure the creator knows it isn't. Probably the best they could come up with in limited time.
I can't tell if this is a parody of HN comments or a serious response to a little toy app.
I don't know if you know this or not, but this is a game.
There was this old Piers Anthony short story about a little kid who likes playing with his dad's wood-splitting kit. He's a little kid so he doesn't handle an axe, but he does use adzes, hatchets, I dunno stuff I don't remember now[1]. Anyway he gets kidnapped by aliens and gets to join a great intergalactic wood-splitting competition. I won't ruin it but maybe if you get really good at this simulation you could be next.
[1] https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?46184
Haha this is also the plot of The Last Starfighter but with video games. I wonder if the screenwriter was familiar with it.
Damn I loved that movie!
If this triggers your interest in IRL firewood splitting it’s a very meditative and satisfying yard job. Also great mild to moderate workout between the splitting and stacking, especially on a crisp Fall afternoon.
I have a lot of splitting to do right now, and you're welcome to it. I'll only charge a low nominal fee. But let me know before September, because that's when I usually go rent a hydraulic splitter from the local hardware store. Then I spend a very long day splitting so that I can return it the next day.
I've spent a lot of time splitting with a big maul, but for me it's harder that it looks. I've broken two mauls by striking to far. And even with "soft" wood, I have stacks of green rounds that I couldn't split at all, the maul just bounces off. But I'm glad that you enjoy the process, I'd probably enjoy watching you work.
If the hydraulic splitter could be electric, so it would not be so loud, I could see that task being meditative. Preferably if the rounds could on a raised platform, so they could just be rolled onto the thing.
Next request, the wood could stack itself somehow.
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as camping is to "glamping," splitting wood is to "sprinkle wood?"
This reminded me when we I was a kid we had to split the wood for the whole winter and that was actually a huge job all day or few days and way harder than just a moderate workout.
I hated it then but actually now I miss the time I spend with my father and brother.
I hated cutting wood, stacking wood, splitting wood, all of it. We ran a potbelly stove in the living room when I was a kid for heat. I hated the stove too.
The only thing I don't miss is rolling a piece of piss elm over to my city living "tough" cousins after two or three pieces of oak and watching the maul just bounce off. Always funny.
I absolutely hated it as a kid, but once I got into my late 20s I started loving it. A great workout and you can go at your own pace as long as you don't wait until the last minute to get it done.
Good workout and satisfying, I totally agree. I actually really enjoy it.
But the long term effects on your joints, even if you think you have perfect technique, its better to just get a wood splitter. We can do a whole winters wood in less than a day now, with minimal effort.
Gotta agree with you there, log splitters rule. We got a little 4 ton electric one for my mom, and on some pieces it would stall. I thought, what a wimpy thing, but then hitting those pieces it wouldn't split with an axe, I realized, those were really hard to split pieces. Just growing up in the 80s we didn't have one cause my dad didn't believe in them.
If you're chopping wood in the Fall, I sure hope it's for next year's winter.
Nope, splitting green wood is much more difficult than splitting dried logs, so I often cut a tree in the spring, stack the rounds, then split those rounds in the fall.
People overestimate how dry wood needs to be to burn correctly. Just have some ultra-dry kindling (seasoned for 2+ years) and you won't have any problems.
On the contrary, I know some folks who let all their wood dry too far, and it burned way too hot and ruined their stove (and almost burned their house down).
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Taking a few minutes out of the day to to split some logs to hear your house for your family feels incredibly rewarding and satisfying.
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Don't listen to this noise; it fucking sucks, it's kinda dangerous, and it's not at all meditative. It's the exact opposite of meditative. My parents made me do it because they certainly didn't want to, because it sucks. I'm so glad I don't have to split firewood ever again.
If you're looking for a meditative exercise try yoga.
It’s also astonishing how much wood needs to be split, to heat even a moderately sized house. Depends on the climate though, I guess.
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Well, it's the kind of "meditative" you get when training martial arts forms. It gets good after a few years of preparation; before that, it's not as fun as spars and way less useful than general conditioning.
Coming from a kendo background, when I had to chop firewood for a few years while living in the countryside, I generally focused on accuracy. The swing is completely different than with a sword, and getting the chop to land at the exact spot (I drew lines with a marker) tens of times in a row was very satisfying, but required a lot of conscious effort to get there. It's not trivial to land a chop at the exact spot you want, and it's also quite hard to ensure the axe travels at its fastest exactly at the moment of impact.
It can be fun, but you need to be into things like that in the first place; plus, having to do it no matter the weather and all the other things you need to do can kill all the joy instantly.
You sound like my father when someone mentions green beans
Unfortunately the traffic noises don’t make this very relaxing.
I enjoy trying to get the maximal number of pieces from the log. My record is 16. The game is slightly annoying about forcing a rotate when i'm trying to shave thinner sections out of the log, so it's somewhat constrained.
Can anyone beat 16?
The pieces look like they retain the shapes I cut them in when stacked. I started cutting them as pie slices, but then tried a few as parallel chops, and they get stacked in those shapes.
Also interesting is the shadows of leaves that stay consistent on the scene as the pile grows, but they don't appear on the splitting area itself.
Lots of engine noise too, I guess that's the ambience in this person's back yard! Probably true for lots of us.
After the first cord or two, the ground around the block should be covered in chips and splinters. That might be easy to add to the sim. Otoh, it's a fun little sim as is.
Half the battle is having the right stance so that you don't accidentally embed the axe in your shin.
I'm ok that they left that part out.
I'm honestly having a hard time visualizing the technique some of you guys seem to be using.
Here's a script to automatically chop wood, if you're so inclined:
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
This simulates a person far more skilled than me.
I never had to adjust the chunk to get it to sit right, the maul hit exactly where I told it to, and it even stacked itself!
Never had the maul get stuck in the wood. Never had the wood fly off the splitting stump.
It does fly off sometimes in the game.
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I have warm memories of splitting wood at my uncle’s with a sledge hammer and wedge. It is that right mix of physical activity (but not too much) and a little brain work. Great to do early while my aunt is making breakfast.
Advice: WEAR STEEL-TIPPED BOOTS! It saved my toes.
Well designed. It has a kind of magic that keeps people hooked.
Fun game. But please don't leave it on in the background while moving on to other tasks.
Pretty much killed my venerable i7 mac.
It seems they chose the Fiskars Axe, good choice I own five of them.
Yeah, I recognized that too. Probably the popular X27 :)
Nothing beats coming home from work, chopping something into pieces, and setting it on fire.
I once lived in a giant country side house in Estonia and nothing matched wood splitting when it comes a morning exercise. You start a bit drowsy and cold but after a few splits you warm up, your mind starts to wake up and body becomes engaged to take on the day. It's a very good exercise that I miss dearly so this simulator is a lovely reminder!
Got the chop wood, now need the draw water and then we will be good
In case anyone is wondering, the quote "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water" is an ancient Zen Buddhist proverb. It speaks to how the life you live, and actions you perform, before and after enlightenment are not materially different. But how and why you do and experience them changes, becoming more mindful and less mired in “attachment” and overthinking.
I kept at it until firewood filled 3/4 of the surrounding circle. After that, new firewood just seemed to disappear.
You can't win.
You need a path out
It bothers me that I can split a log in 3 parallel pieces, rotate 90 degrees and then magically can split the middle piece. That's physically difficult! Besides that it was fun.
What this miss is a second part where you put the same wood that you split in a fireplace and watch it burn.
This task has what I'd call asymmetrical reciprocity.
That is, it's probably easier for the development professional to code a pretend version of chopping wood, than it is for the professional axeman to chop out a pretend version of a computer.
However I do eagerly await being proven wrong.
That was a satisfying part of my day. Thank you.
The most satisfying part of splitting wood is doing it in temperatures well below freezing. The wood is crystalline in hardness and really does tend to split as it does in this over-optimistic simulation. "Split your own wood and it will warm you twice".
CSB: I had no idea my uncle was unaffected by poison ivy. He invited me over to harvest some dead ash trees on his property. I was destroyed for a month by rashes and he didn't even know the wood was covered in urushiol.
Looks like a Fiskars axe https://www.fiskars.com/en-us/collections/axes-and-wood-prep...
What about when you’re splitting a log with a branch and the maul bounces straight back up? Lol
Beautiful sim. Looks like red oak. As someone who has split a lot of wood, wish it could incorporate more of the struggles of splitting logs.
- missing your spot by 6” or more and creating a tiny shard that goes flying - the log you’re aiming at falling as you are in your backswing - getting your maul stuck halfway down the split
Could do with a difficulty setting that includes when you inherit someone else's log pile, someone who really enjoyed making every cut on a new and more inventive angle than the last.
Normally a wedge is used to split the wood, but it also doubles as a wedge to be wedged underneath just so you can get the log to stand up.
Also, Y sections (ycombinator mode?). 40 hits later and you might have a nice pile of woodchips, very rarely will it actually split in any clean way.
Yeah this needs pieces with knots, and having to swing at least 3 times before the initial split works. Very unrealistic, 3/10. Need some wedge + sledgehammer modes.
Also how do I simulate my shoulder and lower back hurting?
With your additions, it probably could be a really neat mini game to have in a survival-crafting game... Game, so, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
But the axe could wobble a bit, depending on some combination of chopping skill and how tired your guy is (simulating shoulder pain and lower back pain). Number of hits required depends on character strength and how straight on the hits are.
I’m not sure how the game would track the pieces of various sizes, though. I guess this would just be for firewood (building wood might have to be handled separately) so maybe it would be fine to just calculate the volume of each slice and have it provide fuel based on that…
I think if you sit and play it for 10 hours your lower back will hurt too. It just takes longer.
You'll like Spintires.
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This is fun. I checked other screen toys by the author, but sadly they aren't as amusing as this one.
The animated gif on the bottom of the list though :D
The page was developed by Claude, maybe you can share the prompt(s) so we can develop variants of it ? I was surprised to see it handles 3D like that so well
Used to watch the competitive wood chopping at my local agricultural show all the time.
The highlight was always the tree felling competition. Each competitor has an axe and four springer boards, and it's a race to basically chop the top off a standing telegraph pole.
That would make a better game.
It's a toy, not a game.
It's all very satisfying: the animations, the chopping, the graphics, and the sounds. I spent more time than I should have chopping splitting firewood.
I chopped so much wood that the browser was starting to lag. Thanks for sharing the simulator, it was fun!
This is cool, but I just got incredibly sidetracked by the fact that author Gavin Shapiro has a fake museum in the arctic (museumzoetrope.org). Half as a ploy it seems to raise the value of his penguin NFTs, half as quite a little prank on the internet.
Wildly addictive.. did Phillip Morris develop this?
Reminds me of classic mini games on miniclip or addicting games.
I wouldn't call it a simulator but an arcade firewood splitting game
If you like this, then try playing Red Dead Redemption 2. While just a tiny part of the game, you improve your relationship with the rest of the gang by doing chores like splitting wood, and also carrying hay to feed the horses.
Red Dead Redemption 2? The birding simulator also has firewood splitting and horse feeding simulators?
https://www.audubon.org/magazine/birding-its-1899-inside-blo...
This is fun and looks amazing, however there seems to be quite a bit of texture in the out of focus blur. There's also a lot of aliasing on the grass. Also, I think the camera shake could do with a very slight delay after the axe hits, and maybe a slightly slower decay curve.
Delightful little experience. Very nice. What would be even cooler would be if the axe only went partway down sometimes and then you have to lift the log up with the axe inside a couple of times to finish it off with that satisfying full split.
For everyone referring to splitting with an axe and saying it’s hard, no wonder, everyone in the know uses a maul for splitting, not an axe.
That was a fun work out. I was wondering what happened when you "filled" the circle of firewood.
What happens?
It starts stacking a second circle
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Okay so the thing is I want a wood fire simulation too. With as much physics sim on combustion dynamics as possible.
Can I have a "Carry Water Simulator" to go with it?
This is really cool! I honestly spent like 30mins just cutting firewood.
I need a fireplace or bonfire simulator that I can throw these into.
There's a ton of non-interactive fireplace simulators on Netflix and YouTube. Especially around Christmas.
Wonderful. I appreciate that it auto-rotates when the piece is too narrow to split along one axis.
That kept annoying me. I thought I was moving the mouse while clicking. I repeated and found it forces a rotate even when you just click.
Nice sim, there's one thing missing though: splitting two sections at the same time. It do this all the time as it can almost double splitting speed when dealing with mid-size logs. Split the log in two halves, making sure to keep the halves close together. Rotate around the splitting block by about 60°, split again hitting both halves at the same time. Do this once more and you've split the log into 6 60° sections, a good size for stacking in the fireplace and also a good section size to be able to light a fire. I split between 5 m³ and 7 m³ of firewood per year which is enough to heat our house and cook our food, have been doing this for about 20 years now so I have some experience. The double-split is a good time saver.
I'd upvote you twice for your nickname alone, if I could! All hail Eris! :)
i managed to get 8 pieces standing on the log, without any of them falling off.
I like how it stacks the firewood.
Right? My inner 17 year old wonders where that magic was, back in the day.
Fun experience, but the forced rotation after a certain number of cuts diminishes it.
great game and very satisfying.
I have never wasted so much time doing something so useless.
It was a lot of fun!
Thankfully there are no knots and it is softwood. Oddly satisfying.
Oddly fun, though could use a little more variety, maybe with knots, etc.
need numbers to go up.
Missing the splitting axe getting a little jammed at a knot.
Otherwise excellent.
This works amazingly well on my iPhone with obvious touch controls.
Very impressive.
The momentum on the camera spin is very annoying. Really cool though
That and the fact that you can rotate w/ left click as well. Turns out I naturally drag the mouse a little. So having rotate on right click only would be way less annoying, especially when combined with the momentum.
But then it wouldn’t work on a touchscreen, and it wouldn’t go viral.
Gaussian splat based game will probably become popular. This game is not gaussian splat rendered 3d, but it is pretty close. Next step is gaussian splat and animations.
I was able to get 19 slices out of one log
Bug: No error displayed if WebGL is disabled.
Feels very satisfying
Didn't even get my maul stuck once.
Add beers and drunkenness , and a scene where you miss the log and bury the maul into your leg.
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if you click fast enough you summon additional axes from the ether
But why?
Because
Poms[0] is great. I'd like to be able to upload my dog's pic.
0: https://screen.toys/poms/
very cool
Fruit ninja but for logs. Now I can finally play lumberjack like I’m Nicole Coenen.
Small nitpick (not of the neckbeard type): if you split the wood in slices then rotate it so the cut strikes perpendicular to the slices, it tends to split horizontal pieces of wood without touching the rest, even if it's "sandwiched" between the other slices, which seems odd since it makes the axe edge feel like a surgical strike rather than something with length.
I think it would feel better if it modeled the length of the edge, which should disturb the other horizontal slices.
This is oddly satisfying. Only weird part is it seems to split whichever piece I click, even if it's behind another piece or in between two other pieces, where it would be difficult or impossible to hit just that one piece and not the others around it.
Very cool sim!
Very infuriating, why does it rotate when i want to split it thinner
I spent too much time on this.
Quite realistic. Could be more realistic still if you could chop two blocks at once.
webgl :/
good exercise!
Honestly I'm more fascinated by the grass around, but I haven't played games in a long time.
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Chop wood, carry water.
Its same as dbdiagram, what's new in this?
You've confused the threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48523992
Fun but hugely unrealistic simulation, so many "bugs":
etc.
You don't understand don't you?