Wandering the overworld of Hytale to find all the types of trees, I quickly realised I don't know what half of them actually look like or how to tell them apart. This soon became a problem when I needed to get softwood planks to upgrade the Farmer's Workbench for the first time.
To save you the hassle that I went through, below I'll cover how to get softwood planks. It's not as simple as just chopping down the right type of tree, either, as you need to process the logs, too. Unless you're already a master builder, chances are you haven't had to do this yet.
How to get softwood planks in Hytale
To get softwood planks in Hytale, you need to chop down beech or aspen trees to get their logs, and then turn them into planks using the Builder's Workbench. As you'll see in the images above, beech trees have moderately light brown logs and bright green leaves, while aspen trees have white speckled logs with orange leaves.
If you've not used the Builder's Workbench before, this is where you'll create fancy, processed blocks that look great when building your own structures, like steps, windows, doors, and furniture.
You can put all kinds of materials into the Builder's Workbench but you'll most likely be sticking to wood early on, and each type of wood creates a different finished product. Oak and ash logs make hardwood, while birch logs make lightwood, for example. As mentioned, you'll need to place either beech or aspen logs in the Builder's Workbench to get softwood planks, though.
Of course, you can also use softwood planks as a building material, but you'll need five blocks of it early on to upgrade the Farmer's Workbench to Tier 2, unlocking new seeds and other farming-related items, so you might want to hold off on using it for construction initially.
