The Adze on Alone: What Contestants Actually Use

The adze sits on the approved-items list next to the axe, hatchet, saw, and machete, its own selectable category under "cutting." Across the 101 contestants with a recorded gear list out of 187 documented across every US, Australian, and spinoff season, it has zero recorded picks in our database. That's a real finding, not an assumption: nobody has ever brought one on record, but that means zero documented, not that zero contestants ever considered it.

What the tool is for, and why that matters here

An adze is built for a narrower job than the other four cutting tools share. Where an axe fells and splits, and a saw cuts clean cross-sections, an adze hews, shaving a flat face onto a round log with a perpendicular, hoe-like swing. It's the tool a timber framer or dugout-canoe builder reaches for, not the tool for putting up a quick lean-to or processing a week's firewood. On a show where the winning shelter styles lean overwhelmingly toward simpler builds, that specialized use case rarely comes up.

How it compares to its cutting-category neighbors

Item (cutting category)	Recorded picks (of 101)
Saw	68
Axe	57
Hatchet	5
Machete	5
Adze	0

The gap is stark. The axe and saw between them account for the overwhelming majority of the field's chopping and processing needs, and the hatchet and machete, despite their own single-digit carry counts, at least have someone on record picking each. The adze has nobody. The items nobody picks on Alone breakdown covers this same zero alongside four other categories, climbing rope, bear canister, ice spikes, and two-hand knife, that also show no recorded picks; unlike climbing rope's documented 10-meter cap or bear canister's region-specific flag in the catalog, the adze carries no documented rule at all. It's simply on the list, unpicked.

Even the reasoning for a hatchet, that it's a lighter, faster-swinging second cutting tool, doesn't transfer cleanly to an adze, since an adze's hewing stroke is a slower, two-handed motion aimed at producing flat lumber rather than quick kindling or fast felling. That gap between the two tools' actual use cases is worth noting given how blurry the line already gets between axe and hatchet on this show: Alan Tenta's own gear list logs his Hults Bruk trekking hatchet under the "Axe" category rather than as a separate item. No similar blending happens with the adze anywhere in the tracked data, because nobody has picked one to blend.

Why it stays on the shelf

Against a ten-item limit, every slot competes directly with a knife, an axe, or a fishing kit that solves a problem every contestant actually has. An adze solves a problem, hewing flat lumber for a cabin-style build or a dugout hull, that almost nobody at almost any filming location needs solved badly enough to give up one of ten slots for it. The show's approved list appears to have been built generously, covering historical and niche bushcraft categories, rather than narrowly, covering only what contestants use in practice. The item catalog's single product entry for the category, a Gransfors Bruks Hand Hewing Hatchet in an adze-style pattern, is flagged as a category example rather than tied to any contestant, which matches the zero: even the reference product for this slot was never sourced to an actual pick.

The adze gear page has the category details, and the axe and saw pages cover the tools that actually fill this niche in practice. For the complete approved-items list, see the official rules page.