Back in late 2021 while playing Team Fortress 2, I encountered members of the Ham Mafia, a service organization dedicated to the pork leg melee weapon known as the TF2 Wiki: Ham Shank. Originally a promotional item from the Wikipedia: Don’t Starve game, at some point it became craftable and some players made it part of their game persona to wield it, to make up lore around it, and even to give other players the item for free.
I too wanted to bludgeon other players with a hunk of ham, but not wanting to be affiliated with any sort of mafia (they make you burn a saint), I looked into the crafting requirements. That sent me down the rabbit hole of the other less-available items I could obtain by crafting.
There were 11 craftable weapons that I didn’t have. Two were general-use melee weapons (the ham shank and the TF2 Wiki: Freedom Staff). Most of the rest were class-specific melee weapons: the Heavy’s TF2 Wiki: Apoco-Fists; the Scout’s TF2 Wiki: Three-Rune Blade and TF2 Wiki: Unarmed Combat; the Pyro’s TF2 Wiki: Maul; and the Spy’s TF2 Wiki: Wanga Prick and TF2 Wiki: Sharp Dresser. Besides, there were two primary weapons: Pyro’s TF2 Wiki: Nostromo Napalmer and Sniper’s TF2 Wiki: AWPer Hand. Finally, there was Spy invisibility watch, the TF2 Wiki: Quäckenbirdt (not shown in the art, because it’s invisible). All were promotional items except for the Unarmed Combat and Wanga Prick. All lack their own specific crafting recipes, unlike most items you can craft.
And so, from December of 2021 I began to save my item drops to use toward crafting these items. The chance to craft each one required eight item drops: two for a scrap metal, three class-specific weapons to make a class token, and three slot-specific weapons (melee, primary, or PDA2) for a slot token. Throw those three together and the crafting server rolls the dice and gives you one of the applicable items.
In order to keep things sane, I devised a strategy: other than the Spy watch, which required other Spy watches that don’t drop as often (as there are only two that can come as item drops), I would save up and craft everything in batches.
For the first four months, there was no crafting at all, only saving up my item drops and keeping track of what I had and what I needed. On 2 April 2022, I had enough items for my eight first attempts. And I had immediate success! I got the Apoco-Fists, which meant Heavy was no longer a contender (so all his drops could be used for making slot tokens) and I got the Ham Shank from trying to craft the Pyro melee, which was fitting given the Ham Mafia business was my original inspiration.
Eight attempts? asks the reader. Yes, the multi-class melee weapons didn’t make sense to have their own attempts, as I was just as likely to stumble upon them while crafting class-specific melees. And that’s exactly what happened with the Ham Shank.
Anyway, it was mid-May before I got to the next batch, which landed me only one of the spy melees, the Sharp Dresser. And that month-and-a-half cadence held for a time, so at the start of July I tried again, and I added the Pyro’s Nostromo Napalmer and the Scout’s Three-Rune Blade to my backpack.
While only getting half of the Scout and Spy melee targets wasn’t great, it did reduce the number of items I needed for subsequent attempts, as did checking off one of the two primaries. At the end of July I was ready for the fourth set of attempts. There were only four dice rolls, and I came up empty other than a duplicated Sharp Dresser. My first whiff, but it would not be my last.
In late August, I was not yet ready for a full set of craft attempts, but I was getting a bit sick of all the primary weapons accumulating. See, the imbalance of slot token fodder meant I had more than enough to try to craft the AWPer Hand while I still couldn’t try for the four remaining melee weapons. My impulsiveness got the better of me, and I went TILT trying to craft the Sniper primary, only to whiff six times in a row! I still had enough to keep going, but decided to hold off until I could make an attempt with all the melees too.
The next week, I had enough to roll with, but more botches left me with only another duplicated Sharp Dresser plus an extra Three-Rune Blade. And late October saw another failure and a third duplicate Sharp Dresser.
It took another two months, until Christmas of 2022, for me to have all the items for my next shot. Baby Jesus smiled up or down or whichever direction at me! I came away with both the Spy’s Wanga Prick and the Scout’s Unarmed Combat as Christmas bonuses. Cross the Scout off the list, freeing more items up, while Spy’s were in reserve for whenever I got enough watches for a PDA2 token.
That left only two attempts per batch: Pyro’s melee (plus a multi-class) and Sniper’s primary. And on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday in 2023, I made my next attempt. I crafted the Freedom Staff on that anniversary of one of the greatest advocates for freedom in memory. While it didn’t free up more items, it did mean I didn’t need to worry about the multi-class melees any more.
Though I was one step closer, I still had two items to seek per run. At the end of January, I also had enough Spy watches to try for that item besides, but I had another luckless day.
The good news was that from the year-mark on, I could do a two-week cadence. The bad news was that from the end of January to April I had 13 busts in the crafting department. The only saving grace during that time was I happened to craft another multi-class melee: the TF2 Wiki: Bat Outta Hell. Readers may have seen it up in the art and wondered why I didn’t mention it before. I already had an untradeable one from Scream Fortress (Halloween) Merasmus drops, so I wasn’t actively looking for another. In any case, it took until late April to break my losing streak, when I finally snagged the AWPer Hand. That left only Pyro’s Maul (and the Spy watch) to acquire.
I stuck to the two-week cadence, and after only one miss, I got the Pyro’s Maul. I was effectively done, except the Spy watch, which at a one-in-three chance was more dependent on the luck of getting the crafting materials than on the luck of the craft. On my next attempt, only last weekend, I got that watch, the Quäckenbirdt, and have completed my quest.
Before I started, I had run the numbers on the quest. I estimated a worst-case of about 70 individual crafting attempts. I ended up taking 63 crafting attempts to get it all done. Not too far off the worst-case. I didn’t estimate how many months it would take, but 1.5 years feels about right.
In terms of the most items spent, the AWPer Hand took me 21 attempts, which comes out to around 160 items (though slightly fewer because the failed attempts still produce an item that can be fed back in for the next attempt).
The best part of getting the items was playing with them. They are all reskins of items I mostly don’t use, so getting a chance to switch up my game by using Sniper or the stock invisibility watch (which is what Quäckenbirdt is) gave me a chance to revisit other playstyles I don’t usually try.
My favorites of these items are the Nostromo Napalmer and the Apoco-Fists, with the Unarmed Combat getting an honorable mention.