Icarus tree sap guide: How to craft this sticky stuff

Icarus spaceman standing in forest
(Image credit: Rocketwerkz)

Need to craft some Icarus tree sap but don't know how? There's quite a lot of stuff on the Icarus tech tree, and it can be difficult to tell exactly what every item does. So when you see a recipe that includes tree sap, it's not entirely clear how to find or make the sticky stuff. Tree sap is an ingredient for crafting epoxy, which is important for upper-tier crafting recipes like a machining bench—the item you use to make guns, armor, and steel tools. Yep, you need tree blood in order to make military equipment. But where do you find it?

Trees are a sensible guess, and there's no shortage of trees in Icarus. But it's not quite the answer. Below we'll explain exactly where to find tree sap, and what you'll need to craft a whole bunch of it.

Icarus tree sap: How to craft it

First you're going to need a crafting bench, which means being at least level 10 and having a spare blueprint point to unlock it. You'll find the crafting bench at the start of the Tier 2 tech tree. To build it you'll need 12 fiber, 20 sticks, 50 wood, and 12 stone.

With the crafting bench built and placed, you'll need to unlock the mortar and pestle, which you'll also find on the Tier 2 tech tree. This is the item you need to make tree sap, and you'll see on the top half of the list, just past the potbelly stove and cooking station. Unlock the mortar and pestle with a blueprint point, and build it at the crafting bench with 4 silica ore and 12 stone. Take it from the device inventory and put it in your inventory or hotbar slot.

(Image credit: Rocketwerkz)

Next, place the mortar and pestle somewhere—nicely, it can be placed on a lot of stuff you may already have set up, like the top of your storage crate. You can even place it right on top of the crafting bench if you want.

Interact with the mortar and pestle and you'll see tree sap in the recipe list. It requires 4 sticks, which you probably already have in your inventory. Craft tree sap and it'll appear in the mortar and pestle device inventory so you can use it in any recipes that require it, like epoxy.

(Image credit: Rocketwerkz)

At some point you may need to mass produce tree sap, and you probably don't want to spend all your time running around picking up sticks off the ground or hoping you get enough while chopping down trees. No worries, you won't need to. Spend a blueprint point to unlock the carpentry bench and craft it with 80 wood, 12 rope, and 120 copper nails. At the carpentry bench you can take wood you've harvested and turn it into sticks. Then turn those sticks into tree sap.

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.