What Is a Bushcraft Knife? Bushcraft knives are often considered more for all-around general purposes than survival knives. Designed to handle various outdoor tasks like building a shelter, starting a fire with a Ferro rod, batoning (splitting wood with a knife and mallet or a stick used as a hammer, etc.) Blade lengths are generally between 3 and 6 inches. As they may be required to perform various tasks, some need the blade to be very strong, so it is best to have a full tang. Depending on the situation, the blade length, steel, and handle materials are all subject to interpretation. As this is not a survival knife per se, you can pick the configuration that best suits your intended environment.

What’s the difference between bushcraft and survival?
Simply put, survival methods are about unexpected emergency situations, keeping yourself alive, and getting back to the safety of civilization. Bushcraft is about using nature to sustain yourself for protracted periods in the wild, often voluntarily.

Bushcraft skills provide for the fundamental physiological necessities for human life: food (through foraging, tracking, hunting, trapping, and fishing), water sourcing and purification, shelter-building, and fine craft. These may be supplemented with expertise in twine-making, knots and lashings, wood-carving, camp craft, medicine/health, natural navigation, and tool and weapon making.