So early on, I can conserve stamina, and just drop zombies with a few power attacks, since the stamina cost of the bone shiv is low. I play on insane/always nightmare run speed/64 zombies/horde every night and perma death. 2 power attacks + bleed is enough to kill some of the others. I think a T6 bone shiv power attack to the head, on insane mode, will kill most of the weaker zombies, after the bleed damage is figured. I am sure, but that is not how I use the knife. Even for hit and run, just putting a barbed wire mod on a club and bonking and kiting them just kind of outclasses the machete in it's own role lol Machete is fun but from my testing it basically always came in second to last in basically every type of test, beating only the Spear which performed drastically worse than I expected. The Club is second best to Junk Sledges on the higher difficulty just because of knock back / stun + the club doing so much more damage to stunned targets and re-knocking them down etc I'm not even sure how much damage it does as it takes so long to actually kill them it was hard to really notice.

You basically have to rely on stun above all else when you are being chased by 2-3 irradiated ferals that are sprinting, and the DoT bleed seems.

I actually did my tests on the second hardest difficulty with zombies that sprinted, and that was where the knife did the worst of all lol Plus the bone knife stamina is really cheap and there is a slow effect on bleed. In the harder modes, you are more likely to actually let the bleed damage take effect to take advantage of the damage.

7 days to die barbed club