Magic Tool

A hand-tool that either:

• is capable of doing many things (akin to a swiss army knife), and/or
• is capable of doing just one or two things, but applicable to many things (e.g a hammer that can only fix things, but has virtually no limitations on the "things" it can fix).

Surprisingly, it is often not much used as a weapon. Carried by the universal Worker Units in Real-Time Strategy games, and the Engineer classes in team-based First Person Shooters. Usually, an Acceptable Break from Reality, as it is more simple and elegant than showing the character carrying around an extensive toolbox or heavy equipment. Maybe some Technobabble tries to justify the tool's utility, but maybe a Hand Wave is enough. If it really is magic, then it is likely Magitek or a classic Magic Wand.

Compare Green Rocks, Duct Tape for Everything, and Imagination-Based Superpower (a common result of using a high-end Magic Tool). One common Magic Tool is a welding torch or something similar: compare Building Is Welding. Another is a hand-held Everything Sensor.

For a weapon that fixes or restores things, compare Healing Shiv. For one of these that can break things instead of fixing them, contrast Swiss-Army Weapon.

Does not refer to a wizard who is a gigantic jerk.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The rarest form that Stands take in Jojos Bizarre Adventure is that of the "Object Stand", where the Stand materializes in the form of a physical object that must be interacted with in order to access the Stand's unique powers.
  • The most recognizable and straightforward examples are Hol Horse's Stand "Emperor" from Stardust Crusaders and Narancia Ghirga's Stand "Aerosmith" from Golden Wind. Emperor takes the form of a pistol with telepathically guided bullets, so whilst it has a shorter ranger than a normal pistol and is Invisible to Normals, which negates its intimidation factor, it is very hard for Hol Horse to miss a shot with it, and he has infinite ammo. Aerosmith, on the other hand, is a toy airplane... which fires real bullets and can drop real bombs, flies wherever Narancia's mental commands order it, and can even track potential targets by their carbon dioxide emissions.
  • A more unusual example is the Stand Anubis, also from Stardust Crusaders. Anubis takes the form of a sword... because, technically, it is a sword, just one that has had the Stand of its smith imbued into it somehow — Anubis the Stand manifests as a ghostly humanoid jackal. This Stand can't physically interact with the world, but can instead possess anyone who dares to wield the sword, having its own will and sadistic personality, and the sword can selectively phase through matter, allowing it to cut only what it wants to cut, making it impossible to physically defend against.
  • Stardust Crusaders also has the Stand Thoth, used by Boingo; it takes the form of a manga that can foretell the future... unfortunately, its predictions are incredibly short-term and hard to decipher, making it one of the most useless Stands seen in the series.
  • Super Fly from Diamond is Unbreakable sits on the vague line between this trope and Genius Locus, being a parasitic Stand in the form of a radio tower that bonds with the spirit of any human who enters its confines and compels them to remain therein, or else they'll turn into a statue of lifeless metal.

Comic Books

• Parodied and averted in Giant Days; the highly practical McGraw carries a multitool which he can employ to generally good effect — but he has his limits.
  Daisy: (as McGraw is trying to pick a lock) Can you...pick faster?
  McGraw: It's a 12-in-1 multi-tool, Daisy. That means it does twelve different things very badly.
• The Omnicom used by DC's Legion of Super-Heroes resemble iPhones with all manner of scanning / sensing and computing capabilities, although they actually predate the iPhone (and the cell phone, and the laptop computer) by several decades.
• Also the Mother Boxes from Jack Kirby' New Gods metaseries. Usually looking something like a cassette tape, each is basically what gods use in place of a smartphone ^note  And their first appearance actually predates the earliest PDA by 20ish years . The list of things they can do is mind-boggling: create a handy disguise, knock enemies out, open up a teleportation portal, change local gravity, and heal injuries... also they're alive and sentient in their own right.
• Steelgrip Starkey and the All-Purpose Power Tool was centered around this trope. It's the size of a toolbox, but can be programmed to perform any task, from raising a skyscraper to clearing a polluted gulf. It runs on no visible power source, synthesizes new components and materials out of thin air, and is apparently indestructible.
• Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: Nautica's wrench. It started out as an ordinary wrench, but Brainstorm upgraded it for her and added "a billion new functions". Including a light that turns on when she exaggerates. And eventually, a button that causes it to say "Brainstorm is an ass" when pushed. It's overall a pretty blatant shout out to the sonic screwdriver.

Film — Animation

• Wreck-It Ralph has Fix-It Felix Jr.'s gold hammer, which has the ability to fix anything that he taps with it. He can even use it to fix up injuries. Unfortunately, this means he definitely cannot destroy anything with it or use it as a weapon. When Felix tries to break out of King Candy's dungeon, he strikes a loose bar with his hammer. Immediately, the bars become thicker and stronger.
  Felix: Oh! Why do I fix everything I touch?!

Film — Live-Action

• James Bond: Any mobile phone. Taser, remote control for your car, and hacking/lockpicking tool. Magic! Averted in Casino Royale (2006) and Quantum of Solace, where the phones are just well standard cell phones. Product Placement ensures we get a good long look at them.
• In Six String Samurai all that is needed to fix a car is a ratchet, cranked a few times on the dashboard. This may have been intentional, as the rest of the movie is pretty ridiculous, too.
• Batons in TRON: Legacy can do many different things depending on how they are used. The first example is creating a light cycle . They can also create light jets, a Laser Blade or Two, a staff version of said blades, a Grappling hook, and.... a parasol.

Literature

• Arly Hanks: In Mischief In Maggody, Kevin gets a job selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door. The brand he's selling apparently does everything from regular vacuuming to leafblowing to paint-stripping to scaling fish. Heaven helps whoever has to clean out the vacuum's filters and dust bag....
• In Carpe Jugulum, the Lancre Army Knife has many tools, several of which are quite esoteric like the Device for Ascertaining the Truth of a Given Statement. And this is after Shawn Ogg has "lost" many of the king's suggestions, out of fear he might end up with the only handy pocketknife that needs to be carried on a cart.
• In Factory of the Gods, Julian's phone becomes this after it touches a Godcore, allowing him to essentially play Factorio while everyone around him is playing a tabletop RPG.

Live-Action TV

• In Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver is a piece of Applied Phlebotinum that can basically fix, break, lock, unlock, or otherwise modify anything you want. The only things it specifically can't do are unlock a deadlock seal, inflict injury, or kill. Unless you're a Cyberman. Oh, and it doesn't work on wood. And it's vulnerable to hair dryers. And you can't triplicate the flammability of alcohol either.^note Though technically you can't do anything that doesn't actually mean anything. It may not be able to inflict injury, but if you're dumb enough to let him near the sound system it can sure as hell hurt your ears. Oh, and one time, it was used to drive a screw. It's also utterly useless as a conventional weapon — the Doctor wouldn't carry it otherwise, as he has moral objections to carrying weaponry. The Master has been known to carry a 'laser screwdriver', a similar multifunction tool that is weaponizable. Then the Eleventh Doctor appears to use it as a weapon against the Silence, while River Song is shooting them. The screwdriver emits a green beam as he whirls back-to-back with River, but he's simply using the screwdriver on the ship that surrounds them, preventing the Silence from absorbing it to power their attacks. Lampshaded by the War Doctor, who is dumbfounded by Ten and Eleven pointing them like "water pistols".
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • The Tricorder and related items, which often allow a skilled user to discover, diagnose, and fix almost anything with no other tools.
  • "Assignment Earth" was a Poorly Disguised Pilot for an Avengers-Esque spinoff series. The protagonist of that episode, Gary Seven, had a do-anything gadget called a 'servo' which is sometimes suspected of being a direct ripoff of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver (it even looks almost identical), but which couldn't have been because the sonic screwdriver didn't make its screen debut until about a month after "Assignment: Earth" was filmed, and more than a year after Gary Seven's servo was first proposed in the original unsold pilot script for Assignment: Earth. Not to mention that Doctor Who wasn't seen in the US until the '70s.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Although not strictly a tool, prestidigitation has the most functions of any single spell. It is often nicknamed "Least Wish," after the high-level spells that can be used to duplicate many different functions.
  • In 5th Edition, the aptly named All Purpose Tool is a magic item usable only by artificers that looks like a simple screwdriver but can turn into any type of tool the wielder wishes and grants proficiency with the said tool if the wielder didn't already have it. It also gives a boost to the power of the artificer's spells and once per day you can choose one cantrip from any class spell list and the tool grants you the ability to cast it as if it were an artificer spell for the rest of the day.
• Most mechanics in Warmachine come with one very large wrench that is of limited use as a weapon and no other obvious tools. That one wrench lets them fix anything, up to and including Circle Orboros constructs made of wood and stone animated with the blood of sacrifices.

Video Games

• In the Battlefield series, the wrench is a miraculous device. Just grind it on any vehicle, destroyable object, or bridge to repair it. Surprisingly, it cannot be used to bash someone's head or sabotage enemy vehicles.
  • Battlefield 2142, in keeping with its theme, replaces wrenches with a repair-gun/welder device, but it has the same functionality as the wrenches of previous games. You still can't hurt anyone with it.
  • The "Power Tool" in Battlefield: Bad Company will repair any vehicle if held up to it and spun. It will also kill enemies if ... held up to them and spun.
    • The second usage is quite possibly more sensible than the first. After all, having a spinning power tool shoved into your face would likely hurt.
  • Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam and Battlefield 3 replace the engineer's impact wrench with a blowtorch. It still repairs friendly vehicles, damages hostile vehicles, and can kill enemies.
• Call of Duty: World at War: A cancelled perk for vehicles would have been called 'Magic Wrench'. Presumably, it would be used to repair tanks.
• Command & Conquer: Renegade features the Repair Gun, which has some range unlike most variants, and does exactly what the name implies. They can also disarm enemy C4 and beacons by draining their health bar (nothing else can damage these things). The single-player version is only used by NPCs and has a damaging secondary fire, but not so the multiplayer version.
• Dark Cloud: "Repair Powder," which takes this to a whole new level: merely sprinkling this miraculous powder on a weapon will instantaneously repair it.
• Desert Strike features "Armor Repair" Toolboxes scattered about each level, pick one up and it inexplicably repairs your chopper to full strength.
• Deus Ex is a rare first-person shooter that almost completely averts the trope. You have nano-lockpicks, which can reform themselves to, well, pick locks. But for electronic security, such as keypads or security cameras, you need to use a different device, called a multi-tool. The function of these tools is more magical than the lockpicks. Finally, to break things such as crates open, you need an object such as a crowbar, police baton, or sword, all of which are themselves usable as weapons. The sequel plays it straight, abolishing lockpicks, as all traditional locks have vanished and been replaced with keypads.
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion have Repair Hammers and Morrowind has less powerful Repair Prongs, good for fixing all swords, bows, armor, hammers, axes, daggers, and shields.
  • Some official mods in Oblivion add forges and other such things which boost your Armorer skill when you're near them, which seems to imply that the Repair Hammers are imperfect at their job unless the player is a master at the craft.
  • Oblivion had a skill book that explained how hammers could be used for repairing most pieces of armor. Though it suggested that needle and thread would be more useful for fur and leather, and advised care when repairing glass armor
• Engineers in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars have a pair of pliers that can be applied to any part of any machinery, even if the player is lying prone and only able to reach a support leg. The pliers are almost as effective as the Contractor's futuristic repair tool (although they also have an automatic droid).
• Factorio has the Repair Unit, a handheld tool that appears to be about the size of a screwdriver. It can quickly repair anything, be it a stone wall or a highly advanced laser turret. However, they're disposable due to a non-replaceable battery, so it's recommended to carry at least a dozen of them.
• In Far Cry 2, any kind of damage to any vehicle (short of complete destruction, natch) can be fixed by taking a few moments to tighten a bolt somewhere under the hood with your ratchet of awesome.
  • And in the sequels you somehow repair all damage to vehicles (including broken windshields and blown tires) with an oxyacetylene cutting torch.
• In Gadget Trial, Izen medics use a giant syringe to heal/repair all other E-series. Which means from other Izens (infantry units), to battleships and bombers.
• Geneforge: Living tools in the series. Use them to pick locks, sabotage stuff, repair stuff, or anything. Of course, since it's a bunch of tentacles strong enough to bend metal and fine enough to do delicate work, it should be pretty versatile.
• GoldenEye (1997): A watch is used for everything, including a cutting torch, a deadly laser, to receive communications, and a Diegetic Interface.
• Half-Life 2 series
  • Alyx Vance carries around an all-purpose electronic...thing that seems capable of overriding, reprogramming, or destroying pretty much any electronic barrier that stands in your way. Alyx then uses a gun on humanoid adversaries. The player's near-multiversal tool, the Gravity Gun, is useless on heavier objects and humanoid enemies until the last level, where simply dragging a bad guy forward kills him.
  • The mod Empires features engineer classes with these kinds of tools. They do everything from constructing turrets to repairing personal armor to dismantling enemy buildings to reviving fallen troops (aka necromancy).
• Homeworld: The mysterious green beam, which fixes ships, is apparently the reverse operation of the mysterious red beam which gathers resources. According to the backstory, the red beam is a "Phased Disassembler Array", a device that uses fusion torches to break materials down to their constituent atoms — the green beam would thus be a device that reorganizes said atoms into the desired form, and is in fact a smaller-scale use of the same technology used by the Mothership to build ships in the first place.
  • In the sequel, harvesting is done by mechanical arms on the harvester, an apparent step back in technology. Probably taken from/inspired by Total Annihilation (see above), which predates Homeworld for a couple of years.
• Jagged Alliance 2 plays with the trope a bit. Instead of a repair tool, you have repair toolkits, a consumable item that apparently contains the necessary spare parts and equipment to patch up anything; firearms, night-vision goggles, body armor, and even (in the v1.13 expansion pack) holsters and other load-bearing equipment.
• LEGO Adaptation Game:
  • LEGO Indiana Jones and other LEGO games feature Lego hammers and/or wrenches which are used to fix broken machinery. Often this will require recruiting someone with a tool or finding the tool yourself. LEGO Star Wars and its sequels dispense with tools and have broken machines fixed with the Force.
  • LEGO Harry Potter has Arthur Weasley and his magic wrench. Of course in this case, it being magical is justified.
• Mass Effect has the appropriately named Omni-tool, a holographic tool that can dispense medigel, conduct electronic warfare, act as an Infinite Flashlight, function as a datapad, and repair vehicles and a certain plasma vent. It is also a definite threat in combat; if you bring her along, Tali will brandish one as a threat while others draw weapons or take up their Pstandard Psychic Pstance.
  • In the game's codex, it's explained that the Omni-tool's functionality is provided by downloadable programs, and that its miniature nano-assemblers can perform programmed tasks in seconds. The encyclopedia does not explain the combat effectiveness of this ability, but playthroughs demonstrate that the Omni-tool generates a mine (possibly an EMP generator of some variant) that the squad member then throws at the enemy like a grenade. The third game takes this even one step further by letting them produce a specialized weapon on command for melee attacks. Oh — and they can run video games as well.
• Minecraft: In BuildCraft, you can use the wrench on machines from almost any compatible Game Mod.
• In Planet Explorers, the Replicator can craft almost any item for which it has the script, although advanced items such as aircraft parts need an Industrial Replicator.
• PlanetSide 2 features the Engineer class's handheld Nano Armor Kit, a pistol-sized tool capable of repairing any damage to faction-specific machinery through the power of white nanite beams, which have no limit aside from Over Heating. Averted by the Nano Dispenser and the Body Armor Nano Kit in the first game, which repaired vehicles and armor (respectively) using cartridges of nanites loaded into the tools, which needed to be reloaded on a semi-regular basis when repairing lots of items.
• Red Faction Armageddon has the nanoforge, which can recreate structures exactly as they were, project a shield, break through walls and kill enemies in several different ways.
• In Roots of Pacha, the handaxe is a weak but all-purpose tool that can cut grass, break rocks, chop wood, and till the land. It can be upgraded into the Magic Handaxe to destroy the first three in one hit.
• Savage: There's no problem that can't be solved by hitting it with a sword.
• In Sins of a Solar Empire, the construction ships can build any structure with a blowtorch.
• In Spiritfarer, the Everlight, a golden glowing orb that Stella wears on her belt and Daffodil wears on his collar, can be used to manifest different tools that seem to be made of pure light, from oven mitts to a fishing rod.
• Starcraft: in full effect with Terran SC Vs. Cutting up minerals when gathering, constructing buildings, fighting - all fusion torch. Dozen SC Vs can blast a single bunker or a siege tank with their torches and repair it to full in seconds. Mostly avoided for Protoss and Zerg, since neither really builds or repairs their structures. Protoss teleport theirs from their homeworld, and the Zerg buildings are living organisms grown from the ground by converting a harvester unit into a cocoon.
• In Star Wars: Battlefront II, the engineer's fusion cutter can fix destructible objects, disarm mines, and cut into enemy tanks to hijack them, but not cut open an enemy.
• Subnautica: The Repair Tool resembles a welding torch and can be used to repair almost any device. The Data Bank encourages you to accept a Hand Wave about how it works.
  Data Bank: Most people don't care why it works, just that it saved their life that one time — but in case you're curious, it combines scanner and fabricator technologies to determine the proper specifications for the targeted object, and then rearranges the available physical material to match the original specs.
• Team Fortress 2: The Engineer's wrench is for whacking foes and applying Percussive Maintenance to machines. The game's "manual" Lampshades the practice: the instructions on upgrading the gun say, for example:
  Continue swinging wrench in an aggressive manner in the direction of your sentry in order to extend dual rotational barrels and remove the rear lid from the ammunition housing container.
• Supreme Commander: Units with the complete engineering suite can construct, repair, reclaim wrecks and not-yet-wrecks and capture enemy units. When constructing and repairing, the four factions have four cosmetically different Magic Tools:
  • UEF: Similar to a laser printer, consists of blue beams swiping back and forth the side of the structure/unit, row by row from the top.
  • Cybran: Swarm of small drones that shoot red beams at random points of the constructed target.
  • Aeon: Unit transformed from the amorphous ball of silver sludge.
  • Seraphim: Unit grows from a singular point into its full size while decreasing in transparency.
• Tribes: The Repair Backpack. Point it at a friend, hold down the trigger, and watch the laser beam heal him back up to health. Turn around and use the same laser thingy to repair a crushed generator to perfect condition. Do a Spinfusor jump and then heal yourself with it in midair. You can also use it to repair enemy equipment and players.
• Total Annihilation: Construction units and Commanders have nanolathes, which can create buildings and units, absorb terrain objects and wrecks for resources, repair damaged units, restore wrecked units and structures to full combat readiness, and even capture enemy units.
• Warcraft
  • The axes used by human peasants and orc peons in the games can chop wood, fix buildings and repair siege equipment, and chop up enemy infantry if you gang up on him.
  • Averted in the third game, where the workers use different tools for building or gathering wood. Human peasants can also be temporarily turned into stronger militia units (using their axes) to defend, while the peons can hide in bunkers and hurl javelins from inside.
• Warhawk features a wrench that repairs any friendly or unoccupied vehicle or turret by whacking it repeatedly. However, it can be used to destroy enemy equipment or just smack someone upside the head for an instant kill.
• World of Warcraft: the Gnomish Army Knife is a straight example of this trope. Created by high-level engineers, this device gives you the functionality of a blacksmithing hammer, skinning knife, Gyromatic Micro-Adjuster (screwdriver), Arclight Spanner, and a mining pick. Also, has a function to bring a player back from the dead, if you are a skilled enough engineer. Originally had an option for flint and tinder in order to create camping fires, but the need for them was removed from the game entirely and from the item specifically.
• X3: Terran Conflict and its expansion pack feature the Repair Laser, a spacesuit-mounted tool that is capable of fixing up any ship. Fire the repair laser at a M5 scout ship, and it'll be in tip-top shape in about a minute. Place a brick over your fire key while aiming at a M2 Destroyer then go watch a movie, and come back; the hull health will have gone up about 20%.

Web Animation

• Weebl & Bob: In "pikea3," Weebl is annoyed that Bob is playing in the cardboard box instead of helping him assemble their pie, so he welds the box shut.
  Bob: How do you even weld cardboard?!

Web Original

• Whateley Universe: At the Super Hero School Whateley Academy, Compiler has the power to control and animate nanites within five feet of herself. She has a nanotech Magic Tool that she even calls a 'sonic screwdriver'. We've seen it transform into a magic marker complete with working ink. It's nothing but nanites, so it doesn't work if it's not close to her.

Western Animation

• Penny's "book" in Inspector Gadget seems to be a complete electronic warfare system packed into a notebook computer.
• Leela's "thing on my wrist" in Futurama, a.k.a. her "wristal jackometer".
• Kim Possible's "Kimmunicator" has whatever kind of Everything Sensor she might need, universal computer access, extensible robot arms for her Mission Control to help with, and even the ability to fly back home if she loses it.
• Moltar can perform all of his duties in Space Ghost Coast to Coast with a single lever.
• ReBoot has key tools, especially Glitch, which can morph into anything their user requests.
• Rick and Morty has the plumbus. You all know what it does since everyone has one.

Real Life

• Multitools. The name says it all.
• Swiss army knives use this trope as a major selling point.
• Modern smartphones: Your basic Internet-connected computer, GPS receiver, digital still/video camera, music player, alarm clock, and pocket watch. Some of them even make telephone calls!

---

Heh, heh... Magic Tool...

---