Guide to Peaceful Coexistence

Keep it anywhere in your inventory and your attacks stop chewing up the scenery. Swings and shots pass harmlessly over bunnies, birds and the rest of the critters, and grass, herbs and saplings survive being hit. Builders and anyone running a critter enclosure get the most from it, because the usual disaster is losing an afternoon of decoration to one careless swing. The trade is that you also cannot clear plants or harvest a herb patch by swinging at it any more.

You do not have to stash it in a chest to get the old behavior back. Press the open or activate key on the item in your inventory or hotbar and it flips to the inactive version, which does nothing at all, and the same key flips it back. That makes it practical to carry permanently and switch off for the few minutes you actually want to cut down a jungle.

This folds Guide to Critter Companionship and Guide to Environmental Preservation into a single item, so once you own it there is no reason to keep either original taking up space. One quirk worth knowing in Journey Mode: the researched copy always comes back active, no matter which version you fed into the duplicator.