by Óðinn » Thu Sep 03, 2015 12:27 pm The materials are simply too thick to effectively work with. Also, they are not strong enough to really hold together an arrow that you're gonna be shooting with a bow, since wool is stretchy (if you use it for this kind of work it'll stretch and your arrow will fall apart) and taproot and stringing nettles are too feeble and weak, and also are a bitch to work with if you are making arrows, because they are so thick and don't yield very well (they kind of always want to return to original shape, so knots are kind of.. weird and hard to make).
So I have thought about it for a while and I decided to make a thread about it. I'm no marksmanship expert, I've just done a bit of research as this topic interests me. Here's what I thought of:
- Add sinew. Sinew would be much harder to obtain at the start as you need to kill something for it. 'But chickens and rabbits!' Yeah, but we can just remove the sinew from chickens, and with rabbits you need to actually catch/hunt them, which is a challenge in and of it's own. While removing the sinew from rabbits isn't.. wholly realistic (I think, technically, it's possible to work with sinew from a chicken, but it'd probably be too fickle, thin and small. Don't quote me on this though.)
This makes obtaining arrows already a bit harder, and it removes the weird string requirements that are currently in place.
While hard to obtain at first, once you have actually hunted an animal succesfully, you'll probably have enough sinew to create several more arrows and sustain your hunting through this. Because of the nature of arrows (bone arrows, specifically) you should be able to sustain your hunting simply by hunting more (well, apart from branches.) This is not only historically accurate, it's also a bit better gameplay wise. Currently I find myself running around shooting foxes in the face, and once I've run out of arrows I find myself running around the forest looking for taproots. - Add flint, remove regular stone arrows. Flint either as a rock type or something you can forage. Why? Because currently the way arrows and their damage types work is unrealistic. First off, not all rocks are suitable for making arrows but in HnH they are. Many rock types will simply break upon contact with an animal bone, especially the more brittle stones. Secondly, well. The killing power of a flinthead arrow is equal or greater than that of a steeltipped arrow. 'But what, steel versus flint? Are you kidding? You're lying!' No, a flint tipped arrow made traditionally will go straight through a deer.
Youtube video with proof
Ignore his lame and boring commentary and just look at the action, and how he made his arrows (sinew, some glue made from treesap..). They might look weak but they are very, VERY strong. It goes straight through that deer, imagine if that was your arm or body. If it doesn't get caught on a bone, you are kind of screwed.
Now I realize he is using a different bow type and that 2 boughs and some string hardly make a good bow (HnH recipe for bow, whatever it is, I can't remember) so you won't be shooting with that kind of power, but still, flint tipped arrows are VERY strong and durable.
Preferably flint should be more powerful than bone arrows, and flint should be relatively rare at low levels of perc x exp, just to balance this out. - Give us back our slings! Don't get me wrong, I love hunting with a bow, but many hunters didn't use a bow at all in the age and time you're trying to represent (granted that the early stages of the game are relatively caveman-like). I would prefer to see long spears hardened in fire (these would be cheap as hell to make, but dangerous to use) but I don't think that will be happening. Slings are the next best thing. They are sort of realistic, have a good balance between cheapness and utility, and above all, it prevents the bow 'n arrow spam that you can currently do (walking up to an animal and shooting it in the face a few times).
I suggest however that you change the recipe to remove general string (taproot and stinging nettles are, once again, very bad choices to make a sling out of considering you'll be using it rather heavily. You need durability) and that you simply make the recipe something like 1-2 leather pieces, an a leather strap. These are items already in the game and I believe most slings were made out of a leather 'pouch' and a leather string to begin with.
However I am not a fan of the q150 slings that we saw in HnH W7, it kind of defeats the purpose of a bow since you could effectively kill anything without too much effort. The only use of bows was PvP and that's not really what I am looking for. So I would like a way to limit the quality on a sling, just to prevent that and force people to 'upgrade' to a bow. I'm just not sure how.
This would also mean that those who don't get quick access to hunting supplies (sinew, bow, whatever), or got unlucky in their hunting can still make a feasible hunting way. Add a sick slinging animation (sling rotating above head, kind of like a lasso, then quickly move the hand forward and release 1 end of the sling to release stone)
Youtube video for a slingshot, showing how to sling + 'potential damage'. 180km/h is pretty fast for a stone. I'm sure that hurts.
That's all I have at the moment and I am quite sure that my ideas are flawed, but posting it will mean that perhaps someone gets an idea from it and can expand on that. The only way forward is by posting things that might not work, but that contain something in them that might work for other ideas. Thanks for reading.
