Weapons

The rifle

The rifle fires 600 rounds a minute from a 24-round magazine. Its shots are hitscan, which means they hit the moment you fire, and they pass through gates. A body shot does 12 damage and a headshot does 21, so someone at full health (100) goes down after 9 body shots or 5 headshots.

The first shot goes exactly where you look. While you hold the trigger, each shot adds 0.22° of spread, up to 2.2°, and kicks your view 0.55° up and up to 0.22° to one side. When you stop firing, the spread starts to shrink after 0.15 s, by 9° a second.

It is the same black rifle the bunnies hold, and it is drawn the same way they are, as a projection: black metal that takes its shape from the sky it reflects (the holes in it don't shine), a mint rim, and a red and cyan fringe. Its barrel runs parallel to your view, so it points at the crosshair at any range. Your own chunky plush paws hold it. Paws in the pause menu hides them.

The reload

A reload takes 1.15 s, or 1.45 s when the magazine is empty, so reloading before you run dry is faster. The left paw does all the work:

1. The gun tilts to show its magazine well. The paw pulls out the old magazine and throws it away, and the magazine glitches out of existence as it falls, because it is a projection too.
2. On the way back up, a new magazine appears in the paw, held round its body.
3. The paw rocks the magazine in, front edge first, and seats it with a slap. This is the moment the rounds count as loaded, at 1.15 s.
4. The paw lets go and taps the magazine from below. If the magazine was empty, the paw goes straight up from the magazine and slaps the bolt catch instead, and the rounds count as loaded at 1.45 s.

After the rounds are in, the rest of the animation is the paw going home and the gun settling, and firing skips it. Launching a skyshell stops a reload, because the left paw is needed on the launcher's pump.

Skyshells

The launcher under the barrel fires skyshells. Hold right mouse or Q to aim, and an arc shows where the skyshell will land; let go to launch. A skyshell leaves at 30 m/s plus your own speed and falls along the gravity field the same way you do, so you can lob one across the void onto the far side, or through a gate. The blast does 90 damage at its centre, falling to nothing at 7 m, and pushes people away. After each launch the left paw pumps the launcher twice, and you can launch again after 0.7 s.

The Skylance

The Skylance is a long-range launcher on key 2, shaped like an RPG and made of the rifle's black metal. A fat warhead sits in its mouth, and the band round the warhead glows as the lock builds. It holds two rounds, and two lamps on the back of the front sight show how many are left.

Aiming and the lock

Hold right mouse to aim. The game works out the round's whole flight ahead of time, using the same physics step the round will fly with, so the preview and the real flight match. You see the path, the ring where the round will land and the flight time, through gates too, and the map changes to a side view of the shot drawn to scale. The Skylance fires only after you hold the aim steady for 0.9 s, and turning your view faster than 25° a second breaks the lock.

Firing

When you fire, the round is kicked out of the mouth and its motor lights a moment later. It then flies along the path you aimed at 85 m/s, for up to 14 s, showing its motor and four fins. The second round appears in the mouth 0.6 s later. After the last round, the left paw loads a new one, which takes 3.2 s, and taps its nose.

The blast

As soon as a round leaves, everyone near the landing point sees a warning ring with a countdown, and bots run away from it. Bots that are in a fight run more slowly. Nobody survives inside the ring's inner 6 m. Between 6 m and the ring's edge at 9 m, the blast does 90 damage on the inside, falling to 30 at the edge, and pushes people away. A direct hit does 150. A building between you and the blast protects you.

Rocks bend its rounds

A gravity well bends a passing shot by an amount that grows with the square of the well's escape speed divided by the shot's speed. The escape speed is also what decides how hard it is to climb out of the well, so the two are tied together. A rock already takes 12–14 m/s to leave, which is more than a jump. A skyshell at 30 m/s that skims a rock bends 10–17°, and a Skylance round at 85 m/s bends only 2°. To bend a Skylance round 13°, a rock would need an escape speed of 34 m/s, and then nobody who landed on it could get off.

So Skylance rounds feel the wells of the rocks and the Heart three times stronger than players do, and the wells reach twice as far for them. A round that passes within about 6 m of a rock bends 5–10° and lands 10–20 m from where it would have landed, so a shot aimed just past a rock curves round it and can hit someone hiding behind it. The landing point still moves smoothly as you sweep your aim. Shots that pass nowhere near a well barely change: in 1,500 random shots from the ground at 0.65×, the median moved 0 m and 92% moved less than 5 m. Near the Heart the change is under 8 m, because rounds cross the centre at about 78 m/s.

While you aim, a faint vermilion ring around each rock shows how far its pull reaches. A dial in the pause menu sets how strong the pull is; at 1×, rounds feel the same field as players.

Seeing your hits

• Damage numbers that add up over each target: amber for headshots and vermilion for blasts.
• A separate sound for headshots.
• A kill banner that counts your kills in this life, with a chime that rises with each one.
• A line for each Skylance round that says where it landed and what it did.
• When you go down, a report of the damage you dealt and took.

The grapple

The third gun is shaped like a speargun and fires a hook on a cable at 240 m/s. The hook catches on anything built or floating within 56 m in the default world (0.575 of the world's radius), and a mint ring marks where it would catch. Hold the trigger and the reel pulls you along the line at up to 28 m/s. At a roof edge it pulls you over the edge and flings you on the way you look. On a drifter or the Heart it holds you on a 3 m rope, so you swing round. You have two hooks, and each one comes back 3 s after you use it, with a lamp on the gun for each.

Its design, the flights measured in the game and the plan for towns built around it are on The grapple.

Bots

The game runs bots the same way it runs players. They move with the same physics and fire the same rifle under the same rules, with the same spread and reload, and their shots pass through gates too. A bot's recoil pushes its aim up, the way yours pushes your view up. Each bot decides where to look and which keys to hold 60 times a second. How they look and move is on Characters.