Board Thread:Guides/@comment-24108228-20140928223440

What I see in many tribes, settlements, or non-nomadic soloists, is a lack of ability to progress beyond a certain tool tier. This will obviously depend on your island of choice, but either way, you'll want the best weapons you can get your hands on. This is a short guide on some of the best weapons you can make with each type of weapon.

Stone
There is a distinctive lack of weaponry in this set, and the instinctive move might be a spear. That is certainly what I see every single stonebound tribe using. However, they have made a mistake in that fact, for there are two more unorthodox weapons which are far more effective. The first one of them is a longbow.

This weapon is remarkably overpowered for its tier, according to halo it's more of an iron tier weapon than a stone one, yet you don't even need a single cutstone to get enough arrows to kill somebody in bento armour. So even a paradise dweller can just make 10 of them, store 9, and whenever their bow runs out of ammo, just drop it into the ocean and grab a new one. It deals 60 damage on headshot with stone arrows, which makes me prefer to use two of them so I can quickly dispatch of an unarmoured player (which accounts for roughly 90% of anyone you will meet).

The second weapon is a hatchet. Now this may be inferior to a sword in some cases, but you have to remember that the stone tier doesn't have a sword, so hatchets are the way to go. The one issue with long bows is that it can be a pain to wait for them to reload should you miss a shot, making the hatchet a perfect weapon to charge in with and deal the finishing blows, in a much quicker time than any spear.

Iron
Iron is a funny tier. Since the long bow is technically it's ranged weapon, it doesn't get any free upgrade, and chickens are native to very few islands, so no iron arrows.

No, the main new addition is the increased damage from swords and hatchets. The issue with stone hatchets is that they take a while to eat through someone's health, so they can run away if there's a boat nearby. With your new iron sword, you can deal enough damage to easily take out a fleeing former assailant. The long bow however is still the main weapon in your arsenal. This will all change soon however, as many islands with iron also have the facilities to make:

Steel
Many people consider steel to not be part of the "Greatest Metal" competition. It's just a fight between bluesteel and mithril, the really unwieldy one that might just be useable if it wasn't for the stupidly expensive recipe, and the quick one with the high DPS, obtainability, and the armour that can be worn without walkspeed issues that makes all PvP combat like fighting a speedhacker (which as we all know is impossible). However, people forget about the one weapon that used to be of mithril tier but was replaced by a (slightly inferior) bow, the crossbow.

As some of our older residents may remember, there was once debates over who would win in a fight, the guy with the mithril sword, the guy with the mithril spear, the one with the mithril javelin, and the crossbowman. It was commonly decided on that the crossbowman would win easily. Then we got Yewbeam and bluesteel, which brought the topic away from that standoff and onto more broad ones. And after around three paragraphs of stalling, I give you the crossbow.

Now this weapon is not for mass tribal use. You cannot give one of these to each of your tribe members and expect good things. These weapons are for skilled professionals, experts in the trade. However, when in combat, these are almost unrivalled. A headshot isn't too hard (especially with practice), and when coupled with a woven vest or quiver (which can be obtained with a small boat trip), they deal serious amounts of damage. No longer do you need to worry about getting multiple headshots, a single headshot will suffice, and with a woven vest, suffices even on players with anything less than a set of rockma armour (it deals somewhere between 185 and 189 damage). I would also like to put particular emphasis on the triple crossbow technique, a method of killing people that uses a quiver, woven vest, and three crossbows, and when well executed, kills a mithrilite in a single round of shots (and if you miss a couple, don't worry, you only have to wait another 4 seconds before you get to try again). The only issue is that anyone using the same tactic can kill you in one shot (as can you to them).

As for tribal users, a crossbow is a tad too expensive to upkeep for an entire tribe, so a steel sword and javelin is a good weaponry set (unless you can get woven vests or quivers, in which case you should stick to the longbow instead of the javelin).

Mithril
If you got this far, well done. I'm also rather curious to why you're having any issue exerting complete dominance over the server, and you're still looking for tips on how to optimise your weaponry set. Either way, I can still provide tips.

In some cases, you will have access to mithril and not steel. This is a rare occasion in which many ranged items become much less useful in comparison to the current weaponry of the tier, and perhaps a mithril javelin would be a good choice. The longbow, although amazing, cannot compare with mithril weaponry. As for your melee weapon, I would suggest a hatchet. The sword does not deal enough damage to instantly kill anyone a hatchet couldn't (excluding guys with only a quiver, but they're rarer than admins giving out Unobtainium), and the greatly improved DPS is good in combat situations, especially in rare events where you need to fight people of a similar ability.

As for people who do have steel, you can make a Yewbeam bow, depending on your location in proximity to a chicken spawnpoint. A single trip is usually enough to provide for an entire game, although a crossbow is of similar quality (sacrificing a couple DPS) and saves large amounts of time in crafting, especially for those not intending to use mithril for anything else. If anyone is pushing you to such high requirements for better weaponry, you should probably step back and rethink what you did to deserve that. However, a Yewbeam bow with a quiver is faster than it's sword counterpart (and holds the record for the highest DPS in the game), and therefore if you have the steel to spare it should definitely be your primary multipurpose combat weapon. Again, if you need this kind of raw attack power despite the high upkeep costs, you should probably retrace what you just did, and why someone is so mad at you.

Bluesteel
Now, I really don't like bluesteel all that much. It's useless for anything that's not a weapon (only the firestarter and weaponry have any redeemable features over mithril), and it's basically just an alternative for those who really cant go mining for the purple ore.

If you do find yourself so limited, I would advise a hatchet. It's just like a mithril sword, but it chops down trees with a 100% success rate too. Your main weapon should definitely be the crossbow, if you have bluesteel you certainly have steel (it's used to craft it for some odd reason, totally not like it's called bluesteel), and any teammates you have should take a similar route, as bluesteel is remarkably expensive and a sword is too expensive and ineffective. 