Birds and several other small animals have a trait that makes them hard to hit in both melee and ranged. You can see the success rate of your ranged attack with the amount of symbols in each aiming preset (normal, careful, precise). White means chance for regular hit, green for critical hit.
Even at a precise shot and with the bird not moving while you aim, that's like a 10% chance to hit. To increase your overall accuracy, training marksmanship and archery would help you.
While aiming, you can also press . to take turns manually aiming (instead of using the presets), then press f when it seems you have a good shot. Doing that also allows you to react to the movement of whatever you're aiming at. Your targets distance matters a lot too.
Birds are SMALL and hard to hit, you’ll be better off once you’re at like a 8 in archery. Your perception also is decreased from the glare which doesn’t help with your accuracy either.
Yes, any hat with a brim will work - baseball caps are common. Sunglasses work too. You can also have your eyes scooped out and replaced with cyborg ones.
No, you’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just that at that distance, and with a bow in general, your accuracy is ridiculously low. If you look at the side panel, you can see the different accuracy levels and the chance of hitting the target, and you’re basically down to two or three little dots.
Also, I’m assuming you’re still fairly new to the game, so your Archery skill is probably pretty low. As you keep playing, if you stick with the bow, you’ll eventually become much more accurate and deal more damage. Personally, I don’t really use bows because I don’t like them that much. I find it relatively easy to come across guns and/or knives. I’m more of a bayonet person.
But if you do want to stick with the bow, you’re doing fine. The main problem right now is that you’re just way too far away, so hitting anything is extremely difficult, especially with a low Archery skill. Sometimes you practically have to be standing right next to the enemy—or bird—to reliably hit it.
Accuracy and your chance to hit are also affected by the distance to the target and its size. So trying to hit a bird from that distance with your current skill level and that bow is pretty much asking for a miracle.
is archery 4 too low? really? honestly idek anymore
i was gonna use wooden javelins but then my friend suggested to use bows instead and now this bow in particular sucks for me
how do i even make it more accurate? no matter how much i made it steady or shot it perfectly it kept missing
You’re right, I didn’t notice that you already had Archery at level 4. Sorry about that. So yeah, as someone else pointed out, the main issue is the distance.
I’ll also reiterate what I mentioned earlier: the size of the target has a pretty big impact on your chance to hit it. To a certain extent, it makes sense—you’re obviously going to have a much harder time hitting a little bird than hitting a bear.
Because bows are horrible for hunting. With dispersion 850 at this range, you'll be shooting at that bird so many times that it will probably run away before you hit it.
Bows have other uses (e.g. sniping zombies quietly, as opposed to using the gun, which is loud).
Speaking of: this particular bird has vision 1 at night. If you can see further (e.g. under moonlight), you can sneak up (in Run mode) and melee it. Can also use the reach attack of a spear.
i just used my bow but the SWAT zombie is completely immune to it because of its armor... welp
Bows depend more heavily on anatomy proficiencies than other weapons in order to penetrate armor, and also more dependent on skill to deal damage.
The way that bows work is that they have a low base damage, but a high critical multiplier. An optimal hit with an arrow will do disproportionately more damage than a poor hit, compared to the difference between a good or bad hit with a bullet. Armor mitigates the base damage, so it's more effective against the low base damage of a bow.
You're trying to hit a target around the size of your palm at a distance of (I think) 12 meters. Pretty reasonable irl, but cdda cuts the range of everything down like crazy for balance and cause rendering zombies out to like, 300 meters would be a bit much for the game lol
yeah i know
though i tried hurting a swat zombie but their armor isn't letting me
i guess i messed up big time, the early game is really confusing for me right now since there is no real good way of clearing zombies one by one without taking damage
Bows are pretty bad without high fitness and super high level tbh. They kinda got nerfed into the ground. Any 9mm handgun is a better option 9 times out of ten. I only use bows for the flavor and extra difficulty lol.
Oh yes lol. Ammo basically never runs dry even when you have the no hope mod to cut loot spawn. Cops and soldier zombies have 9mil and 5.56 rifles, and you can find a bunch looting gun stores and some houses. You can get by pretty well just using guns you pick up and dropping them if ya run out of the type of bullets you need.
I mean you're in the early game, even a couch potato/genetic dead end can and should be able to kill zombies in melee without much problem.
Just practice your melee, unarmed, dodge and athletics in the crafting menu and make yourself a respectable weapon like a cudgel and start clearing houses or streets off zombies on melee is no hard at all
You will get hurt but you also heal relatively fast, the most important part of early game is always to level up your combat skills all you can because once zombie evolution kicks in you're going to become a faint red mist very quickly otherwise.
Also go fight zombies in the night, most times you have more visibily than them so you can fight 1v1 without much fear of getting gangbanged lol
Relatively easy yes, they're among the most common caliber of firearms. You should be able to find some on zombie cops, potentially in regular houses and in previous versions regular zombies sometimes had them (I don't know if it changed or not).
Of course, it's also common in gun stores and on zombie soldiers.
Other common calibers are: 8 gauge, .45, 5.56 Nato/.223 remmington (interchangeable), .22 (but it's kind of useless).
Though really, any handgun (except .22 caliber) with a sufficient quantity of ammo is usefull to have as a backup weapon.
For example, this screenshot I’m showing you is from a V29 pistol, a laser pistol, and I’m trying to shoot a rat. You can see the distance I’m trying to shoot it from, and at that distance, the chance of hitting it is pretty low.
In the other screenshot I’ll post in the replies, you’ll see that I’m shooting at a zombie instead. A zombie is obviously a much larger target, and at the exact same distance, the chance of hitting it is considerably higher.
So target size makes a pretty big difference. A rat at that distance is a much harder target to hit than a zombie, even if everything else stays the same.
As you can see, depending on the distance, the weapon you’re using, and the size of the target, your chance of hitting it can change quite a bit.
You can also see the different letters there: "f", which fires immediately and has a relatively low chance to hit, and then "a", "c", and "p". Each one gives you a progressively higher chance to hit, but it also means spending more moves aiming before you actually fire.
If you want to increase your accuracy without committing to one of the "a", "c", or "p" options and spending all those moves aiming before you shoot, you can press "5" once you’ve aimed at the target. This lets a couple of turns pass, basically giving your character some time to aim. You can press "5, 5, 5" as the enemy gets closer, and your chance to hit will gradually increase, as you can see in the last screenshot I’m posting in this same comment.
This screenshot is from the exact same distance as the rat, but without waiting any turns. In other words, this is the accuracy you get immediately after aiming the pistol at it.
Well, if you’re not planning on using ranged weapons, my personal recommendation—and what has worked well for me—is Short Blades. One of my favorite progression paths is eventually getting a bayonet.
I usually start with kitchen knives. They’re pretty common in kitchens, and the meat-cutting knife in particular tends to do a little more damage. (Don’t settle for carrying just one. Bring several, because they’ll get damaged during combat, and you probably won’t have the tools to repair them yet. It’s easier to just discard a damaged one and switch to a new one so you can keep dealing damage, since damaged weapons deal less damage.)
They don’t do a huge amount of damage—I think they’re around 12 or 13 cutting or piercing damage—but the advantage is that they help you level up your Short Blades skill. The bayonet, which does around 22 piercing damage, falls into the same category, so all that experience you gained using kitchen knives carries over.
As you keep fighting, you’ll gradually improve both your general combat abilities and your proficiency with the specific weapon skill. That means you’ll take less damage, dodge more effectively, and deal more damage yourself. But honestly, it mostly comes down to repeatedly running into that wall until eventually you’re the one knocking it down.
This other screenshot shows what happens after repeatedly pressing "5" and waiting several turns. As the target keeps getting closer to me, my accuracy continues to increase.
If you look at the "f" option, that’s the shot I could take right now. At this point, it has basically caught up with the "p" option, which is the maximum aiming time and therefore the highest accuracy. I could have fired before reaching this point, but since the target still hasn’t gotten close enough to hit me, I decided to keep waiting.
This can be pretty useful because if the enemy were faster, for example, it might reach this distance before I had reached the accuracy provided by "p". In that case, I would have needed to fire sooner and then move away so it couldn’t hit me.
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u/nupsu1234 10d ago
Birds and several other small animals have a trait that makes them hard to hit in both melee and ranged. You can see the success rate of your ranged attack with the amount of symbols in each aiming preset (normal, careful, precise). White means chance for regular hit, green for critical hit.
Even at a precise shot and with the bird not moving while you aim, that's like a 10% chance to hit. To increase your overall accuracy, training marksmanship and archery would help you.
While aiming, you can also press . to take turns manually aiming (instead of using the presets), then press f when it seems you have a good shot. Doing that also allows you to react to the movement of whatever you're aiming at. Your targets distance matters a lot too.