Bow Mechanics Revamped In Today's Rend Update

Frostkeep Studios has just rolled out Early Access Patch 8 for Rend today. Patch 8 is the Norse-themed survival sandbox game’s first update of 2019 and introduces significant changes to how bows work in the game. First and foremost is how bows are fired:

“We’ve made a comprehensive update to how Bow combat works. As of this patch, you draw your Bow by clicking and holding the left mouse button and fire the arrow by releasing the button. This means you can take as much or as little time as you want to fire your arrow. Additionally, the damage, velocity, range, and accuracy are all scaled by how far you have drawn your Bow before firing. Zoom (ADS) is still controlled by right clicking but is no longer required to draw or fire a Bow.”

Bows, which were previously hitscan weapons, have also now been converted to projectile weapons. As projectile weapons, bows will now benefit from the recent projectile weapon improvements which include distance-based damage falloff, critical damage, and reworked projectile weapons logic which should now “reliably send the projectile to where the player is aiming”. Bow stats and their relative damage-per-second have also been adjusted to compensate for the increased difficulty in hitting targets.

Patch 8 also brings with it changes to Ammunition and crafting recipes. The Ammunition crafting tree has been cleaned up and several Ammunition recipes have been fixed “to make them more consistent in reagent cost and item count returns”. In addition, Shademoss and Ichorpods have been removed from the game and therefore have also been removed from crafting recipes.

The patch is also packed with game improvements including better interface and art, performance optimizations, creature tweaks, and numerous bug fixes. You can read through the entire list of changes on the Rend official site.