Modest Guns and Armour for the Humble Newman

My bad--I missed where you were coming from.

The big deal about the current implementation of the eoka is that it lines up (functionally) with the hand cannon from Legacy. The hand cannon is almost caveman era--almost like Rust's take on the cannon that Captain Kirk used against the Gorn, but with more metal. The Legacy homemade shells even fired rocks. The HC's biggest feature is that (like the eoka animation) it has an unreliable firing mechanism that fails a random number of times before you shoot. This might not sound like a big deal, but use it and you'll see it matters a great deal--equal parts frustrating and hilarious, and while fine in PvE it's... very situational in PvP.

The pipe shotgun fires a single shot and requires reloading a shell through the breach. This mechanism lets you reload quickly and on the move. It requires a significant amount of metal to make and also (for now) "modern" ammo.

By comparison, the blunderbuss falls between the two. It uses more metal than the HC (assuming this is what the eoka is settling into), but has a reliable firing mechanism. (I'm holding off getting into the weeds with matchlock vs flintlock and firing pan design--best ignore it for fun factor.) To reload it, you'd need to dump in powder and shot (yes, yes we're ignoring wadding too) through the muzzle--in game terms, longer reload time.

Someone might risk playing the lottery with HC's, but less so a weapon that will definitely go boom when its firer desires it. Once the first shot is fired though, that's when the pipe (and other salvage guns) would prove far superior, so you're still getting what you paid for.

TL;DNR: Eoka/HandCannon is cheapest with random firing timing and long reload; meant for silly/desperate moments funded by melting a food can over a campfire. The blunderbuss costs a bit more metal, reliably fires its spread, and still has that slow muzzle reload time; meant for the early days spent in small houses with a new furnace and only modest ore collection. The pipe shotgun is more expensive in gun and ammo, but its shells load much faster through the breach; by the time you're making scrap guns you have some solid pickaxe tools and maybe even a second furnace.

The blunderbuss, like all these muzzle-loading black powder weapons, bridges the point where you're trying to establish a homestead, but still lack the metal gathering/production to turn it into a fortress protected by functionally modern guns.

/r/playrust Thread