Ammo Changes

We’re planning on changing the way that ammo works in the game, and would like your thoughts.

The current thinking is that by default the Slingbow will have infinite basic ammo, so you can always use it, but to get the most out of it you will have to craft “Crystals” which you can fit into the Slingbow and give a certain amount of powered up shots (called “Charges”). The Crystals could contain extra buffs that effect the damage done, such as “+50 Shock damage” or “5 Burn damage area effect for 10 Seconds”.

I’m pretty happy with that setup, but I’d like to hear your thoughts on it.

One area that we’re not sure about though is the way to deal with the Crystals and Weapons in the inventory. We can see two options for this:

  1. Similar to the existing system – you drag a Crystal over a Weapon and it disappears into an invisible slot inside the weapon. You can’t see the Crystal anymore, but you can find out its details through the right click menu on the weapon. There would an option (on the right click menu) to remove the Crystal at which point it would find a slot in your inventory. It a slot wasn’t available you can’t unload the weapon.
  2. Crystal are still loaded by dragging and dropping, but instead of disappearing they remain in your inventory and a reference is created (similar to the quick use). Charges are used up from the Crystal where is stands. The referenced stack can be a smart stack in which case each Crystal in the smart stack is used in order. Information on the Crystal can be found by interrogating at the Crystal itself, or through the right-click menu of the weapon. Hovering over the weapon also shows which stack it currently has loaded. As above there is also an unload option in the right click menu which breaks the reference.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

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I was a big fan of the flying behaviour of the big arrows. Really. They where visible after shooting for a long distance, the curvy line of flight, and the physic applied to it. So I’d be very sorry to see them gone.
But maybe they’re not the typical shooter ammo, and rather more the type of inbound advanced technology.

We’re working to get the arrow visuals to a higher standard, so we will have nice visible shots with trails to track where they go.

Don’t worry, they will look cool.

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Are you planning on crystals being able to be changed on the fly or would I have to wait till I’ve expended all my currently equipped crystals in order to equip a different crystal to my slingbow?

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1st option sounds good

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You can always drag and drop a new Crystal onto the weapon and it swaps.

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Tbh, I don’t particularly like either.

  1. Sounds promising but I’m not a fan of any additional menu clicking whatsoever.
  2. Doesn’t sound too promising either. Your inventory is already quite cluttered due to how the quick use bars work. Implementing ammunition assigning in the same way would just add to the problem.
    Especially carrying around several slingbows with various ammunition types could become quite confusing.

Maybe the slotted ammunition could be visualized as an overlapping slot, “hidden” behind the corresponding slingbow?
So you can see and interact with the slingbow while your cursor is in the bottom right part of the slot.
And if you move your cursor towards the top left corner of the slot the ammunition pops into the front and can be interacted with:


Maybe for some special “Crystals”, like ones for marking targets for your party, but please no ‘general’ trails.

I quite like the 2nd option to be honest, as you don’t need to keep reloading ammo all the time (or at least as often), with the one exception in that it takes up more of your valuable inventory space.

Wasn’t there mention of a quiver at some point in the past? If this isn’t completely out of scope for development now, maybe this could be an additional place to store ammunition only, whilst still maintaining the reference to the smart stack?

Depending on how they plan to implement the PS4 version, I think this could be quite difficult to use (especially, if there is no visual cursor, but just a highlight on each slot as you navigate around your inventory). sorry, but I also don’t think this will be particularly intuitive either.


I’m wondering if an additional option would be to still have the right click menu, but doing so shows 1-4 additional slide out ammunition slots on the weapon so you could assign ammunition into it. Maybe tie that into weapon tier or progression as well, so better slingbows have more ammunition slots, making it so you don’t have to reload as often.

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I love the crystal idea!

This is something similar to the crystal idea, but a little different.

What if you crafted a crystal oriented upgrade, like a sort of pendant or medallion (except without the necklace) and that’s what is placed into the slingbow (like adding a better graphics card to a PC), but rather than being a form of ammunition, it slowly degrades and eventually brakes like tools and weapons.

And maybe different crystals could be crafted together to make fusion crystals that have multiple effects/attributes. Like inflicting DOT on the target whilst also freezing the target for example. Or maybe better more advanced slingbows could be crafted that have an extra slot for a second crystal, but can only be crafted by players that are a high level crafter.

And about tackling the inventory space problem, I suggest some kind of drop-down menu (similar to a smart stack) and its just one slot for one upgrade crystal (or more given the previous suggestion).

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Option 2 sounds better to me …

But I have a question: you suggested different damage type, but will we also have exploading (oh I miss those realy hard) or block placing shots (just to have 2 examples which are different to just different kinds of damage)?

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Sounds good!

I do not like the idea of having infinite ammo. That changes the game in a huge way. I feel if everyone had infinite ammo there would be no challenge to PvE, and possibly PvP if that ever becomes a thing. @olliepurkiss

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i feel that delay per shots, range and how hard enemy’s will be balance’s it quite nicely, crafting arrows is already easy enough to craft so much arrows that its basically same as infinite, downside is that it takes up inventory space but you can always go less and craft more. so i wouldn’t think that will change the gameplay any easier, just makes it different.

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don’t forget grappling too. If we get pvp then grapple lancers need a counter ^^. Since won’t have enough time to reload, slotting in enhanced shots from time to time sounds good to me.

Also infinite ammo dont make it infinite use since that weapon loses durability as well

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Oh, yeah, I totally forgot that Boundless on PS4 is going to be a thing, scrap my idea then :sweat_smile:


Maybe a ‘Mini Slot’ next to the Slingbow would work better for console/gamepad users and be more intuitive?:


(Click for full-screen)

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The plan is that using the Forge you can produce crystals which do all sorts of interesting effects, including the two you mention.

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As always it’s about balance. The basic ammo will be just that – basic, and the crystals will be needed to be effective against more powerful enemies. It certainly won’t remove the challenge in PvE, and we can make a system around it that will work for PvP too.

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