Firearms

[Tabbot95]

I frankly like guns and think the lack of them in most "fantasy" settings is kind of annoying;

 

I wouldn't want anything automatic;

 

fire lances, rocket arrows,  hande-gonnes; matchlocks, wheel-locks, flintlocks; heck even cap and ball or cartridge firearms if you have the kind of supply chain that can get you mercury sulfate and the kind of production line to produce copper or brass firing caps; though perhaps those should require some additional checks and conditions;

 

 

each stage requiring a combination of "infrastructure" (even if it's not 'your' infrastructure, there's someone who has to either find a guano cave, nitrate deposit, or fermenting animal waste, then mix and mill it into gunpowder, find and refine lead, etc.)..

 

the major advantage should be to cannons and their ability to take down thin stone walls;

 

Edited October 19, 2025 by Tabbot95

[ribbbbbs]

@LadyWYT This game has cementation furnaces which go back to the 1500's in Europe. Matchlock and wheellock handguns fall well within this range.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cementation_process

On 10/16/2025 at 4:25 PM, Tabulius said:

Even up to the American revolutionary war people were still arguing the merits of archery in a military context. So I think bows shouldn't be outmoded by early matchlocks.

Bows were only superior to muskets in terms of rate of fire and long-range accuracy. I believe firearms didn't catch up to longbows in terms of frequency until repeating weapons were invented. However, even 15th century arquebuses were an order of magnitude more powerful than longbows and crossbows and could reliably penetrate all but the heaviest plate armor at short & medium range. 

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I think the key to balancing guns would not be in nerfing their performance per se, but making them tricky to sustain, awkward to load, and possibly hard to obtain.

For sustainment, there's the obvious point that lead and blasting powder aren't trivial resources to obtain in bulk, so it won't be economical to fire upon everything that moves. To fire, hand-cannons and matchlocks use a smoldering match cord that burns up after a while, while wheellocks and flintlocks use some mineral ignition source that gets ablated with each use, adding another consumable to be carried with a gunmen.

To prevent a player form killing a bunch of enemies quickly, I'd suggest making the guns cumbersome and slow to load forcing the player to select a bunch of items in the inventory bar in the correct order to load the gun. To show what I'm talking about consider the video posted above of the matchlock demonstration, notice how he has to prime the firepan, load the charge, load the wad, load the ball, insert the match & only then shoot? In the most popular VS gun mod these steps are done automatically, https://mods.vintagestory.at/firearms. I propose that to realistically simulate the loading steps, that the gun should be held in the players offhand and that the powder, wad, ball, and match should be selected in the correct order from the player's hot menu in order to load the gun correctly. If the gun is not loaded correctly, it should either misfire or break (hope missing that shot didn't get you killed). To fire the gun, the player must click while holding an empty main hand and a loaded gun in his offhand to aim and then click again to fire (for a hand cannon a player must click while holding a burning match in his main hand). Having to dedicate multiple slots in the inventory hotbar prevents the player from being able to load and fire quickly in a situation where he is unprepared to do so. Having to hold the gun in the offhand with an empty main hand to shoot should prevent players from rapidly cycling through multiple loaded weapons too quickly.

Finally, to make more powerful firearms harder to obtain I'd make all non-hand-cannons craftable only by the clock maker. Higher tier weapons, or specifically the matchlock, wheelock, and flintlock actions, might be obtainable as rare dungeon loot or locked behind one of the story quests. 

I few other things I'd throw in are that gun damage not be affected by ranged damage buff/debuffs. I don't really see firearms as a "ranger" weapon but more as a secondary weapon for melee players or as a high damage 1-shot for classes who otherwise aren't otherwise combat oriented. Guns need to be dry in order to work so they can't fire if the player is soaked, it's raining, the player is underwater, etc. Reflecting its historic role as bullet-proof protection, plate armor should have disproportionately better protection against firearms than other types. 

TLDR: if noob-lords are crying in the forums about guns being too difficult to obtain and/or use, they'll be balanced correctly 

Edited October 21, 2025 by ribbbbbs