Bow accuracy needs to be increased

[qualicabyss]

A large part of the weakness of bows in game (aside from their pitiful damage) is how inaccurate they are. 
At a range of only 20 blocks arrow spread reaches nearly 1 block.

At 30 blocks it's even worse

and by 40 blocks good luck hitting anything.

 

Have I mentioned that this it with the recurve bow and hunter? Most players will have even less accurate shots.
And all this is before considering animal movement, the weird mini game with the reticle, arrow drop, and terrain!
It's no wonder bows are so useless, they miss half the time due to rng, barely tickle if they do hit, and then your target is running away at high speeds! (probably right into the ocean)

From my research historically bows were accurate up to and even exceeding 100 meters (blocks), yet here hitting a bear at 40 blocks is a struggle.

[River Oak]

Historical bows accurate up-to and exceeding a hundred metres? Not a chance. Going off of the veritable ARROWS vs ARMOUR 3 video, Vintage Story is quite accurate.

[qualicabyss]

Basically every source I've found had mention of that high, and while I'm not certain it was quite that high, it was certainly more than 40 meters

[LadyWYT]

For what it's worth, distances are already scaled down in Vintage Story, as is time, to an extent. 

As for the accuracy bit...I don't really see an issue here? Archery is hard, and bows are not going to be nearly as accurate as a rifle. Additionally, the further you shoot, the more chance the shot has to drift. 

A lot of media tends to portray archery wrong as well, and many of the "expert marksmen" portrayed in such tend to have both natural talent and years of experience(like Robin Hood), supernatural abilities or enchanted weapons(like Susan from Narnia), or both(like Legolas). 

[MKMoose]

8 hours ago, River Oak said:

Historical bows accurate up-to and exceeding a hundred metres? Not a chance. Going off of the veritable ARROWS vs ARMOUR 3 video, Vintage Story is quite accurate.

Whether bows are accurate up to 100 m is largely just a matter of how you define "accurate". Trying to achieve reasonable hit probability on a line of enemy soldiers or a ship is entirely different from trying to ensure a clean hit to the heart of a deer.

But in terms of objective measures, VS is not accurate to real life by any stretch of the imagination. A one-meter group at 20 m with a traditional bow is entirely within the capabilities of a beginner with very little experience (ask me how I know). For an experienced archer, around 20 m is often considered to be around the maximum range in hunting, where a clean kill is required - targeting the heart or the lungs, which is often approximated roughly as a sphere 20-30 cm in diameter for a medium-sized deer.

It is worth mentioning, though, that the targets in the game are ridiculously huge compared to realistically practical targets due to a lack of weakpoints, and they also tend to chase the player more than anything else, and the quantity of arrows that the player can carry is borderline absurd in some ways, so the bows' poor accuracy still ends up more than sufficient in practice most of the time.

 

The game's ranged weapons are overall very simplistic and have a number of quirks which would be best done away with, both from the perspective of game design and immersion or realism. I think I was complaining about it a while back here, though a couple things there (mainly if not only about spears) are outdated now in 1.22.

 

7 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

For what it's worth, distances are already scaled down in Vintage Story, as is time, to an extent. 

Do note, though, that the scaling is not uniform and not even consistent, because it tends to be done on a case-by-case basis and is rarely updated. Many things (especially small ones) are scaled up for various reasons, and some things are scaled in odd ways largely as a result of being old and never updated. Trees are a prime example of odd and inconsistent scaling which is arguably long overdue for a rework.

I would say that practical range should likely be similar or maybe slightly lower than what it is realistically, in which case accuracy is mostly tolerable currently but would need to be improved greatly if any sort of vital areas or weakpoints are introduced.

[Hanril]

Assuming 1 block = 1m, brother I would like to shoot well like that. If you're talking about 100m, you're probably looking at a longbow that is pretty much medieval artillery.

[SnapJelly]

As someone who has dabbled in historical longbow archery I don't find the arrow spread to be all that unrealistic, maybe a liiiitle but too wide for 20 meter distance but having a spread of over a meter at 40 meters distance is not all that strange for an average archer.

Sure a specialised archer could train to become far more accurate than that at even longer distances but considering your character is likely not spending 2 hrs a day practicing archery I think the spread is quite sensible as it is

[qualicabyss]

On 8/15/2026 at 6:30 AM, MKMoose said:

For an experienced archer, around 20 m is often considered to be around the maximum range in hunting, where a clean kill is required - targeting the heart or the lungs, which is often approximated roughly as a sphere 20-30 cm in diameter for a medium-sized deer.

It is worth mentioning, though, that the targets in the game are ridiculously huge compared to realistically practical targets due to a lack of weakpoints, and they also tend to chase the player more than anything else, and the quantity of arrows that the player can carry is borderline absurd in some ways, so the bows' poor accuracy still ends up more than sufficient in practice most of the time.

But we aren't hitting weakpoints, if we were the arrows would do more than tickle them.

Also its worth noting many animals run away before you can get close enough, hares run away at 14 blocks, pigs at 18, deer at 20, and gazelles at a massive 30 blocks. You probably can't even get close enough to guarantee a hit before they run, and aside from rabbits they will all take minimal damage from the arrow.
Plus when hit they will immediately run far past where you can reasonable hit them, and you can't hit them when running because that makes the accuracy of a bow much much much worse.

[LadyWYT]

19 minutes ago, qualicabyss said:

Also its worth noting many animals run away before you can get close enough, hares run away at 14 blocks, pigs at 18, deer at 20, and gazelles at a massive 30 blocks. You probably can't even get close enough to guarantee a hit before they run, and aside from rabbits they will all take minimal damage from the arrow.

Twenty blocks or so is more than close enough to hit a target reliably most of the time. 

 

21 minutes ago, qualicabyss said:

Plus when hit they will immediately run far past where you can reasonable hit them, and you can't hit them when running because that makes the accuracy of a bow much much much worse.

Well, yes. Most creatures will realistically want to run away from an attacker, if running away is an option. The key in the game is to keep an eye on them to see where they run, carefully following behind, and waiting for them to stop running before you take your next shot(if you're not confident about your ability to hit moving targets, that is).

[Teh Pizza Lady]

I play hunter all the time. I don't think I've ever had an issue with the arrow spread. I've run my own tests and the arrows are FAR more accurate than the spears when thrown.

Might be the way you're aiming.

[Guy Ferrari]

Absolutely wild people are defending bows being useless in this thread

[DeanF]

To be fair, almost everything that you are shooting at has larger hitboxes than in real life.  A wolf, for example, is >1m wide.  I'm not sure if that all evens out, though.
 

On 8/14/2026 at 2:09 PM, qualicabyss said:

From my research historically bows were accurate up to and even exceeding 100 meters (blocks), yet here hitting a bear at 40 blocks is a struggle.

Oh, define your terms, Brother.  What do you mean by "accuracy"?  If you mean reliably hitting an individual human at 100m, the answer is no- that's not realistic.  You'd need to aim 15-20 degrees up to hit at that range with a 100-lb longbow, so you're aiming above the target's head.  Without sights.  And while accounting for the Archer's Paradox.  Not a recipe for accuracy.  

Later (1800s) archery experimenters recorded approximately 50% longbow hit probabilities at 100 yards but that was against 4-foot wide targets, so they were much larger than a human torso.  There are no records describing hit probabilities at range from medieval times, unfortunately.  The ones that do usually just mention the ranges at which archers trained, and that may be where you found those long ranges, but that was training to hit a formation not an individual.  One such record mentions training at 600-foot butts, for what that is worth.

 

On 8/15/2026 at 7:22 AM, Hanril said:

Assuming 1 block = 1m, brother I would like to shoot well like that. If you're talking about 100m, you're probably looking at a longbow that is pretty much medieval artillery.

Probably.  Archery in movies and RPGs are usually shown as being far more accurate than IRL.  Massed archery was artillery.  As I mentioned above, it was fired at formations, not individuals.

Not so much modern archery, though.  On a still day I can put shafts into a area the size of a dessert plate at 40m all day with my compound bow... which admittedly has sights, unlike a longbow.  But I have shot primitive bows... and honestly I had a hard time even finding the target, let alone grouping well.  At 10 yards.  The Archer's Paradox sucks.  (And my compound bow does not suffer from that, either.)

And bear in mind that Olympic archers routinely stack shots into a 12.2cm bullseye at 70m.  (!)  Sonofacrap, that's impressive.  But, that is using modern bows with modern stabilizers and sights.

 

Edited August 25 by DeanF

[qualicabyss]

12 hours ago, DeanF said:

Later (1800s) archery experimenters recorded approximately 50% longbow hit probabilities at 100 yards but that was against 4-foot wide targets, so they were much larger than a human torso.

you have worse odds than that against bears at closer ranges

[DeanF]

On 8/24/2026 at 11:08 AM, qualicabyss said:

you have worse odds than that against bears at closer ranges

Only if by "close ranges" you mean 100m.

[qualicabyss]

 

1 hour ago, DeanF said:

Only if by "close ranges" you mean 100m.

No I mean what I said