Talk:Crossbow

Request for explanation of damage variation
Could anyone expand on the variation in damage of the crossbow? Seeing that the crossbow cannot be fired with a lower than maximum charge, what would be the cause of the difference in damage? 188.151.235.10 18:50, 24 June 2019 (UTC)
 * Just tested it. Looks like the damage is random, doing anywhere between 7-11 damage. My testing was not scientific in the slightest, but it was interesting that I never saw one crossbow shot do 6 damage, only saw 7-11. I didn't test the random distribution of the damage to calculate an average. Would be great if someone could post the damage formula and definitively show that there is a random component. (no polar bears were harmed in the testing of said crossbow). Stonecoldraven (talk) 01:58, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

Trivia section: Killing a Prot IV diamond player with resistance II using 9 normal arrows? Well, one of you is certainly gonna get killed!
"* Due to being able to be put away and still be loaded, a player could have 9 crossbows in their hotbar, allowing for the rapid unloading of arrows. With average damage, this does 90 total damage with normal arrows, which is enough to kill a player in Protection IV diamond armor with Resistance II (38.1 damage total, taking armor toughness into account), the highest effect obtainable in survival without using a Potion of the Turtle Master." -Trivia section.

So, there are several claims here:

First claim: This allegedly does 90 damage on average with 9 crossbows. The average damage of a crossbow is 9, not 10, and no mention is made of carrying an extra in the offhand, so the damage output is flat wrong. Yes, it could do 90 if you're lucky, but it could just as well do 72. And if you're extremely lucky/unlucky, it could do anywhere from 54-99. The mean damage output should be 81.

Seconds claim: 90 damage is allegedly enough to kill someone wearing diamond armor with Prot IV, Resistance II. God armor is tough. Even regular diamond armor is tough. 5 hearts base damage * 9 is not gonna do that even if their hunger bar is down.

Let's look at how tough REGULAR diamond armor is? Diamond armor has the toughness attribute, which makes everything a bit less damaging. So the math is a bit more complicated, but bare with me. The formula for damage is..

Base damage * (1 - min(20, max(armor / 5, armor - base damage / (2 + toughness / 4))) / 25).

So what this tells us is...

10 damage will do exactly 3 damage through diamond armor.

So after just diamond armor, we are only doing 27 damage. Even if we made all crossbow shots do 11 damage, we're still only doing 30.69 damage. If we assume the shots do 9 damage, that's 23.49 damage. If they all did 6, we'd do just 15.6.

Ok... now whatever number we use, we need to know how protection works. "When a player or mob wearing armor is subjected to damage, the EPFs of all applicable enchantments are added together, capped at 20, and then damage is reduced as damage = damage * ( 1 - cappedEPF / 25 ), giving a maximum reduction of 80% at EPF 20."

Protection IV grants the wearer an EPF of 4 per armor part. Since we specified protection I won't give our target any projectile protection, but just know that we could give ourselves an EPF of 20 against projectiles with just one Proj Prot IV armor piece. That gives our Prot IV and EPF of 16.

So... our protection reduces the damage recieved by a flat 64%.

Thus, the damage should be reduced from 3.0 per hit to 1.08. Even if all the shots did 11 base damage, that's still just 1.2276 damage per hit.

So will it kill you through god armor? No. Even without Resistance II, 9 arrows can do, at the absolute most, just over 11 damage. But at the minimum end, they could do much less. Even as little as just over 5 damage.

Resistance II grants a damage reduction of a flat 40%. So that means 9 shots at 10 base damage per shot will do 0.648 actual damage per shot. 3.25 hearts. Not 19 hearts.

TL;DR: this is just wrong. And even if the arrows could somehow do 90 damage in one single combined hit, it would still be wrong. They'd survive with about 2 hearts.

71.237.249.230 12:14, 16 January 2020 (UTC)


 * In bedrock edition, a single shot of arrow of harming II from multishot crossbow can even kill player with enchanted diamond armor full set (protection IV each piece), but not as powerful as nine rapid shooting arrow, due resistance II require two shot, and if resistance IV (from turtle master II applied) then require four shot.


 * While it currently can only done in bedrock edition release, this info may usefull when java edition combat test fully released as it also introduce triple arrow hit a single entity.

Firework explosion radius
Hey folks, I just added a sentence in the Usage > Fireworks section that says "The explosion has a radius of roughly 4 blocks, which is unaffected by the firework star's effect." I believe this to be true from my tests in creative mode, but I haven't data-mined/scientifically tested this so it might be off by a bit. I just thought it would be handy for anyone who wants a general idea of what the explosion is like. --DissPoetry (talk) 06:43, 7 December 2020 (UTC)