Okay, please appreciate: my intention is not to say, “whaa nerf pl0x”. I only intend to develop context, so that the balance can be judged relative to other weapon choices. Maybe a katana with 11 cutting skill is just as powerful. Maybe a Remington 700 loading .30-06 AP with 11 rifle skill is. Maybe karate with 11 unarmed skill is - I really don’t know. Hell, scrap metal spikes on a quad will gib nearly everything… I just want archery to be “cool” rather than “overwhelmingly dominant strategy which renders most other stuff obsolete”, that’s all.
The arrow weight and volume certainly seems fantastical. Which might be fine - fun trumps realism. But with real arrows, you get about 2-3 per pound, depending on length and material.
The training from making metal shafts is probably too much. I would hazard a guess and say that all high-level crafting probably gives much more experience than low-level crafting, but metal shafts and arrowheads stand out as being among the only high-level crafts I have that I can readily spam. For reference, other close ones include concentrated acid (easily done if you have a funnel and a jerry can during acid rain - I believe this is new in 0.6 and also subject to rebalance), steel plating ( 8 lumps of steel, 100 batteries and takes 12 minutes) or high-end tailoring (materials are much more common now that Zeds have tattered clothing, however each craft takes HOURS instead of minutes).
The solution is probably increasing craft time for higher level archery bits (or possibly requiring fancier tools, like a welder or a compactor). After all it’s a bit suspect to say, “here’s a saw, a hammer and some smashed up pieces of a locker. Make ten smooth, straight arrows. You have five minutes.”
I’d also mildly suggest removing the secondary skill requirement from the self-bow and the wooden arrow shaft. Having survival secondary means that you cannot begin to do anything with archery until you have 0 archery skill and 1 survival skill. If that was intended however, more power.
V Or there’s that. Haha.
