While swappable heads are pretty much the norm for modern arrows, looking at some pictures of Ishi arrows they seem to have the head bound with string. Do you have anything that suggests how they swapped them in the field?
It’s mainly from the accounts by Saxon Pope. If you’re interested look up “Yahi Archer” by Saxon Pope on Open Library and you can read a pdf.
Otzi the iceman - the 5000 yr old mummy found in the alps - also had compound arrows. Actually, he had both kinds, several unfinished arrows and an unfinished longbow. And an arrow in the back. 
- Shane
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why not one piece arrows?, like kind of molding the material, like an arrow made from rock but carved in shape, same with glass and metal, not just the tip
Arrow shafts have to flex a lot to fly properly. An arrow made entirely of glass or steel would shatter, damage the bow, be too heavy to fly, etc.
I’ll look into that. We used to have a system where arrows were put together piece by piece and you could easily switch heads, but it was clunky and people hated it. I’d have to come up with a decent way of handling it if we wanted interchangeable heads.
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Well, “clunky and people hated it” are good reasons not to go back to it… 
It is kind of a specialist thing and there are lots of other things on people’s plates - like the aforementioned work on bows.
I may have wandered into the trap of thinking it’s cool because “I” think it’s cool. Anyway, I found it a fascinating read but then again I’m a nerd. (nerds are still cool, right?)
- Shane
Some necroing, but what’s the status?
the same, it hasnt been updated at all, and as far as a i can tell of what the author had planned, it isnt complete per se
If the rework was left incomplete and there are no apparent plans to complete it, could the changes be reverted so at least we’re back to something that worked?
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!
Tl;dr some research indicates that bows are incredibly efficient at dealing damage per unit of energy compared to guns, so if you have a good bow and a good arrow, the damage per shot is on par with many guns, so this 8s actually quite a large buff to archery damage output.
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Can’t wait for my compound greatbow to out-damage .50 cal anti-material rifles. Pog
I’m ok with increasing the damage of self-crafted bows (up to longbow) a bit. But higher tier bows absolutely should NOT under any circumstances consistently out-damage a decent melee weapon used by the same character with similar skill level
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I’ve been playing with the apparently broken archery damage for so long I’ve forgotten how it used to be 
It will be great to be doing some serious damage again.
My major complaint was not the damage, it was the Dispersion. 1000 Dispersion makes them pretty much melee weapons
i dont think out damaging a melee weapon is too far fetched, and i feel is more of a personal preference to the one making the changes, but i see the point of it, iirc before archery revamp was a thing, the only bow that outclassed melee damage was the greatbow, at least that how i remember it, some melee weapons just are too effective.
How in tarnation did you manage to get a 1k dispersion? and with a bow, not even the worst gun has that
Why would an arrow ever out-damage per hit a spear used by the same character?
Cripes, you’re right! I just updated to the latest build to try it out and my longbow has a dispersion rate of 1110. 110 plus 1000. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with that sort of a number even if you were standing right in front of it.
I really hope this is fixed asap as my archery character just became a melee one and will have to remain so. No one can use bows for anything other than bashing critters over the head!
Currently I’ve removed the 1000 dispersion from my longbow via .json. Which probably means it’s overpowered but at least it’s usable.
Well, the speed of a melee attack is bound by the fast twitch muscles, and they aren’t very fast, at least in comparison to a projectile. A bow can store energy over time. This means you can invest all your muscles in pulling the string, not just the fast twitch muscles, and then release it all at once, resulting in way more kinetic energy.
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Whatever energy you “store in a bow” you can simply add to the spear after the hit connects and you push the spearhead deeper.
Bow absolutely does NOT have some magical energy storage system that would allow it to store more energy by pulling it then you would exert in the same time frame by actively using a spear.
Now, a heavy crossbow that uses a gear mechanism of sorts and takes dozens of second (if not minutes) to reload — sure, that can store more energy.
But not a bow you pull within a couple of seconds.
A faster moving smaller object does indeed project its energy differently from a larger slower moving one, even given identical kinetic energy. These things are more complex than straight kj calculations.
Even in that context, you’re making excuses for the crossbow that you don’t allow for the bow. The time you take to draw a bow is functionally identical to spending time gearing up a crossbow. Both are time spent storing energy in a spring. That may be more time than you’re able to spend driving kinetic energy forward in melee before the combat situation forces you to move and adapt.
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so basically anyone that cant push a hole through concrete with a spear, is not pushing hard enough?, i mean some bows can, crossbows definitely can. Anyways as i said earlier, irrc the only bow/crossbow being able to out right damage a melee weapon, where the greatbow versions. if the update keeps to that, then nothing changes, and that would be kind of ok, i mean, if a normal bow is able to the same damage as an .50 gun, then that is out right OP, i always felt that melee had it a bit of hard against ranged characters, with all the stamina and storage management one needs, but got other advantages of its own.