Crossbow topic

[Binnatics]

Hello everyone!

I want to make a topic about one of the most intriguing weapons in DayZ SA, the Crossbow. When I first found it I fell in love with it; it looks cool, it is rare and it promises to be very special. First of all because it is silent. Second of all because the arrows, or bolts as they are called in the game, should be reusable. There's a lot of scopes attachable to it so that promises nice ranged fire power as well. What more could a survivor want?

Here's a few pictures of the bow and its belongings:

The Crossbow itself. Like all weapons you can hold in on your back when not in your hands. That means it replaces any rifle and means you gotta be dedicated to choose for the crossbow. It's either the bow, or an assault rifle or sniper rifle. When you take it into hands, it acts like any firearm. You have to press "space" to draw it up, and by single pressing RMB you can switch to scoped view or fine-aim. If you use fine-aim your weapon will auto focus on the point in the environment where you're aiming at. That suggests that the game will automatically settle the distance / bullet drop. It is automatically strained. So a simple LMB will make the bow shoot its arrow to the target. Reloading in between the shots takes a bit of time, so don't use it in close quarter fighting with multiple zombies running at you. This bow is currently loaded with 4 arrows:
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The bolt Quiver: A leather quiver that can hold up to 5 bolts and is used as a magazine for the bow. The quivers are very rare, and can usually be found in garage boxes in town and villages, and sometimes in houses. In your inventory you can attach it to the bow as if it were a 5-bolt clip. If you have 2 or more quivers, you can 'reload' your crossbow as if it were a gun, by simply pressing "r" (default key-binding for reloading weaponry) and the empty one will be replaced by the full one in your inventory. Reloading the quiver doesn't take much time. A quiver occupies 2 slots in your inventory:

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The Bolt. A high precision arrow, looking much like the ones we know from FarCry3. The arrows in the game are not easy to find. I've been looking for them for days now, and have only found a total of 75 of them, with help from my friends. Bolts, or arrows, can be found in all interesting looting places. When you find an arrow, it will balance on its tail, pointing upwards. If you pick it up, it will occupy one slot in your inventory. Before you can load it to your bow, or better, to your quiver, it will have to be 'ejected'. Although it doesn't look like it, what you picked up is in fact a pack of arrows. If you right-click on the bolt, you can choose to eject and then there will be added a number to the bolt. If you are lucky, it's a '5'. If not, it's only a '1'. If it's a '1' you can combine the arrow with other arrows and stack up to a maximum of 5 arrows per slot.
What you see here is their current appearance in the game when you find them. If you check the small description in the upper left corner, it reads that there's 5 remaining. That means that in this slot there are 5 arrows stashed:
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Killing zombies with the crossbow can be very satisfying. Since it's very silent, the impact of the arrow when it hits the target will probably make more noise than the actual shooting, it adds up big time to your sneakiness. Here's a zombie that I managed to give a headshot. As you can see the arrow is sticking out of her skull on both ends >:D
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This was actually the first time that an arrow was still visible after killing a zombie. When I hit other zombies in the corpse, or whatever spot, the arrow was invisible, and disappeared with the zombie after a short while. This time, the arrow was visible so I sneaked up on the corpse to drag it out. To my surprise that wasn't possible. Suddenly the corpse disappeared and the arrow, although still visible, was untouchable for me:
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That was the first disappointment. So, the arrows are hardly reusable. When you miss a zombie, the arrow may be around to pick it up again, but most of the times it just is untraceable or has simply disappeared. The only times I managed to pick up an arrow again after firing, was when I hit a wall (on purpose for practising reasons) that could hold the arrow and did not swallow it. Many walls simply swallow the arrow, which means it's gone. Only a mark of the impact will remain.

Here's a nice picture of my shadow with the crossbow attached to my back:
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The second disappointment was that, although you can attach a variety of scopes to the crossbow, they make the bow useless. I've tested a variety of scopes with the crossbow and found out that all M4 attachable scopes will mount easily on the crossbow. If you take a closer look through the scope in aimed sight, it will only look a bit weird using the BUIS; a small iron-sight kind of attachment. You can see that the bow points at a different direction than the BUIS 'cross-hair' is aiming at. Here's a scoped fiew through the RV1 RDS Optics:
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Here's the same spot, viewed through the ACOQ Optics:
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The problem with these optics though is in fact what I already saw when having the BUIS attached; the scope points more down than the bow itself does. That makes you always miss your target and hit something that's higher than your point of aim.
This downside is big time; it renders the crossbow useless for longer range shots. There farthest victim I could hit was something like 30 / 40 meters away.

I think there's still some finetuning to be done in future updates, so the fact that right now the bow isn't what I had expected doesn't mean it will stay that way. I've read on the net about a special crossbow optics, that is available. But I think that is in ArmAII, because I haven't come across such scope in DayZ SA yet. It looks a lot like the Far Range Scope that you can attach to the Mosin Nagant, but that's definitely a different one; it doesn't fit.

Until they fixed these scope problems I'm waiting for the next update to farther experiment. So see this as a warming up then ^-^

[Art Blade]

Excellent and detailed,  Binnatics :) +1 :-X

[Abletile]

Very educational BinnZ +1 from me too  ^-^

[Binnatics]

Thanx guys, it was a pleasure collecting the info and putting it up together. Hope for much more to describe once the newer updates will release ^-^

[Abletile]

I await the crossbow update with baited breath, it seems to have so much potential! I do hope they get it right!

[PZ]

Excellent and detailed,  Binnatics :) +1 :-X

Very nice write-up - +1 from me as well!

[Binnatics]

Thank you PZ, and yes, Abletile, I totally agree with you. I'm rubbing hands in expectancy  ^-^

[Binnatics]

I kept finding quivers and arrows, so I decided to give it another go. I am carrying enough arrows and quivers now for a proper new experiment, and I have both the ACOQ Optics and the M68 RDS Optics.

Will see if it's possible to find the divergence between the scope and the weapon and remark the actual cross-hair. That will make it possible to check if long range will be possible with it, and if it's still accurate :)

[Art Blade]

sounds good  :) Makes me want to stick around and watch your six so there won't be any zombies spoiling it for you  ^-^

[Binnatics]

Since 0.50 is running stable I picked up the trail where I left it. I came across a so-called Crossbow Holosight. Check it out:

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It acts quite the same as the red-dot sight we already know for the M4. It also requires a 9V battery to get fully functional. It doesn't really magnify, but gives you a sharp view with red dots indicating the point of impact at various distances, so they help you with the bullet bolt drop. The one in the centre of the scope reads 30 (which stands for meters I guess) then slightly below it reads 50 and the third at the bottom reads 70.

Of course I tried to check if this is correct, but unfortunately I haven't been able to check it. You can see the moment of impact when the bolt hits the wall, but when you walk up close, both bolt and mark are gone. I couldn't check if the bullet drop was accordingly at long range.

Besides, I think we must consider the crossbow a short range weapon only. It is pretty accurate up to 100 meters, but farther is just guessing. And it's hard to hold it steady.

Here's some pics looking through the new scope, which really gives a nice vision. I like it:

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Oh, and one last thing; they did fix the problem with the bolts. Now, when you find a bolt, once it is in your inventory it will show directly how many bolts you picked up; can be something between 1 or 5.  :)

Edit: I have been searching for the bolt quivers a long time now on both 0.50 and 0.51 stable, but can't find any. They must've become extremely rare with all the new loot to be found. The good news is that you can eject the bolts which are loaded in the crossbow and fill it up again with 5 new ones. So after some action you can at least prepare yourself for the next encounter.
I read on the net that people were complaining about the arrows not being very effective; it should take at least 2 arrows to kill a zombie or a human. I tested it, and one arrow will do the job on a zombie. The arrows still vanish though after being fired, and since they are still quite hard to find, it's not too easy to get enough ammo for it.

[Art Blade]

nice. :)

[PZ]

Cool!  :-X