Complete Noob's
Guide to Asherah
Darned Near Everything You Could Ever
Want to Know About Archery
In Several Highly Detailed Tables With Pictures,
Even
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(Edited 1/22/2014 to reflect changes in the Asherah 1.64 client.)
To do archery, equip a bow AND a set of arrows. Be sure to have crystals of the color that matches your arrows. You will need one crystal for each shot. Point at the target and hold down tab.
Archery is an extremely important skill in the game, and once one had gotten a bow (and arrows, of course), much of the difficulty of the game is resolved. Archery provides a number of benefits. You are, for instance, virtually (but not completely) invulnerable to monster attack. Most of the monsters do not have ranged attacks and can only melee their opponents. There are some exception where monsters (or the screens themselves) cast hostile spells but these are relatively rare.
Secondly, unlike some of your other weapons and armor that shatter when your stamina is used up, bows and arrows will never break, regardless of your stamina. Some players refer to the depletion of stamina as an "energy cost".
Thirdly, they are, in the words of one player, "massively overpowered" compared to the other weapons available in the game. The cheapest, weakest bow (hunting) paired with the strongest arrows (white - 25 hp) gives you a total of 26 AttPower. Not too shabby. That's stronger than anything in the Staff, Heavy Arms or Hammer class and exceeds the power of all the axes, except Gold. Only the Beta and Gamma swords (currently not available in the game) have base values stronger than the cheapest weakest bow and white arrows. Only Pharaoh Sword, Blood Sword, Beta and Gamma Swords have maximum att power at or above that.
(Asherah 1.63 has attempted to modify this somewhat. Bows are still very strong but not AS strong as they were.)
Fourth and lastly, unlike many of the other weapons, bows don't have any minimum strength requirement. You can heft any of them even if you only have one Strength.
It is likely that in the next client, bows (or arrows) will either be downgraded somewhat, removed as something built with carpentry, made significantly more rare, or removed entirely. For many years the only bow available was the silver crossbow, and that, only for a donation. Comments are appreciated.
How do you get a bow? Currently, you can buy the short bow in the noob area, and you can make bows after you reach 100 in carp.
On the down side, arrows can't be obtained from a game NPC until you reach Keld, which means you'll have to be at least 50HP to get to Keld. Although blue arrows are fairly cheap, white arrows are very expensive. Plus each time you shoot an arrow it costs you a matching crystal. Again, blues are fairly cheap (two to three gold), while whites are much more (25 gold). You can, of course, mine them for the cost of a mining hammer.
As with the
Swords Page tables, the following tables contains lots of information about various
weapons except where they can be bought and for how much. That will
be added later. As far as I know there aren't any bows that are unique to Asherah. Not all these are necessarily
available in Asherah at the present time, but all appear in the default FSO .dir
files. I'm adding them because a lot of players have those
default FSO .dir files and are aware that those weapons exist.
We
acknowledge they exist, but if we don't have it, we don't have
it. If the thing "exists" but we don't have it in the game, you
can be confident that it was, in some way, miscoded or there were problems with it that outweighed whatever good there was.
As with the swords, we have listed the ATT power given in the
.dir files. The Att Power button on the GUI may give you a
different reading and you may notice different readings when you
actually use the weapons. We will slowly begin adding test data
to each weapon's stats as time allows.
Please note. Unlike the other weapons, ranged weapons (bows) don't have a range of attack powers. The bow itself has only its base stats. However, adding different arrows or the Bowmaster Ring will add to the base figure (10 points as of 1/22/2014). As noted in the
Skills page, on the
Donations page, and on several other pages, additional boosts may be given depending on rings, random skill factors, membership in factions or the monster that you're fighting. It's good for showing you relative base strengths between weapons, not to reflect the absolute attpower you will have when you use the weapon.
Key to the Skills
- A = Archery
- MA = Martial Arts
Archery
| IMG | NAME | CLASS | ATTPOW | MAXATT | MADEWITH | SKILLS |
|---|
 | Hunting Bow | Archery |
1 | N/A | Wood | A |
 | Short Bow | Archery |
3 | N/A | Wood | A |
 | Wooden Bow | Archery |
6 4 | N/A | Wood | A |
 | Long Bow | Archery |
- | N/A | Wood | A |
 | Wooden Crossbow | Archery | 12 | N/A | N/A | A,MA |
 | Great Bow | Archery | 13 8 | N/A | N/A | A |
 | Silver Crossbow | Archery |
18 20 | N/A | N/A | A,MA |
 | Runic Crossbow* | Archery |
19 | N/A | N/A | A,MA |
 | Night Killer | Archery |
23 10 | N/A | N/A | A |
 | Steel Bow* | Archery |
24 | N/A | N/A | A |
 | Assassin's Crossbow | Archery | 26 10 | N/A | N/A | A,MA |
 | Elven Bow | Archery |
30 35 | N/A | N/A | A |
| *It seems likely that these two values are wrong. |
Arrows
| IMG | NAME | CLASS | ATTPOW | MAXATT | MADEWITH | SKILLS |
|---|
 | Blue Arrows | N/A | 1 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
 | Red Arrows | N/A | 5 2 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
 | Green Arrows | N/A | 10 3 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
 | Yellow Arrows | N/A | 15 4 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
 | Purple Arrows | N/A | 20 5 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
 | White Arrows | N/A | 25 6 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
|