Liberator
 | |
| Tactical Information | |
|---|---|
| Caliber | 12 gauge |
| Capacity | 4 |
| Reload type | Round-by-round |
| Base damage | 8 hearts (x4) |
| Firerate | 60 RPM |
| Lifespan | 200 shells (50 shots) |
| Action type | Single shot |
| Sight type | Iron sights |
The Liberator is a quad-barrel break-action shotgun which uses the common 12 gauge shells. While an overall rather impractical weapon, it excels when it comes to burst damage.
Crafting
The liberator can be crafted using high-speed steel, gunmetal and wood:
Due to using four light barrels, it uses a fair amount of high-speed steel, making it somewhat costly early on.
Mechanics and Play
The liberator is a double-action quad-barrel shotgun with one trigger, meaning firing will set off all chambered shells. While the liberator is considered an earlygame weapon, it has a theoretical base damage of 32 hearts at a single trigger pull, far exceeding the health of most vanilla mobs. As a trade-off, the gun reloads painfully slowly, inserting one shell after the next until it's full. It takes about five seconds for a full reload, although hitting the fire key will cancel the current reload, allowing the gun to be used with fewer shells.
Because of it's high damage, but low rate of fire and high ammo usage, it is impractical as a general purpose weapon, but it is rather effective as an "emergency enemy deleter". Equipping the gun and pulling the trigger takes just a bit over one second, delivering a ton of damage at once, even more with more advanced ammo types.
Another utility the gun has is knockback, while high tier shotguns get more damage out of explosive slugs, the liberator has the advantage of firing four slugs simultaneously, delivering quadruple knockback instantaneously. This could be useful in cases where the damage doesn't make much of a difference (say, a player with lategame armor, which is basically immune to almost anything), but knocking them away as far as possible is preferable.
Finally, the gun can somewhat work like a sniper rifle. Despite being relatively short, the liberator has no innate inaccuracy, so firing slugs while using sights will always be perfectly accurate when the gun is in good condition. While the sights are not really meant for long distances, practice allows this weapon to deliver a ton of damage in bursts over large distances.
Mods
- Choke: By halving the effective spread of buckshot-type ammo variants, the choke effectively increases the usable range of the Liberator. Since projectiles are more likely to hit, each shot becomes substantially more devastating.
- Speedloader: The speedloader causes all shells to be inserted at once, instead of one-by-one, mitigating the Liberator's greatest weakness. The effective fire rate is still limited due to the Liberator's post-fire delay and the opening/closing animations, however, a full reload now only takes 47 ticks (2.35 seconds) instead of 92 ticks (4.6 seconds), making the effective fire rate almost twice as fast.
Trivia
- The liberator serves as a spiritual successor to the Jackhammer, the quad-barrel shotgun from before the gun update.
- Originally, the gun was supposed to have its stock "folded", similarly to the Uzi and the Grease Gun, however the stock isn't actually foldable or collapsible, instead it has to be pulled out of a small fixture from the front, flipped, and reattached to the back, which would have made for a relatively lengthy animation. The animation was never made due to being too long, making the gun even less practical, so the wire stock is now permanently attached to the back of the shotgun.
