Weapon Comparator V1.12.7
Single-target melee comparison. Character inputs change weapon calculations; weighted preferences only reorder the results.
Hit Distance: Percentage of the weapon's currently usable reach when the hit lands. Damage scales continuously with actual distance. At skill 7+, Axe, Long Blunt and Spear gain +20% usable reach while the damage calculation still divides by the weapon's stock MaxRange, so that extra reach can also increase distance-based damage.
Knife / stab crits: B42.20 can calculate a crit roll for Stab/KNIFE attacks, but an ordinary non-close-kill knife attack explicitly cancels that critical hit. The table still shows the weapon's stock CriticalChance and CritDmgMultiplier, while neutral combat calculations treat ordinary Stab attacks as 0% effective crit chance. Weapons marked * have a special close-kill interaction that is not included in the neutral ranking.
| # | Weapon | Wpn Dmg |
Eff. Dmg |
Wpn Crit |
Eff. Crit |
Score | 1-shot | ≤2 hits |
Hits/ kill |
Attack | Speed | End/ Kill |
Reach | Durability |
|---|
Difficulty scope: The named presets contain many other differences. For this comparator, only Zombie Toughness currently changes the neutral weapon calculations: it changes zombie HP distribution and the toughness-based melee crit modifier. Zombie Strength changes how hard zombies hit players/objects, not your weapon damage. Speed/sprinters, population, cognition, hearing, injuries, loot and respawn alter encounter difficulty or weapon availability, but do not directly alter the intrinsic damage/APS/endurance/reach/durability formulas under the healthy-player assumptions used here. Outbreak and Apocalypse therefore intentionally produce the same weapon calculations.
Probability model: One-shot chance is calculated deterministically from the weapon damage distribution, crit chance and selected zombie-health distribution—there is no per-weapon Monte Carlo noise in the 1-shot column. Multi-hit outcomes and expected hits/kill use common deterministic samples across all weapons to prevent arbitrary favorable rolls.
* Impact (s): Estimated time from starting a standard attack until the weapon connects with the zombie. Lower is faster/more responsive; it is different from APS, which measures sustained attack rate.
† Kills to break: Fresh-state estimate using expected hits-to-kill and overall-condition loss. The comparator assumes weapons remain sharp.
* Special-condition weapon behavior: An asterisk marks weapons with a KNIFE/Stab close-kill path. Close Kill / Jaw Stab requires special positioning/combat conditions and is excluded from the normal standing-vs-standing calculations. Rear attacks and prone-target attacks also have special modifiers and are excluded from the neutral baseline.
Repeated-hit damage: B42.20 tracks successive melee hits on a zombie. Hits 1–3 use normal damage; beginning with hit 4, the runtime applies its escalating hit-count modifier. This affects expected hits/kill and related sustained metrics, but not first-hit one-shot probability.
* Speed timing: APS, hit time and post-hit recovery use the traced B42.20 normal standing melee animation clips/events and runtime CombatSpeed. Forbidden Technique shortens only the applicable post-attack MeleeDelay; it does not shorten the attack animation or hit time.
Wpn vs Effective: Wpn Dmg and Wpn Crit show stock weapon-definition values. Eff. Dmg is the configured ordinary non-critical first-hit damage range. Eff. Crit is the configured ordinary crit chance; KNIFE/Stab attacks show 0%. Hover the combat-skill icon beside a weapon name to see its skill.