Longbows are inaccurate? (2024)

I've been messing around with shortbows, crossbows, vanilla bow and a bunch of arrows, including vanilla arrows.

I found that the vanilla bow and short bow are pretty accurate, crossbow is unmatched in accuracy but the longbows with TiC arrows are incredibly inaccurate. I tried researching nto why but I could find no answers.

The image below shows an example of arrow spread from bows and arrows I tested with.

Why is the longbow with TiC arrows so bad for accuracy? Is this a bug or am I missing something important?
Also crossbows have no downside, they are literally the best? xD nerf pls

Can't load the image, but if you're using the same arrows as your shortbow for the longbow, don't.
Longbows work better with heavier arrows, shortbows work better with lighter arrows.

And crossbows are more tedious to make.

Use a heavier arrowhead. Enderium seems light, try manyullyn.

If not, use a better fletching. What fletching are you using. Don't use leaves.

Manyullyn arrowheads have a weight of 2.25, endurium has the highest weight at 9.
I tried endurium and its just as inaccurate as other TiC arrows, the spread against targets is the same.

When you use vanilla arrows with longbows, the accuracy is fine... but... y'know... they do no damage :c

You should have seen crossbows when they first came out. I was one shotting others.

Edit: I had and issue with longbows where they would not accept any arrows. But when I updated that went away.

I did some testing with various arrowheads and longbows a couple of weeks ago.

I did two sets of tests with both Short and Longbows, one at 30 blocks, the other at 60. I also did some long-range shooting just to test distance. Without getting into much detail because laziness:

Longbows shoot a lot farther than Shortbows. They also hit a lot harder--if you can hit the target. Unless you're within 10-20 blocks, you'll miss a lot of shots. Kinda defeats the whole point of having a Longbow in the first place, if you ask me.

Even with Slime Fletching (~94% accuracy) and very heavy arrows (I think Lead was the heaviest I tried, with a weight of ~8), they're accuracy was almost identical to Cactus Arrows, at both 30 and 60 distance.

After all my testing, I'm pretty sure something is wack with their accuracy. If I'm not feeling too lazy in the near future, I might run some more tests and detail/screenshot all of the results.

RavynousHunter said:

Seems a bit odd to me...wasn't the historical reason behind the prevalence of longbows because they were accurate at long distances due to the high amount of energy the limbs stored while shortbows were mostly used for shooting while on horseback due to their lower profile and faster drawing speed?

Click to expand...

another reason for the use of the shortbow was it is easier maneuver it in a heavily forested/overgrown area.
third reason being they were a lot easier to make/cheaper to buy.