Minecraft Combat- Archery (Part Two)

Once you have your bow and arrows, it’s time to get practicing.  Yes, I mean practicing.  Find yourself a secure spot near a lot of darkness at night or in a cave, and prepare to miss a lot.  On the upside, arrows you miss with can always be reclaimed (if you can find them), but if an arrow hits an enemy, it’s done- even if the arrow sticks around afterwards for some reason.

The thing that makes archery difficult is the exact thing that makes it hard in real life- gravity.  The longer you hold the action button for your bow, the further back you pull it and the more momentum the arrow has- but that momentum is constantly getting turned downwards.  This puts a relatively low practical range on the bow and arrow, since once the arrow gets near the maximum range for a slightly-above-level shot, you can’t actually see it anymore.  While you could theoretically fire in a high arc to hit things, it’s absolutely impossible to track the arrow through its arc, so you have no idea how badly you missed.

So, with gravity affecting your shots, you have to remember to aim above your target- and further above the further the target is.  If you had depth perception, this would be easier but the game isn’t made for three-dimension monitors and so you have to get a lot of practice to learn just how far the arrow is going and what height it’s going to actually be when it hopefully hits that creeper instead of flying over its head.  Still, the damage is good, and the range is a nice protection- so if you’re willing to farm arrow materials, go ahead and learn this skill.  It’ll come in handy.

As an additional note, the momentum does translate into damage- the further back you’ve pulled the bow, the more damage the arrow will deal when it impacts something.  Assuming you can actually hit your target, this gives you a good shot at killing most things before they can reach you.  The main exception here is the Endermen, since they teleport away from hits- an arrow shot at an Enderman will be destroyed as if it hit, but will deal no damage.  Also, it will make the Enderman hostile even if you didn’t look at them to aim your shot.