The Black Ox Crossbow is a Tier 3 stronger variant of the Crow Crossbow made from parts harvested from a Black Ox Beetle.
Compared to normal bows (such as the Sprig Bow and Insect Bow), it fires slower than bows, but each arrow does large amounts of damage, and fires in a much straighter path, at the cost of using much more stamina than bows. It's therefore a good choice for players who have great aim, since the crossbow offers high risk and high reward, thanks to high damage output at the cost of high stamina usage.
After a crossbow fires a shot, the player will receive the Rough Reload effect, reducing the damage of all shots by 80% and increasing the stamina cost by 30% for 2.3 seconds. That is slightly shorter than the crossbow's natural 2.67 seconds long "attack and reload" animation, which means that you don't have to worry about it when you let its reload animation play completely.
Blocking while the Black Ox Crossbow is reloading will cancel the reload animation, and allows you to instantly fire again. However, the Rough Reload debuff effect still lasts the same amount of time, and all negative effects are active if fired early. Furthermore, firing another shot before Rough Reload has expired will refresh the duration of that debuff. It is therefore a massive damage per second loss to spam the block button while firing, since your shots will only be doing 20% of their normal damage, meaning that you'll need to fire 5 times as many arrows to defeat an enemy if you never wait for Rough Reload to expire.
Wearing the full Antlion Armor set will speed up the reload animation by 40% and reduces the Rough Reload debuff duration to just 1.5 seconds.
Recipe[]
| Item | Materials | Station |
|---|---|---|
 |
6  Rust4  Black Ox Part4  Lint Rope2  Pinecone Piece
|
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Trivia[]
- The Rough Reload effect was added to the game when they introduced the ability to block enemy attacks while holding a crossbow. The debuff's purpose is to explicitly discourage players from being able to exploit the reload timer by spamming block to instantly reload arrows.