Quasimorph Weapons Guide: Ammo Types and Damage Explained

Quasimorph splits weapons into two broad categories, melee and ranged, and the game itself frames the difference as more than range: "ammo and melee weapons have different damage types, and armor has different resistance" against each — which is the real reason some fights go badly even when your gear looks fine on paper.

Melee weapon types

There are six melee weapon types. Knives are lightweight, throwable, and carry high critical multipliers (165-210%) — the Shiv is a named example, dealing piercing damage with a backstab bonus and a 4-tile throw range. Blades deal cutting damage and are generally heavier and non-throwable, like the Starblade, which adds radiation damage plus cleave and amputation effects. Clubs deal blunt force with knockback and knockdown, exemplified by the Macuahuitl's heavy knockback range. Fists are equippable gauntlets like the Hangover, dealing blunt damage with a severe bleeding side effect. Axes deal cutting damage with cleave, like the Tepoztli, which can also be thrown for piercing damage. Chainsaws, like the Chainblade, deal cutting damage with amputation and wounding on top.

Ranged weapon categories

Ranged weapons span pistols, shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, marksman rifles, machine guns, miniguns, rocket launchers, sprayers, disc-throwers, and grenade launchers. Pistols are typically backup weapons with varied ammo types — the Man-of-War uses 12.7mm rounds with full pierce-through, while the Prometheus runs on plasma charging. Shotguns hit hard per shot with significant scatter; the Border Chief adds collimator sighting with a single-load reload. Submachine guns fire fast with pain-inducing crits, silencer support, and painful-critical multipliers that can reach 300%.

Damage types and the composite-resistance rule

Damage comes in piercing, cutting, blunt, poison, radiation (beam), shock, and electromagnetic flavors, inflicting status effects like bleeding, wounding, and fractures depending on the weapon. For combined damage types — Entropy, which is fire plus cold, is the clearest example — the game always applies the lower of the two relevant resistances rather than averaging them. A target with 66 fire resistance and 62 cold resistance only gets 62 resistance against an Entropy hit, which is why mixed-damage weapons are so consistently recommended: they're built to exploit exactly this rule against enemies who only stacked resistance against one damage type.

Ammo types that change how a gun performs

Ammo choice changes a weapon's behavior more than most players expect. Hollow-point 9mm rounds deal noticeably more damage with better crit chance and wounding, but add 40% scatter — since scatter scales with shots-per-burst, this hits hardest on burst weapons and barely matters on single-shot ones. Buckshot trades one tile of range for close to 100% scatter but slightly higher damage per pellet, so it's most effective fired as a single well-aimed shot rather than a burst. Shotgun slugs add a tile of range plus knockback, making a shotgun viable at longer range than you'd expect. Fleschette rounds lose one pellet of total damage but add crit chance, accuracy, high wounding chance, and 35% armor penetration — a combination that explains why armored targets sometimes die unexpectedly fast. On the heavy-ammo side, armor-piercing rounds ignore armor outright, cold-elemental "42F" rounds are a signature AnCom ammo type that makes AnCom fights unpredictable, and rubber "anti-crowd" bullets are surprisingly dangerous to the player too, since they combine a damage modifier with crit chance and knockdown.

Weapon modifiers worth knowing

A sidearm gun in a secondary slot grants roughly +8% crit chance to your main weapon, though the exact stacking math isn't fully confirmed. Pairing a bipod with suppressive fire — craftable early by disassembling a turret — can cut enemy accuracy by 60% and pin down a group from cover. Painful-crit modifiers are called one of the best in the game, applying up to a 300% pain and damage multiplier on a critical hit, strong enough to effectively one-shot most enemies on a well-built crit weapon. Collimator sights extend effective range dramatically at the cost of needing to stay stationary to fire.

The Venus Spear: a unique unbreakable weapon

A quest-reward spear — referred to in different places as Itzpapalotl or Ispapalotal, with the exact official spelling unconfirmed — deals a minimum of 104 and a maximum of 120 cold damage at 10-tile range, with 208 crit damage, a 35-round magazine, and a 6-turn reload. Its standout trait is that it has no durability at all: it's unbreakable and never needs a repair kit. The catch is that it fires 7 rounds per shot, so the 35-round magazine only lasts 5 shots before that 6-turn reload kicks in. Because cold damage is rarely resisted — even top-tier armor sets tend to lack good cold resistance — it can also freeze very tanky enemies solid after a single hit. It's obtained through a content-patch questline that involves visiting Venus, defeating a specific boss, and completing several other story steps; the exact acquisition chain is covered in a separate dedicated walkthrough.

Quasimorph weapons FAQ

How many melee weapon types are there? Six — knives, blades, clubs, fists, axes, and chainsaws.

What's the composite-resistance rule? For combined damage types like Entropy (fire + cold), the game applies whichever single resistance is lower, not an average of the two.

Why do fleschette rounds feel so much stronger than they look? They stack crit chance, wounding chance, and armor penetration together, which is why armored targets can go down unexpectedly fast.

Is there a weapon in the game that never needs repair? Yes — a unique quest-reward spear tied to a Venus storyline questline has no durability system at all and never breaks.