Chainsaw



The chainsaw mutilates enemies close enough to contact. At 525 hits per minute, it is roughly a quadruple-speed fist.

It is considered to be most effective against Demons and Spectres. Some players, when confronted by a pack of Demons and Spectres, back into a corner and chainsaw them down one by one (if the corner is less than 107 degrees wide, only one Demon can attack at a time). It can also be used fairly effectively against Cacodemons, Pain Elementals, Lost Souls, and Imps.

The chainsaw first appears in a secret area of the level E1M2: Nuclear Plant, and appears again in secret areas of E1M3: Toxin Refinery and E1M5: Phobos Lab. It is finally found in a non-secret area on E1M7: Computer Station.

In vanilla Doom, if a player has a chainsaw, they cannot switch back to the fists unless they have a berserk pack. Although in later versions, the fist and chainsaw can be rotated by pressing 1 while holding either of the two. It's the same as switching between shotguns in Doom II.

The chainsaw can be obtained via the cheat code idchoppers (and, in some source ports, idfa or idkfa).

Data
The chainsaw can inflict approximately 96.25 points of damage per second:


 * 1) This table assumes that all applicable calls to P_Random are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: the monster's pain chance must be handled, as well as possible counterattacks and AI pathfinding, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably most significant for small monsters.
 * 2) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map.
 * 3) Due to errors in the line-of-sight algorithms of vanilla Doom (see Spider paralysis), it is sometimes impossible to keep the chainsaw in continuous contact with a wide monster.

Appearance statistics
The IWADs contain the following numbers of chainsaws: