BFG9000/Doom

The BFG9000 appears as a large, futuristic, solid metal gun which fires large balls of green plasma. It is the highest damaging weapon in the game.

The BFG first appears in a secret area of E3M3: Pandemonium. When picked up, the message "You got the BFG9000! Oh yes." appears.

The initials composing the weapon's name stand for "Big Fucking Gun", or "Bio Force Gun", as it is known as in the 2005 movie.

Combat characteristics
When the trigger is pulled, there is a pause of 30 tics (about 0.857 seconds) before a green and white plasma ball is ejected. 40 plasma cells will be consumed, and if the large plasma ball hits a solid object, it explodes and causes 100-800 hit points of damage to the target, in round multiples of 100.

After a further pause of 16 tics (about 0.457 seconds), additional damage is calculated: 40 invisible tracer rays are emitted by the player in a cone-shaped area (about 45° half-angle) in the direction the plasma ball was fired (if the player has turned around, the direction of the rays does not change — they are still traced in the direction of firing of the original plasma ball; on the other hand, if he has moved to another location, their origin moves along with him). Each ray causes 49-87 points of damage if it hits a solid object within 1024 map units. Even cyberdemons and spiderdemons, which are immune to blast damage, are affected by these rays.

Therefore, the minimal damage of the weapon is 49 points (if an object is hit by one ray and not the plasma ball) and, hypothetically, the maximal damage is 800 + (40 &times; 87) = 4280 points (if the plasma ball hits an object for full damage and all 40 tracers also hit the object for full damage). However, even should all 40 rays and the energy ball hit a single target, that much damage can still never actually be inflicted due to the periodicity of the simplistic pseudorandom number generator used by the Doom engine.

Contrary to section 3H of the BFG FAQ, the tracer code does not include horizontal auto-aiming (although, like any bullet attack, each tracer can auto-aim vertically).

Because the BFG projectile does not cause standard blast damage, it is safe for the player to use at point-blank range. In fact, this is often the preferred method of usage against large monsters, as this allows more of the tracer rays to strike a single target for concentrated damage. Conversely, because each ray can strike a different target, a large group of monsters can be damaged by the tracer rays if the weapon is fired from a moderate distance.

Tactical analysis
Despite its tremendous power, the weapon can be used correctly only with practice, due to its staggered firing sequence and nonstandard blast damage. The BFG FAQ includes an extensive section on deathmatch tactics.

The BFG is particularly useful for killing heavy demons such as Arch-viles, Spider Masterminds, and Cyberdemons, all of which otherwise require multiple rockets to kill. It is also highly useful in tight situations when the player is being assaulted at close range by a swarm of medium-level monsters, thanks to the lack of splash damage.

Data



 * 1) This table assumes that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and muzzle lighting are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). It is also assumed that all projectiles are launched at nearly the same range, so that the various procedures call P_Random in the same sequence each time. Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Assumes that direct hits are possible, which does not occur in any stock map, unless using the idclip cheat code.

Appearance statistics
The IWADs contain the following numbers of BFG9000s: