Chainsaw



The chainsaw mutilates enemies close enough to contact. At 525 hits per minute, it is roughly a quadruple-speed fist. It is often used, because it conserves ammo (the chainsaw in Wolfenstein 3D required gasoline pickups), its "rapid fire" works well on enemies with low pain chance which minimizes damage in melee situations, and because of its gory implications. When picked up, the message is "A Chainsaw! Find some meat!". The TV advertisement for the Super Nintendo port showed numerous instances of the player chainsawing Imps and Demons, intercut with images of butchers at a slaughterhouse/meat factory.

It is considered to be most effectively used against Demons and Spectres, since the player can more than likely kill them without taking damage. The chainsaw's disadvantage is its slow killing speed, compared to the berserk fist, which becomes a liability when facing multiple enemies and in open areas. Expert players 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. It is ineffective against Hell Knights and other demons with powerful ranged attacks.

The chainsaw is effectively rendered useless against Demons and Imps if the game parameter is set to Fast Monsters (such as in Nightmare difficulty), since these monsters' melee attacks are three times as fast.

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 E2M6: Halls of the Damned.

In vanilla Doom, if a player has a chainsaw, they cannot switch back to the fists unless they have a berserk pack. Most modern source ports allow toggling of the fists and chainsaw by pressing "1" (as with the two 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: