Bread

This article is about objects that can spawn when players die or teleport. For other meanings, see Bread (disambiguation).

“

Full of bugs. Smells like fish and old milk. Was eighteen dollars for some reason. Now it's... I don't know, a dollar? Free?

— Mann Co. advertisement for Eighteen-dollar bread

”

Bread is an object that occasionally appears when players teleport or die. Several seconds after spawning, the bread prop will disappear. Based on leaked source code, the chance for bread to spawn when teleported is 1/20 with a hardcoded exception for Soldier of 1/3. There are currently nine different bread models which will appear randomly. Bread monster-related weapons were one of the main focuses of the Love & War Update.

Update history

June 11, 2014 Patch

[Undocumented] Bread now occasionally spawns when using a Teleporter.

June 18, 2014 Patch (Love & War Update)

Map Fixes.
- Updated pl_upward.
  - Fixed physics debris triggering the Payload cart's finale explosion.

[Unknown Date]

Reduced chance to spawn bread on teleporting or death.

Trivia

Each type of bread represents each class. Baguette represents Spy, burnt bread represents Pyro, cinnamon-swirl bread represents Demoman, cornbread represents Engineer, crumpet represents Sniper, plain loaf represents Scout, pretzel represents Medic, bread ration represents Soldier, and borodinsky bread represents Heavy. This is backed up by a string array called g_pszBreadModels found in the source code, containing filenames for all 9 types of bread alongside comments of which class each type of bread is for.^[1]
- The plain loaf and cinnamon-swirl appear to be marked for the incorrect classes. The plain loaf is a traditionally Scottish bread, but is labeled as Scout's, and cinnamon-swirl is often misattributed to Henry David Thoreau, a man from Massachusetts, but the bread is labled as Demoman's. This is supported by questions marks that follow a few of the labels in the source code, implying that the programmer responsible was unsure which breads represent which classes.
Bread was hinted at multiple times before its appearance in the game itself:
- Bread was first mentioned in the Lecture Valley page.
- Bread was also shown on the Adult Swim Extravaganza blog post. In the top right corner directly above the Scout, a pair of baguettes are visible.
- The icon for the Summer Appetizer Crate contains two baguettes.
- The Two Cities Update page for Rottenburg shows Archimedes flying away with a pretzel.
- One of the RED Team's affiliated companies is RED Bread, which was prominently featured as RED team's cover in the Expiration Date short.
The plain bread loaf appeared in the short Expiration Date as mutated sentient bread, and later became a monstrously large tentacled beast.
All bread props can be destroyed with the Short Circuit and are also able to be air-blasted, similar to projectiles.
Before June 17th, 2014, the rate at which bread spawned during teleportation was initially quite rare. During the Love & War Update, the rate of spawn was seemingly increased to a 100% chance to appear. As of late, it appears to have been changed back to being quite rare.

Unused content

Texture filename strings were found listed in the texture_preload_list.txt file added in the October 28, 2015 Patch, hinting at 3 types of bread that didn't make the cut; bagged bread, robo-bread and shortbread.
- tf/materials/models/weapons/c_items/c_bread_bagged.vtf
- tf/materials/models/weapons/c_items/c_bread_bagged_normal.vtf
- tf/materials/models/weapons/c_items/c_bread_robo.vtf
- tf/materials/models/weapons/c_items/c_bread_shortbread.vtf
- tf/materials/models/weapons/c_items/c_bread_shortbread_normal.vtf