Hitscan

“

Click to listen

— The Soldier, telling the Scout that bullets are faster than everything else.

”

Hitscan attacks instantly damage targets in their path. All hitscan attacks emit down the crosshair, from the attacker's eye level, despite what is suggested by the view model and world model. Unlike projectiles, hitscan attacks are not code-rendered physical objects, but are infinitely-thin lines drawn on the server that are then rendered client-side visually as projectiles. Depending on the object hit and client settings, the hitscan weapon then generates an effect: dealing damage or painting blood and bullet hole sprites.

In technical terms, this means that hitscan weapons have infinite velocity, but this does not mean that they always damage instantly after firing.

Melee weapons, with the exception of the Spy's melee weapons, wait 0.2 seconds after input before initiating a short-ranged hitscan attack. This prevents the weapon from hitting or killing a foe before the melee animation completes.

There are two main types of hitscan attacks: those that make contact with the bullet-based hitbox and those that make contact with the environmental/projectile hitbox (melee weapons, shield bashes, and kill taunts). The latter is also sometimes referred to as the bounding box.

Bullet-based weapons (a list of which is given below) fire seemingly infinite lines (the actual maximum range is ~56,754 Hammer units). Most bullet-based weapons are affected by bullet-spread during a 1.25 second cooldown after firing a bullet, which causes bullets to move off-course to varying degrees. The Ambassador gradually recovers its accuracy and can fire a perfectly-accurate shot after 1 second. Weapons that fire multiple pellets, like the Shotgun and Minigun, guarantee a pellet straight down the crosshair if the weapon was not fired within the last 0.25 seconds. When fixed weapon spread is enabled, shotguns use a fixed spread pattern. For example, the Scattergun uses a fixed 3x3 pattern when fixed spreads are enabled. If a shotgun-type weapon fires more than 9 pellets at once, fixed spread causes multiple pellets to hit the same location. The Wrangler's laser sight always attempts to focus on the center of an uncloaked and undisguised enemy.

Hitscan weapons have the ability to destroy enemy stickybombs once they're attached to a surface. Unlike most projectile-based weapons, hitscan weapons are unable to penetrate friendly players. The only exception to this rule is the Sniper's primary weapons.

Bullet weapons

v • d • e List of bullet-based hitscan weapons
Scout	Primary
	Primary	Scattergun	Force-A-Nature	Shortstop	Soda Popper	Baby Face's Blaster	Back Scatter
	Secondary
	Secondary	Pistol	Lugermorph	Winger	Pretty Boy's Pocket Pistol	C.A.P.P.E.R
Soldier	Secondary
Soldier	Secondary	Shotgun	Reserve Shooter	Panic Attack
Pyro	Secondary
Pyro	Secondary	Shotgun	Reserve Shooter	Panic Attack
Heavy	Primary
	Primary	Minigun	Natascha	Iron Curtain	Brass Beast	Tomislav	Huo-Long Heater
	Secondary
	Secondary	Shotgun	Family Business	Panic Attack
Engineer	Primary
	Primary	Shotgun	Frontier Justice	Widowmaker	Panic Attack
	Secondary
	Secondary	Pistol	Lugermorph	C.A.P.P.E.R
	Building
	Building	Sentry Gun	Combat Mini-Sentry Gun
Sniper	Primary
	Primary	Sniper Rifle	Sydney Sleeper	Bazaar Bargain	Machina	Hitman's Heatmaker	AWPer Hand	Classic	Shooting Star
	Secondary
	Secondary	SMG	Cleaner's Carbine
Spy	Secondary
Spy	Secondary	Revolver	Ambassador	Big Kill	L'Etranger	Enforcer	Diamondback