guide version 1.03 (7/20/18)
Hey there Mothergunship players! Here's a some quick tips on how to pick what gun to use out of the vast assortment of parts at your disposal.

The key to getting the most out of your avaliable weapon energy lies in two gameplay tips and a simple formula. I won't dwell on the gameplay tips too much as it should be fairly obvious: Spread your barrels out evenly among both of your hands. If you put all your barrels on one side, you're wasting a ton of energy and will have to sit around more often for that energy recharge. Instead if you want two barrels and put one on each hand, you have essentially doubled your energy for free.

Second tip is that if you have a weapon that fires slower, tap the mouse button when you fire it instead of holding it down. Holding the button prevents your weapon from recharging, or if you have caps on your gun, will keep depleting energy when you're not firing. Tapping the mouse click at the rate of when the barrels fire will keep your energy levels comfy, and you shooting alien-robot things for much longer. If the fire rate of the barrel is 1 or lower, you will more than likely be able to fire your gun forever by tap firing. It will take some time to get used to, but mastering this skill will eliminate any tension caused by managing energy resources.

Finally let's get to that formula. Making a great gun starts from choosing the right barrel(s) for your gun. Can't choose between energy stream or chaingun? Use this math formula:

( (Damage + (Damage * Crit Chance) )* Fire Rate * Multishot) / Energy Consumption = Max Damage Per Energy Used

Confused? Let's see this formula in action with the grey versions of the energy stream and chaingun. The grey energy stream has a damage of 1, a fire rate of 30, and since there's no multishot or crit chance, let's make those 1 and 0 respectively. Also the energy stream consumes 15 energy. With this information we can find that:

(1 + 0 * 30 * 1) / 15 = 2 Max Possible Damage that Energy Stream can do per energy used

Let's compare these stats to the grey chaingun, which has 4 damage, a fire rate of 10, a crit chance of 0.01, no multishot, so once again that's 1, and an energy consumption of 12. Let's put it in the formula and see what comes out:

(4 + 0.04 * 10 * 1) / 12 = 3.3667 Max Possible Damage that Chaingun can do per energy used

So if you're looking for a rapid fire gun for mid range firefights, the chaingun should be your barrel of choice. With this being said, here are a few more things to consider when choosing barrels:

• Guns have plenty of invisible stats that you can't see, for example: while the chaingun has more damage per energy used, energy stream has much greater accuracy, and therefore would be a better pick for playing at longer ranges. There are plenty more stats too, such as projectile velocity, hard capped range, explosion damage and radius, projectile drop off, etcetera.
  
  

• Originally posted by PotatoGrant:

  While the energy stream is bad at lower levels, it's quite effective at higher rarities. It has a absurd rate of fire too, which works well with some caps like the fire mine or stun gel ones.

  
  
• No gun will work best in every situation. It's always a best practice to have one barrel on each hand which are vastly different from one another. Even then, you still might find that the gun that has the lower stat might've been better because it could get rid of hordes of enemies or was great at long range damage.

Steam user Raho has already begun compiling a list of all of the barrels and their stats, on a spreadsheet in google drive, so if you'd like to take a look at what we have so far, go here:

List of Barrels by alphabet, then rarity[docs.google.com]

I have contributed to this sheet, and if you would like to contribute to this sheet, please comment below the statistics of any barrels you own that are not listed on the sheet, and we will try our best to add them. If we don't in a timely manner, there's always the formula.

At the end of the day, choosing the right barrel might be down to pure preference in play style and situation, but that's not what you read all the stuff above for, and while you can't ever choose the "Best Gun", you can at least now be armed with some additional knowledge and can get closer to choosing YOUR best gun.

• Learn more about hidden weapon stats
  
• Start a list on all barrels' stats ordered from best to worst
  
• Make a section about caps

Version 1.03 (7/20/18)

• Added viewable list of barrels to a new section titled "List of Barrels" (Thanks Raho!)

Version 1.02 (7/19/18)

• Modified Formula and Tutorial in "The Best Barrel Formula" to account for critical chance (Thanks Raho!)
  
• Fixed Typo in formula from "Energy Conumption" to "Energy Consumption"
  
• Removed Bullet Point on not knowing how crit chance works in both "The Best Barrel Formula" and "Final Thoughts"

Version 1.01 (7/19/18)

• Added quote from PotatoGrant in "The Best Barrel Formula"

Version 1 (7/18/18)

• Created Post