Introduction

Feeling overwhelmed? Take to the skies and rain rotten eggs down upon your enemy!

Overview

Relative to its actual power, Birdy is one of the most under-utilized weapons in Hedgewars. It is similar to the flying saucer in piloting style, but has its own unique ammo it can use to poison enemy hedgehogs.

Properties

• Flight similar to flying saucer
• Number of eggs: 2
• Max. damage per egg: 10
• Effect of egg: Poisoning (5 damage per turn)
• Charge to shoot: No
• Can go underwater: No
• Affected by wind: No
• Ends turn: Yes
• Retreat time: 3s
• Crate type: Weapon

How to use

Pressing the Attack key once (default: space bar) will issue a Birdy whistle. A few seconds later Birdy will swoop down and grab hold of your hog. After Birdy has grabbed your hog, tap the up key several times to get airborne.
Important: Your turn time will not stop after activating Birdy. Your retreat time will start after you've landed.

Tapping the left or right key will cause Birdy to flap its wings and fly in that direction. Birdy will naturally descend rapidly if you stop pressing the up key, so keep tapping the key periodically to stay in the air.

Be careful not to tap up (or any direction key) too quickly or Birdy will fly off the screen resulting in large fall damage and/or the death of your hog.

While airborne, pressing the Attack key will cause Birdy to lay a rotten egg. Birdy may drop up to two eggs per flight. Hedgehogs hit by an egg will be poisened and take 5 damage per turn. As always, poisoned hedgehogs can cure themselves by collecting a health crate.

Birdy tires out the more you use it, so trigger wing flaps sparingly. Each flap spends energy which is practically identical to the fuel of flying saucer, but it is not displayed. When Birdy is starting to rapidly lose feathers, this means that Birdy is soon to run out of energy.

Hints

• If you see Birdy losing a lot of feathers, try to land as soon as possible
• Poison undamaged hogs with the birdy as early in the match as possible. Poisoning two 100 HP hogs early in the game will later result in two hogs which have 1HP and can both be killed with a multi-shot weapon like RC Plane, Desert Eagle, etc.
• If you are in a bad position and don't want to (or can't) use movement utilities, using Birdy is a good way to get to a better position, pick up crates, and also deal some poison damage to the enemy
• Health crates cure poison damage, so it is a better to avoid using Birdy while there are uncollected health crates on the map. Unless of course, you want to do one better and use Birdy to poison two hogs and pick up an uncollected health crate!
• With practice, Birdy can be used to nudge hogs together, into mines, over cliffs, etc.
• You can can poison multiple hogs that have been grouped together using 1 egg

Trivia

• Birdy is one of two weapons with the ability to cause poison damage. The other is the old limburger
• Birdy is often used to distinguish new players from experienced ones. New players usually don't realize you need to keep tapping the movement keys to pilot Birdy and thus prematurely end their turn shortly after activating the weapon

History

• Birdy was the first weapon to incorporate poison into Hedgewars.