Introduction

Look at me go! Check out my mad skills! I'm a ninja! Whee!

Overview

Swing around and generally cause havoc. In the hands of a skilled player, the rope is probably the most powerful movement utility in Hedgewars. Use the rope to surmount obstacles, move into a better position, or knock enemy hedgehogs to their doom.

Properties

• Weapon Slot: 8
• Affected by wind: No
• Can be aimed in 90 degree arc starting from directly above the hog.
• Usage can be cancelled
• Can arm secondary weapon
• Can be used in mid-air
• Ends turn: No
• Crate type: Utility

Basic usage

Hint: Also try out “Basic Rope Training” in the training mission menu to learn how to rope.

The basic usage of rope is easy.

Press and hold down the Attack key (default: space bar) to shoot the rope. A rope hook will extend rapidly from your hog towards the direction you are targeting. If the hook hits terrain or an object, it will connect and stick to it.

Once connected to an object, you can lengthen or shorten the rope by pressing the Up or Down key (default: up/down cursor keys). You can also swing towards the left or right by pressing the Left or Right key (default: left/right cursor keys). The rope itself is very elastic and will bend arounds the terrain.

While using the rope, you may also arm a secondary weapon by selecting it from the ammo menu (or by using the slot keys). Note however, that not all weapons can be armed. Once armed, the secondary weapon may be dropped via the Jump key (default: Enter).

At any time, you may detach from the rope by pressing the Attack key again, although this may result in fall damage if you are high above ground.

World edge behaviour

Warning: The rope does not work through the “wrap around” world edge (see basic settings), you need to be careful! Shooting the rope through the border just destroys the rope. Also, if your hog moves through the border while being attached to a rope, the rope is detached and removed.

The rope is also destroyed when it touches the bouncy world edge.

The rope has no special effect when it hits the ocean world edge.

Repeated attaching / conserving ammo

After you've just detached a rope and you are still in the air, you can shoot the same rope again to attach yourselves somewhere else. As long you don't touch the ground or your turn ends, you can repeat this as often as you wish. This is a great way to conserve ammo.

After you attached the rope hook from the ground, your rope ammo is only considerd to be “used up” up when:

• You touch the ground while not attached to the rope
• You have detached your rope and fly and you miss a shot

This means, even with just one rope (and enough skill and time) you can reach almost any point in the landscape. You “just” have to stay in air and never miss a shot.

If you missed a shot in mid-air, this only means your current rope ammo is used up. Subsequent misses will thus not further reduce your number of ropes. But since your rope is used up, you need a new rope to continue roping. Note that you will never use up any ropes when you're on the ground and miss your shot.

Hint: Keep an eye on the announcer messages on the top, it tells you when the number of ropes changed.

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Appendix

Hints

• Use airborne repeat swings to conserve ammo.
• Use the rope to detonate mines and quickly retreat to safety.
• Knock against the top half of a hedgehog to send them tumbling into mines / over cliffs etc.
• Slide into hedgehogs on a flat plane to knock them into mines / over cliffs etc.

Advanced Rope Maneuvers

While not an exhaustive list, explanation (or even qualification) of rope maneuvers is beyond the scope of this wiki, listed below are a few descriptions of rope maneuvers as written by the Hedgewars user ElMarranote.

Bouncing

The first Shoppa move I'll post is the most basic one and works basically on any surface for an unlimited amount of purposes. Bouncing is achieved by, while attached to a wall pressing and holding the up key and the direction key towards the wall until your hog hits the wall. This creates momentum in the opposite direction of the wall.

Notice that it is not necessary to press the up key all the time, since you can run out of rope's length making the hog oscillate out of control.

The up key is used to gain momentum, so you can keep the directional key towards the wall you want to bounce from and start pressing and holding the up key to bounce, the resultant bounce depends on the momentum gained by decreasing the rope's length and the wall's angle. After that, you can press the Attack key to “jump” towards your current angle of movement around the rope's attachment point. You can also keep holding the up key to gain extra momentum and to increase your angle to perform greater jumps.

Keep in mind that if you run out of rope length, your hog will oscillate fast and the jump may be harder to control.

Sliding towards and away

Sliding is useful to push enemy hogs and to move quickly on smooth surfaces. This first sliding technique can be performed on a smooth surface with an attachable obstacle at one side.

To slide towards the obstacle, you must attach your rope to it and press and hold up to gain speed towards the obstacle and while pressing up, press the space key, this makes the hog slide slowly towards the attached obstacle, sometimes, once you attach the rope to the obstacle, pressing up or down does nothing while the hog's crosshair goes crazy. To solve this, try to “bounce” from the ground pressing both up or down but do not detach your hog, this should make your hog jump a little and be able to perform the slide. Also, you can just detach your hog and attach it again to the obstacle.

Sliding backwards is just the same but pressing down instead of up.

Sometimes (mostly because of you ran out of rope's length or you hit something before pressing space), this slide does not work; remember that the most important aspect of sliding is the movement speed you already have when attached.

Force Push

This is a useful and powerful movement which allows you to gain a lot of momentum. It can also act both as a slide or jump.

The easiest way to perform this movement is by attaching the rope to a wall right on top of your hog. A 90° angle is not necessary, but the first time, it will be easier if you do so. Once attached to the “roof”, press a direction key (right or left) and hold it to modify the angle, then press down and Attack. This should make your hog perform a jump towards the identical direction and once on the ground, start sliding. As the angle goes away from 90°, the jump will be higher; keep in mind that your hog will not push enemies while in air unless his jump slightly hits the enemy from above.

This movement can't not just be used on the ground, it can also be used vertically. Be creative! Use the gained momentum to your advantage.

Close Push

This move is basically a force push for enemies too close from a wall.

To perform this move, you have to place your hog in mid of the wall and the enemy and attach your rope to the wall high above both hogs. You should be hanging from the wall in an almost parallel angle. Then, you must press and hold the down and the opposite direction key towards your enemy. Your hog should be oscillating against the enemy hog. Press Attack and your hog may …

1. … push the enemy away from the wall sliding or jumping, or
2. jump towards the wall, bounce from it and push the enemy hog with the resultant momentum of his bounce.

If nothing happens, try again.

Aerial Push

Most of the time, when your hog is in mid air, it can't push enemy hogs suddenly stopping instead. Nevertheless, there's a way for your hog to push enemies in mid air:

If your hog lands on the head of the enemy (or ally) with a certain horizontal momentum, it pushes the hog beneath him with around one half of the previous horizontal momentum. This is useful to separate two hogs that are too close together (for example taking your ally out of a bunch of enemies to safely attack 'em without collateral damage) and to push hogs on a circular surface too close to the edge to be “pushable” by normal means among many others.

Rope Surf

Use the rope to gain enough horizontal momentum, then release the rope close above the water. If your hog is fast enough, it will bounce of the water. Obviously, this technique is quite dangerous, so it requires practice.

Jargon (incomplete list)

• Rope-knocking: Shoving a hedgehog or object away by using the rope
• Pro roper: A player with serious skills at roping

Trivia

• The rope has inspired a generation of Hedgewars players for whom rope-proficiency is the ultimate goal. These players (known as “shoppas”/“shoppers”) predominately play a scheme combo called “Shoppa” (Infinite rope, crate drops every turn and no other weapons/utilities) and other rope-based modes like Racer or WxW.
• Due to the difficulty of using rope effectively compared to other weapons, proficiency with rope is sometimes seen as an easy measure of how experienced a given player may be.

Videos

Hedgewars Second Shoppa Compilation, By DJ.LisT

History

• The rope has seen numerous changes across different versions of Hedgewars. Each of these changes has been met with rage, fury, weeping and gnashing of teeth from the community at large. For more information about upcoming changes to rope, please refer to the Release Schedule.
• The rope icon was replaced in the Hedgewars 0.9.19 release.