Combat mechanic — not covered elsewhere
The Nuclear Bomb
The one weapon that leaves the world permanently different — a crater, a city in ruins, and radioactive water, for good
Most weapons in Blister Online deal damage and nothing else. The Nuclear Bomb is the exception: detonating one leaves three lasting marks on the world itself — a real crater, permanently green water for a wide area, and, if a city was standing close enough, its buildings reduced to rubble forever. None of it heals or resets.
Getting one
A Nuclear Bomb costs 40 Iron Bar, 8 Gold Bar, 20 Crystal, and 15 Fuel Cell to craft. Holding one and pressing [F] detonates it roughly 120m out along wherever you're aiming — far enough that you aren't standing at ground zero yourself, but still well within the blast's outer fallout ring.
A Nuke Launcher (60 Iron Bar, 14 Gold Bar, 30 Crystal, 25 Fuel Cell, 4 Plasma Core, requires Attack 30) fires a Nuclear Bomb as a lobbed shell instead, out to 600m in a real ballistic arc rather than a hitscan shot — each shot consumes one Nuclear Bomb from your inventory as ammo, so you need both the launcher and a stock of bombs to use it.
What actually happens
| Zone | Radius | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Lethal | 110 | Kills every enemy outright; 160 damage to the player. |
| Fallout / irradiation | 198 (1.8×) | Surviving enemies become Irradiated — permanently stronger (+80% HP, +70% damage, +60% XP and money) rather than harmed; 40 damage to the player. |
| Crater | 77 (0.7×) | Ground physically sinks 60 units deep, permanently — a real, persistent deformation of the terrain rather than a scorched texture. |
| Green water | 242 (2.2×) | Every body of water in range turns radioactive green, permanently, wider than the crater itself. |
A city — yours or the rival city — caught within roughly the lethal radius is reduced to rubble for good: its buildings stop rendering as buildings and render as ruins instead, with a toast reading "Your city lies in radioactive ruins" or "The rival city has been wiped off the map." There is no repair for this; it's the one truly one-way action a player can take against a settlement.
Why it's permanent, and how that's kept honest
Craters, green water, and destroyed cities are each their own separate saved list of locations — not one global flag — so a second bomb somewhere else adds a second stained location rather than re-triggering an effect that already fired once. Green water in particular is deliberately scoped to where a bomb actually fell, not the whole planet: an early version of this system stained every sea in the world from a single detonation, which is not what "a nuclear strike happened here" should mean.
Currently inert in multiplayer — but the server side is now built and waiting
As of this writing, firing a Nuclear Bomb in an online game still does essentially nothing to other
players or the shared world — but the reason has changed. According to the game's own development log,
the multiplayer server has since been given a real, deliberately-designed nuke message
handler: falloff damage that's strongest at ground zero and tapers to nothing at the rim rather than a
guaranteed kill, no way to damage another player at all (the game currently has no player-vs-player
damage of any kind), and craters or destroyed cities staying private to whoever fired the shot rather
than becoming shared, unrepairable world state — plus a region-based cooldown so the same patch of
ground can't simply be renuked. All of that has reportedly been deployed to the live server. What still
doesn't exist is any code in the actual game client that sends that message in the first place — the
connection module shipped in the game only ever reports your position and chat, never an attack or a
nuke — so firing a nuke online today still only ever affects your own local view of enemies, with no
kill credit, no drops, no experience, and no shared crater or fallout, exactly as before. The server
is ready for the day a client update actually calls it.
Version history
- The Nuclear Bomb, Nuke Launcher, and full blast system added — the crater, the kill/irradiate split, city destruction, and the original all-water-turns-green effect.
- Green water rescoped from the whole world to the actual blast site. The first version wrote directly to the game's single shared water material, so one detonation, anywhere, stained every sea in the world permanently with nothing left for a second bomb to do. Fallout is now its own list of specific locations, and a water surface picks its colour based on whether it's actually inside one of those areas.
Trivia
- Destroying a city with a nuke and defeating it in the ongoing rival-city war are tracked separately on purpose — a rival city already defeated in the war still has standing buildings until a bomb (or ordinary siege damage) actually levels them, since "defeated" is a state of the war and "destroyed" is a physical fact about what's still standing.
- Irradiated enemies are a straight upgrade for them, not a debuff — a nuke that doesn't outright kill something makes it meaningfully more dangerous rather than weaker.