Grenades — Wiki

Frag and smoke grenades: fuses, damage, cover and how smokes pop.

Each player can carry one frag and one smoke. A frag costs 2 tokens and a smoke 1 (see Economy).

Frag grenade

• It explodes 3.4 seconds after you throw it. Holding it before the throw doesn't shorten the fuse, so you can't cook a frag.

• The throw is the same for a frag and a smoke: it leaves 16 cm in front of your eyes, aimed 4° above where you look (less the more you look up or down, none straight up), at 28 m/s, plus your own speed along the throw. Running forward throws further and running back shorter; moving sideways changes nothing. A jump adds your speed up too.

• Its damage depends on distance: 105 at the grenade and still 100 at 3.5 m, so it kills from full health within 3.7 m. It does nothing past 6.67 m.

• Cover: the game checks whether the grenade can see your head, your middle and your feet. If something hides all three, you take no damage.

• Your own frag hurts you as much as anyone else. Your teammates are safe, because friendly fire is off.

How grenades fly and bounce

• A grenade falls at 19.6 m/s², twice the Earth's gravity, as fast as a player. The server moves it 120 times a second, as a ball 12 cm across, so a throw always flies the same way.

• At every bounce it keeps 40% of its speed across and 30% up and down. That's why grenades never roll far: on the ground one stops within a few hundredths of a second. Nothing else slows it, so it flies at full speed until it hits something.

• It bounces off everything solid, including the invisible walls round the map, but flies straight through the invisible walls that only stop players. Most of the maps' invisible walls are of that kind.

• A frag doesn't care what it touches: it goes off when its 3.4 seconds are up, still in the air or not.

A grenade to the face

A thrown grenade that hits a player directly also does a little damage, by where it hits. That goes for smokes too, so a smoke can finish someone off, for the By Any Means medal.

Smoke grenade

• A smoke pops when it lands, never in the air. That's on its first touch of a floor (anything flatter than 45°) once it's been flying for a second, or as soon as it has nearly stopped. Bouncing off a wall doesn't pop it.

• The smoke lasts 18.5 seconds. Its hiss stops 4 seconds before it clears.

• Walk into it and it covers your screen. The effect fills a box about 10 × 9 m wide and 5 m tall, from just under the grenade up.

• That box is turned the way you threw. The grenade keeps the angle it was thrown at, and the box with it: throw a smoke straight up and, by the game's code, its box stands on end. Thrown level, it lies flat as you'd expect.