From Team Fortress Wiki

“

— The Soldier on the space marines and futuristic robots Scientists in the future have studied your ass for centuries - and sent me back in time to kick it! ”

The Righteous Bison is a secondary weapon for the Soldier. It is a handheld retro-futuristic or steampunk-styled ray gun.

The weapon fires an unreflectable, undestroyable projectile beam that pierces targets in a straight line, at the cost of dealing heavily reduced damage to buildings. Each beam is able to hurt an infinite amount of targets, and 20 damage is dealt per tick.

Like the Cow Mangler 5000, the Righteous Bison features a "Bison" bar in the HUD which serves as an indication of its ammunition clip. After the bar is depleted, it can be recharged through a reloading process in which a piston in the back of the weapon is pumped. It does not incorporate the traditional ammo reserve used by other weapons.

Enemies killed by the Bison suffer a distinctive death by vaporization: they turn black, hover in mid-air while surrounded by team-colored particles, and then disappear into ashes while a loud, distinct vaporization sound plays. Like backstabs and headshots, there is a 25% chance that opponents will perform a specific disintegration animation if killed in this way.

Weta Workshop held a panel at San Diego Comic-Con 2011 and handed out coupon codes to visitors that can be redeemed in Team Fortress 2 for a Genuine quality Righteous Bison.[1]

Damage and function times

Damage and function times Shot type Projectile Damage type Bullet Ranged or Melee damage? Ranged Damage Maximum ramp-up 120% Players: 24

Base damage 100% Players: 20

Buildings: Maximum fall-off 53% Players: 11

Critical 60 Mini-crit 27-32 Function times Attack interval 0.8 s Reload (first) 0.92 s Reload (consecutive) 0.4 s Values are approximate and determined by community testing.

Item set

Demonstration

Crafting

Blueprint

As a crafting ingredient

Strange variant





Unused content

There is a set of additional projectile particles that are not used. There is also an impact particle, though since the projectile just passes through the enemies, the impact particle is never seen.

This weapon contains an unused idle sound and an alternative projectile shot sound.

Bugs

The attribute -34% clip size is missing.

is missing. Rarely, after a moment of not firing, the Soldier will automatically reload the weapon's clip, regardless of the player's auto-reload setting.

In the client view, while crouching, the projectile will appear to fire much higher than the weapon model.

When minimizing the game with this weapon equipped, the ammo portion of the HUD may disappear. Looking at the scoreboard or typing hud_reloadscheme into console may fix this.

The projectile can collide with certain invisible map elements that it is supposed to pass through, effectively making the projectile disappear mid-air in some map locations. Examples include the lowest level of the wooden platforms near the rocks on both of the second control points on cp_gullywash, and the room with a raised pathway near the final red spawn on pl_frontier.

Hitting an enemy at certain angles at certain distances will cause the penetration to trigger twice on the same target, effectively doing double damage. [2]

Trivia

The appearance of this weapon is based on that of 'The Righteous Bison - Indivisible Particle Smasher', which can be purchased from the online store at Weta Workshop.

Notes

Despite the Jungle Inferno Update stating to have reversed stats to before the Meet Your Match Update, the weapon does not deal as much damage as it used to. This is because of the change on the projectile.

Gallery

RED first-person view.

BLU first-person view.

RED projectile.

BLU projectile.

The Righteous Bison promotional image in the Weta Store.

An image of a life size Righteous Bison.

San Diego Comic-Con Righteous Bison voucher.

The Righteous Bison in Grordbort's Crash.

Early particle effect concept for the Righteous Bison.

References