"Stick Fight: The Game started as a one man game jam project for 'No more Sweden.' Wilhelm Nylund used the TABS physics system to let players have a go at each other in a couch multiplayer fashion. It turned out pretty cool and development continued together with Pontus Ullbors, Karl Flodin, and Philip Westre on late nights and weekends for about 3 months." - Landfall

If you seek to become a more proficient player at Stick Fight: The Game; if you desire to make more of your abilities and improve beyond your former limitations into betterment, keep reading. Note that Stick Fight: The Game, or just SF, is a rather... unpolished game, and has faced its fair share of bugs & patches over the years. "Stick Fight: The Game" was released on September 28, 2017 by a team of four developers from Landfall West, it was created over a few months and was a pet project worked alongside a variety of other larger projects Landfall was developing, like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator (TABS), which they are far more well known for, and whose quality is considered much higher.

Stick Fight was supposedly developed only over a few months since its inception, and by nature of being a pet project, was not as prioritized relative to Landfall's other more popular games, and thus, was left unpolished over the years that followed its release. And hence, many of the players who expected a high quality game from Landfall ended up disappointed at its rough-around-the-edges nature, especially when bugs would unrender the map, leaving the grey background patiently glaring back at the user. A while later, the developers of the game brought in another team to help fix many of the desynchronization problems & bugs of the game; however, were informed that, to fix the source of the problem, they'd have to redesign the game from the ground up, which they supposedly were not able to do, given that other projects took precedence.

And hence, years after its release, Stick Fight remains a game riddled with latency & desync problems that, while usually fine, for many users, can make the game physically unplayable, although this depends on the user.

If you seek to improve your capabilities, generally, you must first establish why? Why are you trying to get better? What is the point in getting better at a years-old party game? Why try when the game is a buggy mess? Why try when someone with five times the number of hours will wipe the floor with you, and then make you pay for the date? Okay, maybe the last one just effects me--but the point being, if you don't have a damn good reason to keep playing, you aren't going to, you may play a few hours, maybe 100 hours, maybe 200 hours, maybe even 500 hours, but you will fade from the game if you don't know why you're playing it.

For me, personally, the Steam and Discord 'communities' have kept me at least somewhat invested in the game. Stick Fight unto itself is rather unremarkable, but rather, the tournaments we set up, the 1v1s in those godforsakenly laggy matches, the new colored names that air drop in from nowhere with NASA computers to kick your little, petite rectum into the next galaxy, and the rare modded users who sought to spice up the game throwing you one of the hidden weapons to mess around with. Needless to say, it's more all the stuff around Stick Fight that makes it interesting. It is a medium we play within, that is made fun by what we do with it, it standing alone is pretty boring, but what you can do with it, as I see it, is nowhere near boring. Do not force yourself to be the best, by doing that, you burn out. Those who play Stick Fight the longest, and hence, have trained the most, play it for the goofy game it is, and less so for the serious fighting game it isn't. There may be stakes, you may in a battle for your life, but why get stressed out by a game when its supposed to be a place where you can do the opposite?

If you seek to improve, do not forget the reason why you're trying to improve in the first place.

Stick Fight has many categories one can improve upon, including, but perhaps not limited to: Latency Management, Maneuverability, Using the Environment, Body-Only Combat, Blocking Opponents, Throwing Items, Weapons Combat, Extending Mechanics, Game Quirks, & Player Prediction. To improve these abilities, one first would likely need to review the settings, basic game mechanics, basic combinations of mechanics, optimizations, & features, and for that, check the description for a former guide which acts to complement this guide.

For many players, Stick Fight can become borderline unplayable. The desynchronization between players can lead to point-blank punches, attacks, or thrown weapons missing their targets, or, alternatively, being hit half-way across the map by a punch or weapon that clearly missed you.

It's not about where you are on your screen, it's about where you are on their screen.

Additionally, instead of Stick Fight having to pay to keep general servers online, they supposedly have players host matches on their own devices. However, since light takes time to travel, when that area is "pinged," the time it takes from send to receive is (supposedly) one's desync; events that occur for one user may appear to occur 0.2 seconds (200 ms) later which, in a fighting game, can be brutal. Additionally, if the information packets being sent and received to each of the players go through congested networks (eg. huge chat messages, tons of entities & bullets, crappy internet connection, players joining/leaving, etc.), the UDP communication protocol may lose important packets, leading to corrupted player data, entity data, & map data. This packet loss is localized to the player data in the match, and hence, no data corruption carries over. Recurrent latency & bugs may imply a client-side issue. Lastly, given that the host's player data has the least distance to travel to the host's session, the delay experienced by hosts can often be much better than for players, and hence a term you may come across: "Host Advantage."

Stick Fight loses its match data somewhat easily, and hence, players can become generally invulnerable, invisible, be unable to throw weapons, immune to the void, immune to lava & spikes, split into mobile or immobile clones, lose in-game audio, be unable to attack, unable to block, unable to grab weapons, unable to chat, be a head centered in the middle of the screen, and other increasingly rare player-related bugs. Sometimes players can view a match without fully joining, even if four players are already present, the maximum I've seen was 7 players in a match, most of which were immobile and bugged, including me. Moreover, bullets, boxes, snakes, explosive barrels, ice fragments, & player clones can carry over between matches, usually due to the Time Bubble weapon & congestion. At other times, maps & objects can unrender for some players, leaving others to walk on things that do not appear for some players, causing said others to fall client-side, to then rubber-band back up to their previous position, causing player jittering (to some degree) as the two perspectives about what's going on battle it out. There are even moments where players will squish themselves into closed holes in the large spike-ball level, or will faze through the flaps of the windmill on one of the Western levels, or will appear to be jumping on air itself, grabbing guns from seemingly nowhere; this is a sign of desync, and sometimes, they're even playing on a different map that doesn't appear to you, grabbing guns that aren't on your map. If you are exceedingly lucky, the whole map, set of players, entities, audio, in-game menu, & chat messages will be unrendered & muted, leaving a grey background staring back at you, causing you to usually have to tab out and force quit the game--this happens especially when joining matches, but when precautions are taken, it's not necessarily game breaking, just irritating.

No, there's not an organized onslaught of hackers, the game is just an old, unpolished pet project.

At times, the game will sort itself out; however, once data packets are lost, the game presumably will attempt to reclaim said packets, which can take ages, if it too isn't having issues. Moreover, often, when a player of some color (eg. Red) is bugged, every subsequent "Red" player will generally be bugged as well, usually in the same (or worse) ways. Generally speaking, since the data corruption is supposedly match-specific, re-hosting is usually the only effective way to remove bugs, the game usually cannot do so of its own accord.

Since there's supposedly a variety of issues and fixes, and so much more I'd like to explain, but for sake of brevity, consult one of Kaitahuri's former guides (it also contains YT videos to help):
(Fixes are in the lower sections)

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2811783324
Note: These fixes do not always work effectively, it's user dependent, some may work very well. Perhaps, they can make a difference in your game and make for a better experience, but this is not guaranteed.

Depending on the nature of which keys you have set in the Keybindings section of the menu pop-up, accessed with the 'esc' key, walking is presumably achieved by holding the A or D keys. To jump, press the 'W' key, and to fall faster, hold the 'S' key. When a player jumps upon a surface, they're given a force reflecting their own, and hence, jumping on the ground sends you up, and jumping on a wall sends you away at a supplementary angle in the opposite direction. With this mechanic, the player can make use of the jump force to fling themselves off of walls; a wall bounce. Moreover. if said player moves back into the wall after bouncing, they can repeat the process to perform a simple one-wall climb. If there exists a nearby wall on the opposite side, they can potentially bounce from wall to wall in a two-wall climb, a climb much faster than its one-wall counterpart.

Generally speaking, for most maps, weapons will usually fall from the same set of points on a frequency determined by the host's Game Settings, also accessed via the Menu. Under most circumstances, when a weapon falls on the left, the next weapon will usually drop on the right; however, I presume that the underlying process is randomized to some degree with the only potential caveat being that it won't drop in the same place twice back-to-back.

In Stick Fight, "Ground" is an immovable tile or series of tiles textured in accordance with the Biome of an original or custom map. However, bushes, trees, lanterns, and other background objects players can 'hide' or interact with are not available in the Editor, and hence, are presumably not available in custom maps. Notably, there also exists small and large "Ice Blocks" in which colliding objects of sufficient force can cause a preexisting set of ice fragments to "fracture" apart, fragments that can damage players and cause other ice blocks to break apart, causing collapses of large sections of the map.

Technically, SF is basically a 2.5D game, as many textures & objects are 2D (like Ground & Crates), but Weapons and some level-specific tiles are, in actuality, three dimensional objects. Amongst the 2D objects, spikes, and their frozen counterpart, icicles, can one hit any player no matter the hp setting: 1 to 300, it's instakill. Thusly, you can punch players into spikes to instakill them immediately. Alongside spikes, wrecking balls will usually swing off of pivot points with dynamic, unbreakable chains players can climb, although at risk of being instantly lobotomized if they hit the spikes.

Of the movable entities in the game, "Crates," "Large Crates," and "Long Crates" can be moved by any force-acting body, however, move far slower under even minor latent conditions. Pushing crates pillars is usually recommended to collapse box levels, especially with snake associated weaponry.

Lava is an immovable foreground tile which the player takes moderate damage & knockback from, 4 hitting players on 100 hp check this. Additionally, in some lava levels fixed or falling towers exist, usually emitting 'streams' of lava down its sides, sometimes periodically, sometimes staying active after its first emission.

On the various laser-centric levels of the game, some may rotate around a pivot, others may remain fixed, some are periodic, some constantly beam. Laser beams do not instakill on 100hp, however, supposedly deal high damage quickly. Moreover, some levels will also have rubber-banding laser platforms which you can rotate via holding 'S' into opposing players; however, lasers sometimes have desync issues, making it appear as if players are running through them when, in actuality, they are dodging lasers you cannot see due to desync.

Snake barrels are immovable map props which either generate about 10 snakes check this or produce snakes endlessly, however, supposedly only generate the "default" snake. Snake barrels can be entered in from the front, and potentially phased through out the top or back with enough attack and jump spam.

Snakes can weigh down players and prevent them from escaping if they've yet to advance their movement abilities. Snakes can be damaged, but only killed in the Editor.

On occasion, some levels will have "Platforms," small, dark gray, rounded rectangles which, when touched by a player (or variant of snake) will 'break.' Another variant of platform, are the various cycling, rotating, and see-sawing variants found in the original Factory maps along side the pop-In-cycle platforms in the Halloween maps.

As one of the most damaging environmental threats, explosive barrels' damage depends on how close the player is, instakilling when point-blank check this. Explosive barrels are triggered by being hit with a sufficient force, taking 5 seconds to explode check this and oscillate in size after being hit, potentially causing a chain reaction if their oscillation imparts enough force onto neighboring barrels. In some levels, barrels with appear to not explode, and yet, still damage the player; however, generally, the host can see the barrels oscillate and explode on such levels.

Lastly, the void walls and floor, who supposedly kill on contact, like a combination of lava and spikes. The void ceiling, however, does not kill players, and can even be phased through on rare occasion, making the player effectively unkillable on the map. When a player dies to the void, they usually will spew out a directional cloud of their player color. Presumably, the void also usually deletes weapons, snakes, boxes, etc, potentially assisting with in-game latency.

Predict gun drops, Hide when necessary, Bounce of the walls, Avoid what can harm you.

Presumably, for most players, right click (right mouse button in Keybindings), controls the block mechanic. When one presses right click, an annulus arc forms in the direction of their cursor relative to the stickman with the same color as said stickman. As the mouse shifts, the annulus shifts in accordance, pivoting around the center of the stickman. As one holds right click, the shield's size will decrease until it stops at its smallest size in about 1.5 seconds holding or 1.0 seconds while spamming right click. The shield does regenerate if not used, taking about 1.5 seconds if unperturbed.

Additionally, for a brief period (aka. the Block Interval) after one right clicks, the shield dilates outward, turning white; this is referred to as the "Active Shield" with the colored form being referred to as the "Inactive Shield." When a player moves into an active shield (movement is required) and punches or attacks with any melee weapon, a *clang* sound will be played, supposedly sounding deeper the greater the forces involved although this is personally more theoretical. Nevertheless, upon being blocked, the opponent will not be able to attack via hands nor weapons until the stunning effect subsides a few seconds thereafter. Moreover, shields can also deflect bullets of many kinds, although not necessarily preventing the taking of damage outright; presumably, even many of the Pumpkin Boss attacks are technically deflectable. However, in general, thrown weapons & entities are not blockable. (eg. snake variants, crate variants, explosive barrels, ice fragments, etc.)*

In former times, many players merely spammed the active shield to block; however, upon my hiatus, the SF community presumably developed a technique known as "Infinite Blocking" which, as Spawn explains, "There is a technique for the white part to appear which is called infinite blocking. Infinite blocking is right clicking and waiting precisely 0.3 seconds then repeat. To make sure you are performing this task correctly your hands should be completely still so spamming won't work."

Notably, there supposedly is a large problem with the blocking mechanic for, well, actually blocking players. Presumably, blocking is only achievable when the other player hits your active shield on their screen, not yours. And hence, given that Stick Fight is presumably riddled with desync, the delays between players supposedly can make for a frustrating experience attempting to block other players, despite their supposed clear intersection with one's active shield. Hence, many supposedly "struggle" with the blocking mechanic, and yet, often, it's more that the mechanic is faulty, or if anything:

Supposedly, the blocking mechanic has remained one of the 'least developed' skills in the general community as Stick Fight's unpolished nature rids of the consistency necessary for mastering it.

With latency, maneuverability, and blocking in mind, the actual "fight" part of Stick Fight:
Without weapons, the stickman can still attack; presumably, the stickman will punch if left click is clicked while on the ground, and the stickman will kick if left click is clicked while above the ground. Presumably, when two players attack each other weapon-less, their limbs may contact whilst mutually attacking, supposedly leading to an "Attack Cancellation" wherein no damage is dealt to either party. You potentially can see it occurring as a small, colored annulus (ie. fat ring) around the contact area.

From my own stopwatch data vs. numbers of punches/kicks, the player can punch 3.00 times per second, maximum, and hence, once every 0.33 sec, given 14 cps input. Presumably, once one hits a player, their punch or kick will deal 22.5 hp no matter where on the stickman they hit. Thusly, 5 hits are necessary to "kill" a stickman on 100 hp.

Like essentially every other aspect of the game, body-only combat is subject to the 'same' desync problems, and hence, some players will potentially appear to be unhittable in direct combat as their attack cancellation inhibits the majority of your attacks, supposedly leading players to use weapons to bypass the heavy latency dependencies of body-only combat. A theory of mine is also that their hit box potentially 'lags behind' their movement, causing you to hit the ragdoll instead of the hitbox, making them potentially, yet again, almost physically unhittable.

Generally, few are "good" at body-only combat as latency management, blocking, maneuvering, prediction, and other abilities are presumably what actually allow you to hit the other players. Often, host advantage & desync play a more significant role in succeeding in body-only combat if the other aspects are assumed to be relatively similar between the players.

- Melee Ranged & Mob Weapons
(See. Sword, Spear, Blink Dagger, Light Saber)
- Grabbing Weapons (touch them / run into them) (See. Reaching)
- Using Weapons & Gun Recoil
- Gun Horizontal Boosts & Recoil Jumps
- Body Neck & Head Damage Multipliers
- Boss Pumpkins & Map-Specific Weapons

If the stickman has no weapon in-hand, they grab a weapon by running into it, a process made worse due to latency. In Stick Fight, there are 36 general weapons, 10 level-exclusive weapons (eg. Laser Sword (aka. Lightsaber), Pumpkin Launcher, the 4 boss pumpkins, Halloween AK-47, Halloween Revolver, Halloween Pistol, Halloween Sniper, etc.), 11 inaccessible weapons (eg. Shotgun, Laser Planter, Shield, Fan, Ball Launcher, Bow, Minigun Old, MiniMinigun Old, Holy Sword, Holy Minigun, & Lava Whip)




If you hug a wall and throw your weapon then recover said gun it will be in the wall. This is called wall clipping and you are able to fire through walls which will surprise amateur players and be useful in most situations.

Throwing is one of the best mechanics (And latency dependant) and some would consider it the best to be in stick fight which I couldn't argue with. Throwing is pressing F (default button) which releases the weapon and flings it towards your cursor.

FPS comes into play as whiffs occur more frequently if you have higher fps while low fps almost guarantees for an excellent, fast throw.

Throwing is generally used for sticky situations or predicting where someone will be but not being fast enough to shoot. Most of the time players throw the snake guns or spears because they are not useful in most situations. Spears are bouncy and ricochet but there is no way of absolutely knowing where you spear will bounce to as they are extremely buggy. Watch out as you can hit yourself with the spear which would do a lot of damage and embarrass you. The spear is typically thrown for its short range but it is good to only throw it when another gun spawns as it is good for defending an area. I'm not going to go in depth as for all the map strategies but on most maps spears are useful for defending high areas.

Throwing at the body does 1x damage while neck does 1.5x and head does 2x which is a 1 tap. This graph explains everything: Rexi and Monky made this so they get 100% credit.

- Throwing Weapons
- Body, Neck, & Head Multipliers
- Reloading Weapons
- Duplicating Weapons (Latency Dependent)
- Weapon Shields & Throw-to-Throw Cancellation (Latency Dependent)

Rainbow Boss Spikes (quirk)
Large Rotating Wrecking Ball & Lava Spray (quirk)
The Map Edge (quirk)

Spike Jump & Latent Player Hitbox (quirk)
In order to perform the spike jump move, you will have to precisely time jumping off a spike at the last second. Spike jumps are easier to execute if you are on another host far from you due to the lag which carries out this glitch.

- Passive to Aggressive Spectrum
- Attractive & Repulsive Movements
- Desire for Weapons & Baiting
- Avoidance of Environmental Threats & Baiting
- Avoidance of Armed Players & Baiting
- Overwhelming Opponents & Rapid Actions
- Weapon Drop-Off & Controlling All Weapons

If there is a gun near another player they would typically lunge at it but if you know that they will be at the position of where the descending gun is ; you are able to throw or fire your weapon at that gun. This is predicting where the player will be as the gun is the bait and it is their desire to obtain a gun which is left out in the open.

You may also bait a player with a melee weapon when standing near a laser and blocking them into it or disarming them with bullet deflections. When the opponent receives the first gun SF has changed from fighting game to a platformer. This is what I call the tom and jerry stage where you have to run for your life and bait them using the obstacles in the level.

After mastering the basics, there is a high skill ceiling for SF and always room for improvement as of practising such techniques.

The first technique is called quick draw which is a must learn for low fps players as it is easier to pull off. With an m1, revolver or deagle if you click fast after obtaining the gun it will spray out bullets with rapid speed and meticulous accuracy. However, it gets better when you are able to disarm opponents if they rudely steal your gun. This is mostly latency dependent but it can still be done on any host. In order to execute this, you have to hit the gun in their hand (not the opponent).

Just a few more techniques until you become a stick fight pro. Throw Hopping - Aiming your weapon at a 45 degree angle upwards or downwards and jumping. This tech is very hard to master because of the inconsistency and is only useful in some situations (like escaping that damn closing in spike map) or maneuvering over an obstacle in your path such as players. Gun Hopping - When a gun is gifted to you by the stick fight gods and descends from the sky: you may jump on the gun and when picked up press w again to hop on the gun. Finally, a weapon reload is throwing your gun on the ground and picking it up again which completely reloads it without having to find another gun.

FPS - Low fps such as 60 will give you worse blocks, melee, movement speed, worse jumps but better quick draw and faster throws.

High FPS will give you better jumps, blocks, melee, movement speed but worse qd (your going to have to click faster for better qd) and worse throws.

There is no better fps it is just up to playstyle but to determine which one is best for you; you should attempt using all the fps options and start experimenting. I personally prefer using 144 as it balances all out but like I said before, throws are crucial which is why people cannot pick which is better.

- Potential Energy & Limb-to-End Distance
- Spam-Click Movement & Mouse Position
- Edge Collision & Edge Jumps
- Damage Collision & Spike Jumps
- Falling Weapon Jumps

Check out Kaitahuri's guide; it is much better than mine and he really helped with this by writing half of the guide. He also wrote a guide on bugs and latency which has been displayed previously in the guide at the Preventative Measures for In-Game Issues but if you missed it here it is.

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2821046017
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2811783324

Also check out Rexi and Monky for that helpful graph to display the damage of all the weapons to the body, neck and head.