Turn your boring Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord bow into an arrow shotgun with this mod

I'm not an expert on medieval warfare, but I have seen Army of Darkness and played several PC games, so I'm confident that shotguns can kick the hell out of your average medieval soldier. This Bannerlord mod, MB2Shotgun, delivers most of the appealing power of a boomstick without being as obviously anachronistic: It makes your bow or crossbow fire off something like 20 arrows at once. Carnage results.

The mod doesn't by default look that impressive—it hits enemies with a hell of a lot of force, but doesn't really give you that satisfying pellet spread of a real shotgun. Pair it with the Firelord mod's fire arrows, though, and things start to heat up.

Here's a demonstration of a flurry of fire arrows lighting up the night.

Some notes if you decide to turn your bow into a shotgun—the mod is disabled by default even when installed, so you'll have to toggle it on with a hotkey before battle or go into the mod file to permanently enable it. That's pretty simple to do: Just open up your Bannerlord folder, go to /MB2Shotgun/settings/CheatLogicSettings.xml, and set "ShotgunFeature" to "true." One other edit modder yhyu13 says you may need to make while you're in there: changing the "ShotgunBounusDamage" value, depending on the kind of arrows you're using.

Yhyu13 is still actively working on the mod, and in an update today, extended it to also support throwing knives. Perhaps this will extend to an actual, fully fledged shotgun in the future.

Dozens of new mods are popping up for Bannerlord every week, so check out our guide to the best Mount & Blade 2: Bannerlord mods to stay up to date.

Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).