Welcome, Nerfers! This is a place for Nerf, Modifications, Homemades, Assassins, Office wars, Humans vs. Zombies, BoomCo, Off-brands, Water Blasters . . .
We're intended to be like /r/nerf except not dependent on reddit.
Are you new to Lemmy? Please click here to expand.
Lemmy is a lot like reddit. For most purposes you can treat it as if it is reddit.
The main difference is that when you view your front page or search for other communities, you have a choice between "subscribed" (what you've already joined), "local" (a small subset of communities) and "all" (every community that this server knows about).
discuss.online is one of many Lemmy servers and many of the communities that you see here originate on other servers - but this networking is handled behind the scenes. This decentralization makes Lemmy resilient but you can still use it just like reddit.
A longer explanation can be found here.
We have some idiosyncratic rules. Please click to expand and take a minute to read them before posting.
Don’t spam (post excessively) or excessively self-promote. That means at most 1 post per day, and less than 1/10ths of your posts and comments each may be self-promotion.
No low effort content.
Only post thrift finds on Thursday - where "Thursday" starts at 1AM GMT-07 and runs for 24 hours. This corresponds to daylight Thursday for most of our readers.
Don’t recommend or show dangerous practices, such as these. There is to be absolutely no deliberate weaponization, even as a joke or against nonhuman targets.
Pirated/knockoff versions of hobby-made designs should not be shared; don’t give pirates free advertising.
Respect community standards (below) and stay on-topic (further below).
We maintain a higher standard of civility here than an average forum. Please be nice, and be forgiving: the other guy might be literally a kid.
We have moderate post quality standards here; nerfchatter is very lax. If you'd like to ask a question, please try googling it first.
It’s “blaster/dart,” not “gun/bullet” - because the latter can lead to things that we'd rather avoid. This is a common mistake, but it is a mistake. Similarly, it's good to be clear that realistic blasters shouldn't be used in public spaces for the benefit of our young readers.
3d printing questions not specific to nerf should go on 3d printing communities.
You can buy/sell/trade/“what’s it worth?” on /r/nerfexchange (though we may make an exchange Lemmy community later).
No scripted battle footage. We have to ban this so that we don’t get flooded with it. This is very easy to find on YouTube if you for some reason want to see it.
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You can tag a post by including a tag (including the square brackets) anywhere in the title. As a rule of thumb, we suggest that tags higher on this list take priority if more than one could apply.
Resources
[help] - Asking for advice.
[download] - A 3d printable blaster or accessory that's ready to download and print.
[guide] - Writeups (and occasionally videos) describing how to do something.
[review] - Reviews, usually of blasters but also of mod kits etc.
Playing
[event] - An upcoming game looking for players.
[LFG] - Looking For Group.
Showing off
[completed] - A completed project: paintjob, performance mod, integration, etc.
[WIP] - As above except not completed but still something you want to share.
[selfpromotion] - Do you have something to sell? Is this a link to your own YouTube channel? We’d appreciate it if you’re completely upfront about it.
[thrift] - "Hey, look what I just found for cheap in a thrift store!"
[armory] - A picture of your entire collection.
[conceptart] - Concept art for hypothetical blasters, often wit weird and wonderful operating mechanisms.
News
[availability] - Did an anticipated blaster just get released early? Did Amazon accidentally list the DZ Tomcat for a few dollars again?
[1stparty] - For hobby news such as announcements, press releases, and leaks from major manufacturers.
Discussion
[theory] - Ideas, usually on the technical side of the hobby, that you'd like to discuss.
[meta] - Information about this community.
DartSweep: A system for finding games and groups with more features in development.
(old) Map of Active Nerf Groups
BritNerf: A traditional forum catering to British foam flingers.
Nerfy Discord Servers: There's tons of Nerf servers on Discord.
Blasted.de: A German forum (and mostly German-language, though English is welcome too).
NerfHaven: A 20+ year archive of information. Not accepting new members.
Lipo battery guide, charging, safety tips
Because of the abundance of cheap, high quality aftermarket short darts, nobody really makes their own anymore. But if you still worship the old gods, you'll want some foam backer rod for the bodies. Here's the guide:
http://nerfhaven.com/forums/topic/23034-how-to-make-homemade-nerf-darts/
I'll second all of what Ali said, but I'd also like to add that not all games these days even allow homemade darts due to safety concerns. The worst-case here would be a felt tip falling off and exposing the metal washer underneath.
For this reason some darts were made without a washer at all - and with either a solid lump of hotglue serving as the weighted tip or with a small BB in the bottom of that hole for weight (which guide Ali linked might already say? There's a follow-up post saying that it was updated to include metal-free dart tips but I can't find where it describes how to make them.)
OP, I'd recommend reconsidering whether you want a hard tip. If you're running into issues with people not feeling and not taking hits, improving the velocity of your blaster will solve that while also providing greater range a difficulty-to-dodge. (If your problem is people "not feeling" and not taking hits - then that's not something that any modification can solve short of something actually dangerous.)
If you do have a good reason for wanting a harder-than-normal tip, then 3d printed tips are an option. TPU is available in a variety of hardnesses and differing infill and tip geometry should theoretically allow you to design a tip with whatever characteristics you want. I wouldn't recommend this - most people don't other with homemade darts at all any more and there's good reasons for that - but it is an option if you just want homemade darts.
My homemade darts wouldn't be for any games just shooting targets and my brother. I'm just sick of shitty darts jamming my nexus every time I'm in a battle with my brother.