SN38 Revolver in Build 42 — Damage, Weight, Range and Verdict

The Trade in One Line

The SN38 trades everything for the smallest footprint on the belt: at weight 1.2 it is the lightest gun in the verified set, and at 0.5–0.8 damage with an 8-tile max range it is the worst shooter of them too. It is a door prize with a trigger — take it when the alternative is no gun, and spend the savings knowing exactly what you sold.

What the Numbers Mean in Play Cross-Verified

• Damage 0.5 – 0.8. The floor of the entire firearm worksheet — its ceiling sits below the M9’s 1.0 and a full band under the B-F’s 1.6. Assume multiple shots per target at the good end and a panic at the bad end.
• Max range 8 tiles. Half the reach of a Patrol Revolver, and a ceiling rather than an envelope besides. This is a gun that fights things already near the fence (firearms guide).
• Weight 1.2. The genuine purchase: 0.3 under the lightest handgun class and 0.8 under a Magnum. On a run with no belt left, half a zombie’s worth of damage can still be worth the space.
• Condition 10. No exception for the little one — every gun here shares it. Wear is Maintenance-gated; see the skill leveling guide.
• Report. Relative to the full-power revolvers and everything with a stock, the snub barrel’s shout is the smaller one — quieter is a word we cannot print a number for on this wiki, but it is the column that flatters this gun.
• Feed. A stub cylinder. Slow between shots, small capacity — at this end of the sheet, the honest statement is that a knife is usually the better gram-per-kill purchase.

When Not to Use It

• When anything else on the sheet is available. The Patrol Revolver (0.95 – 1.4, 12 tiles, weight 1.5) is the nearest real upgrade and is worth the 0.3 difference.
• As a substitute for a knife. The hunting knife weighs 1, hits harder through most of its band, and never advertises where you are.
• In dense terrain. Eight tiles of ceiling in Louisville means the fight is already close; take a shotgun or a blade (high-risk POIs make this worse).

How It Compares

The knife row is the punchline: same weight class, better damage across most of the band, silent — and the SN38’s answer is eight tiles nothing else in that weight range can reach. If that distance matters to you, the next row up (Patrol at 12) is almost always the better buy. Where any of this ranks: weapon tier list.

Sources & Verification

Every printed figure on this page is agreed by two independent sources we can read today, matched by the in-game item ID Base.Revolver_Short:

What this is not. Neither source is our own measurement — nobody fired this gun in a test sandbox for this page. The noise value and the cylinder capacity exist only on the PZwiki side (pzfans has no comparable column), so they are described qualitatively above and never printed as numbers. Spawn locations are omitted for the same one-source reason. PZwiki stamps most firearm pages against builds older than 42.21, so treat this as 42.20-era agreement rather than 42.21-verified, and expect a patch note to move these numbers eventually.