To learn everything there is to know about bullet penetration in CS:GO would be overly
complicated, long-winded and unrewarding.
And it wouldn’t help you at all.
So in this video, I’ll only share with you the stuff I think will help.
Bullets can shoot through stuff in CS:GO, hitting stuff behind them.
Including players.
The amount of damage these shots deal depends on 5 things; the weapon you’re using, how
far the bullet has to travel, how thick the material is, the material type and how many
surfaces the bullet is penetrating.
The weapon you’re using matters a lot.
You can see on Slothsquadron’s handy weapon spreadsheet that they each have a penetration
stat, ranging from 1 to 2.5, with higher values causing bullets to lose damage more slowly
when travelling through thick or multiple walls.
But it’s worth understanding that the amount of damage a weapon inflicts normally also
makes a big difference!
An AWP is great at penetrating and delivers huge damage, so it’s by far the best weapon
for wallbanging.
A glock or shotgun, on the other hand, has both a low penetration value AND base damage,
making it useless.
Both values need to be high for maximum effect.
Even rifles, which have a fairly high penetration value, lack the sheer damage that snipers
can deliver so can only achieve a small fraction of the wallbang effectiveness.
Autosnipers are by far your best bet for spamming through cover.
But even with these formidable weapons, there are limits.
Even if you’re only hidden behind ultra-thin paintings or chain link fences, as long as
there are 5 of them you’ll take 0 damage, even from the almighty AWP.
The ONLY exception to this is water.
Not sure where you’d find yourself shooting through 5 walls of water to hit a player,
but this won’t protect them at all.
Seems Mythbusters was wrong about the protective properties of this stuff!
All other material types stop a certain amount of damage.
A stone wall will be better at stopping bullets than, say, a wooden one.
I tested a lot of different surfaces and found that nearly all of them stopped bullets by
different amounts, even when you’d think they’d be in the same category!
For example: metal pipes stop more damage than metal barrels.
This table shows a list of surfaces by order of how much damage they reduced an AWP shot
to.
Glass and chain fences are joint worst at defending against damage, followed by wood.
The best is -perhaps surprisingly- dirt, followed by metal, bricks and tiles.
All of these surfaces were just one unit thick- you’ll be unlikely to find surfaces thinner
than these.
Most will be thicker and thus, will stop a lot more damage.
I also tested how much it would take to stop the AK47, which is your best chance of wallbanging
somebody with a rifle.
It can pass through over 44 units of wood, but plaster, stone, brick and metal stop it
far sooner.
Even just 4 units of any material stops it from being an immediate one-hit-kill to the
head.
And for you mappers out there, props behave identically to world geometry.
A wooden crate prop functions the same as a solid block of wood.
And those crates on Dust2 also happen to be wooden, judging by the amount of damage they
stop.
And finally, material thickness.
I tested numerous weapons through wood to see how the damage dropped off as it got thicker.
The glock and USP-S fare the worst.
This also represents how SMGs and shotguns will do, all of which share a penetration
value of 1 and somewhere in the region of 30 base damage.
What’s more surprising is that, even with 2 penetration, rifles such as the AK and M4
don’t do a lot better!
As I said earlier, base damage also matters and for these rifles, it’s still in the
mid 30’s.
The deagle has the same penetration as the rifles but almost double the base damage of
63, so far out-performs the rifles at shooting through stuff.
And the revolver, with an even higher base damage of 88, does even better still.
It almost does as well as the SSG08 sniper rifle, despite it having both a higher base
damage and penetration value.
And at the top of the pile is the AWP which combines the best penetration and damage values.
Other things I noticed were that multiple different walls touching each other behaved
as one, whereas if there was a bit of a gap between them then they tended to block more
damage.
In conclusion, I did a lot of testing but didn’t find anything particularly game-changing.
If you’re interested in knowing what it takes to shoot through a particular bit of
cover, GO UP TO THAT PARTICULAR BIT OF COVER AND TEST IT.
When it comes to penetration damage, the AWP inflicts the most.
But the autos offer the best compromise between damage and firerate.
Apart from the deagle and revolver, all other weapon categories trail far, far behind sniper
rifles.
But even shotguns and SMGs can wallbang a little bit, but only at extremely close ranges
and through incredibly thin surfaces.
Only the nova can’t wallbang at all.
Stupid, stupid nova.