Cannon

You buy this from the Pirate and you place it. It does not go in your hand and it does not follow you. To fire, click the cannon itself while holding any Torch, which is not spent by the shot, so a placed cannon costs nothing at all to keep running. Cannonballs are decoration now and are not loaded into anything. What comes out arcs, punches through the first few bodies it meets and detonates on the one that stops it, and the blast covers a wide square without harming your build. It is home defense, and it is useless the moment you have to move.

The sprite is smaller than the pocket it demands. The barrel has to be able to swing through every angle, so the game reserves space above and to the side that appears empty. If placement keeps failing in a spot that visually fits, that is why. Dig out another row and try again.

There are nine settings, stepped in eighths of a right angle, and you change them by clicking whichever side you want the barrel to swing toward. It will not point straight down, but the arc handles targets below the emplacement anyway. Level is the shortest reach by a wide margin. One notch up roughly doubles it and is the setting worth defaulting to. Around halfway up is where the ball travels furthest. Past that you are buying height with range, which is what you want when the thing coming at you is airborne.

Wire either fires the cannon or rotates it, depending on which face you run the wire to, and pressure plates let enemies set it off themselves. The catch is the cooldown on a wired shot, which locks that cannon out for a long stretch and also gags every other cannon in the world for a shorter one. You cannot build a wired battery that volleys. Firing by torch ignores all of it, so wiring is for traps you leave unattended and manual operation is for anything you actually want dead.

Each body the ball passes through gets a slice of invincibility on the way. The target that finally stops it gets none, which means it eats the impact and the explosion back to back with nothing in between. Setting up a line so the enemy you care about is the one at the end of it is a genuine trick worth knowing. The Bunny Cannon is the same machine built heavier if you want the idea taken further.