If you've ever tried to build a combat game, you know that getting a roblox sword system script right is basically the first big hurdle you'll face. It sounds simple on paper—you click a button, the sword swings, and the other guy takes some damage. But as anyone who's spent more than ten minutes in Studio knows, things rarely go that smoothly. You end up with swords that don't hit anything, damage that triggers five times in one swing, or worse, a script that exploiters can break in seconds.
I've spent plenty of time messing around with different combat setups, and I've realized that the "perfect" script doesn't really exist. What exists is a system that fits your specific game. Whether you're going for a fast-paced anime style or a slow, clunky medieval feel, the core logic remains pretty similar. Let's break down how to actually put one of these together without losing your mind.
Starting with the Tool Object
First things first, you need a place for your script to live. In Roblox, swords are almost always handled through the Tool object. It's tempting to just throw a script inside a Part and call it a day, but the Tool object handles all the heavy lifting for you, like animations, equipping, and dropping.
Inside your Tool, you're going to need a few specific things. You'll have your Handle (the actual sword model), a LocalScript to handle player input, a ServerScript to handle the actual damage, and a RemoteEvent. That RemoteEvent is the most important part. If you try to do everything in a LocalScript, you'll find out real quick that while it looks fine on your screen, nobody else is taking damage. That's because the server needs to be the one deciding who gets hurt.
Handling the Input
Your LocalScript is basically the "ears" of your sword. It listens for when the player clicks their mouse. You'll usually use the Activated event for this. When the player clicks, you don't want to just send a signal to the server immediately. You need to check for a debounce.
A debounce is just a fancy way of saying a cooldown. Without it, a player could spam their mouse button and fire off fifty attacks in a single second. It looks ridiculous and it'll probably crash your server logic. I usually set a simple boolean variable like canSwing. If it's true, we swing and set it to false. After a second or so, we set it back to true. Simple, but it's the difference between a functional game and a chaotic mess.
The Client-Server Handshake
Once the LocalScript decides the player is allowed to swing, it fires that RemoteEvent we talked about. This is where the roblox sword system script really starts to take shape on the server side.
The server receives that signal and says, "Okay, Player A wants to swing their sword. Let's make that happen." The server should then play the animation for everyone to see and start looking for hits. This is the part where most people get stuck: hit detection.
Hit Detection: Touched vs. Raycasting
There are two main ways to see if your sword actually hit someone. The "old school" way is using the .Touched event on the sword blade. It's easy to set up, but honestly, it's kind of a nightmare for precision. It relies on the physics engine, and if your sword is moving too fast, it might pass right through a character without ever "touching" them according to the engine.
The much better way—the way the pros do it—is Raycasting or using Region3/OverlappingParams. With Raycasting, you're essentially drawing invisible lines from the sword's position in the previous frame to its position in the current frame. If that line crosses a character, boom, you've got a hit. It's way more reliable and feels much "snappier" to the player.
If you're just starting out, don't feel bad about using .Touched. Just be aware that as your game gets more complex, you'll probably want to upgrade to a raycast-based hitbox system to keep things fair.
Dealing Damage Safely
Once you've confirmed a hit, you need to subtract health from the target. This part is easy: humanoid.Health = humanoid.Health - damageAmount. But wait, there's a catch. You have to make sure you aren't hitting the same person multiple times in a single swing.
I usually keep a small table or list of "already hit" targets for each swing. Every time the sword hits a humanoid, I check if they're in that list. If they aren't, I damage them and add them to the list. Once the swing animation finishes, I clear the list so they can be hit again by the next swing. This prevents the sword from dealing 100 damage in a single frame just because the blade touched the enemy's arm and torso at the same time.
Security and Anti-Cheat
Let's talk about the elephant in the room: exploiters. If your roblox sword system script just trusts whatever the client says, you're going to have a bad time. An exploiter could fire your RemoteEvent from across the map and kill everyone instantly.
To stop this, the server needs to do some basic math. When it receives a "hit" signal, it should check the distance between the attacker and the victim. If the attacker is 500 studs away but the sword is only 5 studs long, the server should just ignore that request. It's not a perfect fix, but it stops the most basic "kill all" scripts from working.
Adding Some Polish
A sword that just lowers a health bar is boring. To make it feel like a real game, you need feedback. This is where you add the "juice."
- Sound Effects: Add a "whoosh" sound on the swing and a "thwack" or "clang" sound on the hit.
- Particles: A little blood spray or some sparks can go a long way.
- Screenshake: A tiny bit of camera shake when you land a heavy hit makes the combat feel impactful.
- Knockback: Use a
LinearVelocityorApplyImpulseto push the enemy back slightly when they get hit. It makes the sword feel like it has actual weight.
Organizing Your Code
As your roblox sword system script grows, you'll probably want to move some of the logic into ModuleScripts. Maybe you have different types of swords—fire swords, ice swords, heavy hammers. Instead of writing a brand new script for every single one, you can have a "CombatHandler" module that manages the damage and hit detection logic for everything. This keeps your Workspace clean and makes it way easier to fix bugs. If you find a bug in the damage logic, you fix it in one module instead of hunting through fifty different sword tools.
Wrapping Things Up
Building a sword system is one of those things that seems easy until you're staring at a "nil" error at 2 AM. But once you get the hang of the RemoteEvent flow and figure out which hit detection method you prefer, it becomes second nature.
The biggest piece of advice I can give is to keep it simple at first. Don't worry about complex combos or elemental effects until you have a basic swing that feels good and registers hits reliably. Most of the time, players won't notice your fancy math, but they will notice if the sword feels unresponsive or laggy. Focus on that responsiveness first, and the rest will fall into place.
Anyway, get into Studio and start experimenting. The best way to learn how a roblox sword system script really works is to break it a few times and figure out why it stopped working. Happy scripting!