Red Barrel

Barrels filled with an explosive mixture that burn all in vicinity.

* Knockback resistance
* Explosion resistance

**Red Barrel** is a a red barrel with hazardous material markings to indicate its volatile and explosive mixture.

It can be unlocked after player level 5 for 700 coins.

## Functionality

Red Barrel is a **support item**, meaning it can be used to support units on the field with direct control by players over where it is placed. It requires rage to be deployed.

Red Barrel is a simple but potent and versatile stationary unit, with high health, low rage cost, and short preparation time along with high explosive and fire damage. However, it has below-average on-hit(melee) damage.

### Perks and Abilities

Red Barrel is sent from outside of the bus, able to be put almost anywhere the player chooses by being placed directly on the battlefield. Upon application, Red Barrel will fall on the area the player selected, dealing melee damage to units, enemies and other rage abilities. The barrel will act as an obstacle once placed on the field, stalling most enemies until it is destroyed, where it will explode and leave a burning fire pool in its wake. The fire will destroy any corpses on the floor within its radius, preventing dead player units from turning and/or stopping certain zombies from reviving.

Red Barrel can also be detonated if tapped.

If a mission has rainy weather in it, Red Barrel's fire pool (and only fire pool, not explosion) will be extinguished immediately, losing out all of its fire-based damage potential. Unlike Molotov Cocktail, however, the brief fire pool is still capable of destroying corpses.

In addition to the aforementioned properties, Red Barrel possesses the following undocumented resistances:

* Poison resistance grants it immunity from the poison debuff that causes damage over time.
* Full knockback resistance prevents it from being pushed back entirely.
* Explosion resistance prevents it from taking damage caused by grenades and fiery explosions, though this does not apply to blood-based explosions(E.g. Fat Zombie, Slob).

## Gameplay

### Main Campaign

Red Barrel one of the best and crucial unit in the entire game thanks to its versatility and ease of use, being useful for both offensive and defensive uses as it can be used to damage or kill clusters of enemies, dispatching groups of running enemies with its explosion or fire pool and help to eliminate high health targets, as well as serving as an excellent fast and cheap durable shield for important units thanks to its high base health, low rage cost and short preparation time. It sees great use against the Charged Zombie, able to bait one attack and kill small groups of them easily with its explosion. At higher levels, a pristine Red Barrel can even survive one attack. Naturally, Red Barrel is not as effective in missions affected by rainy weather since it loses a considerable portion of its damage output from the fire pool, although it can still perform adequately as its explosion remains unaffected.

Red Barrel can be considered as an upgraded version of Empty Barrel, having higher health, the same method of deployment, and significantly more damage output overall thanks to its explosion and fire damage. And while Empty Barrel has a much higher on-hit(melee) damage and costs slightly cheaper, this is a rather marginal upside overall, making Red Barrel better in practically any mission once it is available to buy. As such, players should replace Empty Barrel with Red Barrel as soon as possible.

### Skirmish

While Red Barrel is unavailable in League, it can be summoned through Specops' special ability. Compared to Empty Barrel, it is much more useful in large part thanks to it being able to be manually detonated, though it remains somewhat situational if the enemy unit who have killed Specops is a ranged unit.

## Trivia

* Up to four Red Barrels can be found on top of the Bus which serve as a fuel counter. These barrels have a different cross marking on their yellow strip as opposed to the black droplet on the usual Red Barrels.
* Perhaps due to its nature as a support item, Red Barrel's volatile properties defy usual physics and chemistry, as it will explode as soon as it is ruptured by brute force or on a remote trigger, but other nearby fires and explosions do not set off the payload.
* Red Barrel appears as an obstacle in some very early missions. While they usually don't block enemies, they can still be manually activated to damage enemies.
* Red Barrel used to be the only stationary unit with a health bar to not possess fire resistance.

 Humans
 TMF Squad