Use time

Use Time is a statistic that applies to Weapons, Tools and other usable Items, which determines the time that must pass, after use, before the same item or another item can be used again. In basic terms, this is the "rate of fire", as measured in game frames (1/60th of a second). A lower use time means a faster weapon. The Shortswords, for example, have a Use Time of 11, meaning that they can be used in quick succession, as compared with the exceptionally slow Fiery Greatsword, which has a Use Time of 33 -- a much slower weapon that can not be used as often.

Here is a demonstration calculating fire rate. A Megashark has a use time of 7, meaning that it fires every 7 frames. Therefore, its fire rate, calculated by dividing the FPS by the weapon's use time, is ~8.57 rounds per second, which adds up to ~514.3 rounds per minute. There are exceptions for certain items, for example the Health restoration items like Mushrooms and Lesser Healing Potions, which have a special cooldown period, or Flail and Boomerang weapons that must return before being fired again.

Some weapons such as some Projectile Melee Weapons have secondary attacks that have their own use time that are different to their standard use time, these attacks are still affected by speed modifiers and attack speed/melee speed modifiers. However if such weapon does not have autofire and if the secondary attack is different to the standard use time, after the use time on the second attack is over it cannot fire again until the primary attacks use finishes.

Some weapons such as the Clockwork Assault Rifle have an independent attribute called use delay. This is not affected by speed modifiers or attack speed/melee speed modifiers and acts as a base increase to use time.

This statistic is particularly useful in comparing the speed of tools and weapons. The in-game tooltips for these items automatically groups these values into categories like "Very Fast" or "Very Slow". These are grouped as following:

Modified Use Times
When a typical Modifier is applied to the weapon, "+10% speed" actually means "-10% use time", the modified value is rounded and produces the new Use Time. Due to rounding, the actual bonuses come in diverse percentages. The table below compares the rapidly firing Megashark and the much slower Musket.