The spell that turns any loose five-pound object into a 90-foot cannonball, no words required.
Today we’re looking at a 1st level transmutation spell called Catapult. Available to Sorcerers, Wizards, and Artificers, this is the one where you point at a rock, a mug, a skull, a flask, whatever, and hurl it across the room at 3d8 bludgeoning. It is one of the most creative, most argued-about, most flat-out fun first-level spells in the game, and I’ve got a whole companion post just for the uses because there are dozens of them.
Sitting at a range of 60 feet, a casting time of one action, and a duration of instantaneous, Catapult does something no attack cantrip does. It weaponizes the room. Every barrel, bottle, bust, and brick around you is suddenly ammunition. And here’s the part that breaks brains, it has no verbal component and no material component. It’s somatic only. You don’t say a word. You just gesture, and something heavy goes screaming across the battlefield. Hold that fact, because it’s the key to half the tricks in the companion post.
The whole personality of this spell is that it’s a physics engine with a spell slot attached. It rewards a player who pays attention to what’s lying around, and it punishes a table that treats the battlefield like an empty featureless box. Let’s get into the rules, and remember, you can always fight me in the comments if you read it different. That’s the whole point.
RAW
- Casting Time: 1 action
- Range: 60 feet
- Components: S
- Duration: Instantaneous
Here’s the text, straight from Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, page 150:
“Choose one object weighing 1 to 5 pounds within range that isn’t being worn or carried. The object flies in a straight line up to 90 feet in a direction you choose before falling to the ground, stopping early if it impacts against a solid surface. If the object would strike a creature, that creature must make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, the object strikes the target and stops moving. When the object strikes something, the object and what it strikes each take 3d8 bludgeoning damage.”
Let’s take this apart, because every clause matters and this is a spell people constantly get wrong.
“Choose one object weighing 1 to 5 pounds within range that isn’t being worn or carried.” Two limits here. First, the weight window, 1 to 5 pounds. Not a feather, not a boulder, something in the range of a full bottle, a hand axe, a good rock, a human skull. Second, and this is the big one, it can’t be worn or carried. You cannot rip the sword out of the villain’s hand with this. You cannot catapult a creature’s held gear. The object has to be loose, sitting there, unattended. That clause is the fence around every clever idea you’re about to have, so know exactly where it is.
“The object flies in a straight line up to 90 feet in a direction you choose before falling to the ground, stopping early if it impacts against a solid surface.” So your reach is big. You pick an object within 60 feet of you, then it flies up to 90 feet further in a straight line. It’s a straight shot, not a lobbed arc, and it stops the instant it hits a wall or a body. Aim matters.
“If the object would strike a creature, that creature must make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failed save, the object strikes the target and stops moving.” This is the one people miss, so listen up. Catapult is a save spell, not an attack. And unlike almost every other damage spell, there is no half on a success. If the target makes the Dexterity save, the object simply sails past or drops, and they take nothing. Fail, they eat the whole thing. It’s all or nothing, which makes it swingy, but it also means no attack roll to whiff.
“When the object strikes something, the object and what it strikes each take 3d8 bludgeoning damage.” Here’s the sleeper clause that launches a thousand strategies. The object takes the damage too. 3d8 to the target, and 3d8 to whatever you threw. Throw a rock and who cares, the rock’s fine. But throw a fragile glass flask and it shatters on impact, every single time. Your brain should already be running with that, and if it is, go read the uses post, because that’s where we live.
At Higher Levels. “When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or higher, the maximum weight of objects that you can target with this spell increases by 5 pounds, and the damage increases by 1d8, for each slot level above 1st.” So a 2nd level slot lets you throw up to 10 pounds for 4d8, a 3rd level slot is 15 pounds for 5d8, and so on. It’s the rare spell where upcasting gives you both more damage and access to bigger, heavier, and frankly stupider objects to throw.
Limits and Cheeses
The quick version, because the deep dive is its own video.
The all-or-nothing save is the real balancing act. No half damage means a good Dexterity save turns your whole turn into a thrown mug that hits a wall. Against nimble targets, Catapult is a gamble.
The weight and the unattended clause are your two fences. Five pounds and not worn or carried. Almost every “wait, can I catapult a” question dies on one of those two words. Learn them, because your DM will be leaning on them.
And the somatic-only casting is the quiet superpower. No words means you can cast this while silenced, while gagged, from inside a Silence spell, or while pretending you’re doing absolutely nothing. It’s one of the sneakiest damage spells in the game before you even pick what to throw.
I’m keeping this short on purpose. The real uses, the alchemical flask tricks, the metamagic cheese, the delivery-system combos, and a big pile of deranged ideas, all live in the companion Catapult uses post. This one is about what the spell is and where it came from. Speaking of which.
Is there a 2024 version?
Short answer, no, and this trips people up. Catapult did not get reprinted in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. A lot of the popular Xanathar’s spells made the jump into the new core book, and Catapult just wasn’t one of them. So there is no updated 2024 version to compare against. The spell you’re casting is still the Xanathar’s Guide version, word for word, and it works perfectly fine under the 2024 rules. If someone asks whether Catapult changed in 2024, the honest answer is that it didn’t change because it wasn’t touched. It’s still sitting in Xanathar’s, exactly as it was.
That doesn’t mean the spell has no history though, because it absolutely does, and it’s a good one.
History
Catapult is a modern spell. This isn’t one of the old 1974 classics or an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons relic that got rebuilt six times. There is no first edition Catapult, no second edition Catapult, none of that. It is a pure 5th edition creation, and it has only ever existed in two official printings, but there’s a real story in the gap between them.
It first showed up in 2015, in the Elemental Evil Player’s Companion. That was a free supplement Wizards put out alongside the Princes of the Apocalypse adventure, a little pile of elemental-themed spells and race options, and Catapult was one of the standouts. And here’s the interesting part. In that original 2015 version, the range was a hundred and fifty feet. You could pick an object a hundred and fifty feet away and still fire it another ninety. That’s a monster of a range for a first-level spell.
Then in 2017, Catapult got the wider, more permanent reprint in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and that’s when it got nerfed. The designers cut the range from a hundred and fifty feet all the way down to sixty. That’s the version we have today, and it’s the only real change the spell has ever gotten. Everything else, the 3d8, the 90-foot flight, the 1 to 5 pounds, the somatic-only casting, all of it survived the move untouched. They just decided a first-level spell reaching a hundred and fifty feet to grab its ammo was a little too generous, and they were probably right.
So the whole arc of Catapult is two printings and one number. Born in the Elemental Evil companion at 150 feet of range, trimmed to 60 in Xanathar’s, and then left completely alone, including getting passed over for the 2024 book. It’s the youngest spell I’ve covered, and one of the most popular, which tells you the design mostly landed on the first try.
Opinion
Catapult is one of my favorite spells to see on a player’s sheet, because it tells me what kind of player I’m dealing with. The person who takes Catapult and only ever throws generic rocks for 3d8 is fine, that’s a perfectly good first-level damage spell, roughly on par with the heavy hitters. But the person who takes Catapult and starts eyeing the shelf of acid flasks, the barrel of oil, the beehive, the bag of ball bearings, that person is going to make your job as a DM a delight and a nightmare in equal measure.
That’s the real value here. Catapult isn’t strong because 3d8 is a big number, though it’s a respectable one with no attack roll and it scales nicely. It’s strong because it hands a clever player a tool with almost no rules guardrails and says go be creative. The all-or-nothing save keeps it honest, the weight limit keeps it grounded, but everything in between is wide open. It’s a spell that’s exactly as good as the player wielding it is imaginative, and I love that.
So I want to hear it. Is Catapult a slot on your sheet, or is it too swingy with that all-or-nothing save for your taste? And most importantly, what’s the best thing you’ve ever thrown with it? Let me know in the comments below, go read the companion post for the full arsenal of tricks, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous.
