Pump shotgun

The pump shotgun is a moderately-heavy, single-shot weapon with slightly higher damage per shot, a slightly shorter time between shots, high accuracy, and short range. Due to these attributes, the pump shotgun makes a great early-mid game close combat weapon due to its impressive damage output, but the handicapped range will be a limiting factor as more powerful, better-equipped enemies take to raiding your settlement. As typical with a short-ranged, faster-firing weapon, the pump shotgun's effectiveness won't be too badly hindered if it were to be equipped by a less accurate (<95% post-processed accuracy) shooter - and it benefits more from a trigger-happy than a careful shooter as a result. Its high stopping power also means that it's effective at crippling, or even outright destroying limbs and organs.

As tribal raiders don't get any better-equipped than plain tribalwear, and possibly a parka (which still offers little protection), the pump shotgun is a great counter against them as there will be little-to-no resistance from its impressive raw damage output.

Obtaining

Pump shotguns can be purchased from outlander combat suppliers and towns, and orbital weapon traders for a moderate price - or obtained via incapacitating a pump shotgun-wielding outlanders, pirates, and mercenaries. Pump shotguns can also be manufactured at a machining table once the machining research has been completed for 60 steel, 3 components, and 30,000 ticks (8.33 mins) of work.

Conclusion & Comparison

Overall, when put up against other weapons in RimWorld, the pump shotgun really is just middle-of-the-road in its class: it's considerably better than the cheaper machine pistol in terms of damage output and accuracy, but still has a significantly shorter range which'll put the machine pistol at an advantage. However, the more expensive heavy SMG has a significantly higher (~32%) higher average useful DPS than the pump shotgun, as well as a slightly longer range - and the LMG has a significantly longer range than the pump shotgun, although the pump shotgun's useful DPS is actually slightly higher (~14.8%) than that of the LMG's.

Against its brand new burst-firing cousin, that is the chain shotgun, things get more interesting: while the pump shotgun has superior range to the chain shotgun, the chain shotgun still has higher overall accuracy than the pump-action shotgun - 3 times 41.1% (~123.3%) versus 82.5% at 8 tiles, the most likely range that both of these weapons would see a lot of use at - and the chain shotgun also has a higher damage output, and there's even more to come as the chain shotgun has a lot of unrealised potential in normal combat scenarios - but there's more information on that matter on the chain shotgun's page. However, the chain shotgun is considerably more expensive and also rarer than the pump shotgun.

Graphs

Trivia

The pump shotgun seems to have the appearance of a variant of the Remington 870.
In-game visuals depict it as firing a blast of pellets rather than a singular slug; however, it deals damage as if the target is hit by 1 shot.

Weapons