Gun Powder: the one recipe under every other recipe

When I built the reverse index for this site — the list on every item page of what it is used to craft — Gun Powder came out with forty entries, which put it fifth in the whole game behind metal fragments, wood, cloth and high quality metal. Those four are raw materials. Gun Powder is the only crafted item in that company, and it is the reason every ammo and explosive cost on this site has to be traced down a level before it means anything.

The recipe

Recipe	Charcoal ×30, Sulfur ×20
Yield	10 per craft
Workbench	Level 1
Craft time	2 seconds
Stack size	1,000
Item ID	-265876753

Three things in that table matter more than they look. The yield of ten is the highest of any ammunition-related item and is the single most common cause of accidental over-crafting on this site's yield list. The two-second craft time is why a large gun powder queue is fast but never instant. And the 3:2 charcoal-to-sulfur ratio means charcoal, not sulfur, is what you run short of first if your furnaces have been idle.

What a stack costs

A full stack of 1,000 is one hundred crafts:

That last row is the one to sit with. Eight rockets need 650 gun powder each once the Explosives inside them are counted, so 5,200 in total, and at two seconds a craft that is seventeen minutes of queue before you have made a single rocket. The raid cost guide works the rest of that bill out.

Where the charcoal comes from

Charcoal is not mined. It is what a furnace leaves behind when it burns wood, which means every smelting run you do for metal or sulfur is also a charcoal run. In practice the way to never be short is to keep furnaces burning whenever you are home, even with nothing in them but wood. A furnace full of wood produces charcoal on its own; it does not need ore in it to do that.

The ratio to remember is that gun powder wants one and a half times as much charcoal as sulfur. If you have farmed 2,000 sulfur for a stack of powder, you need 3,000 charcoal to go with it, and if the furnaces have been cold that 3,000 is the slow part.

Everything Gun Powder is used to craft

All forty, from the dataset. Every one of these is a recipe where the real cost is the powder, which is to say the sulfur.

Ammunition (13)

Pistol Bullet HV Pistol Ammo Incendiary Pistol Bullet 5.56 Rifle Ammo HV 5.56 Incendiary 5.56 Explosive 5.56 12 Gauge Buckshot 12 Gauge Slug 12 Gauge Incendiary Handmade Shell SAM Ammo Fragmentation Mortar Shell

Explosives and ordnance (11)

Explosives Rocket High Velocity Rocket Incendiary Rocket Homing Missile Beancan Grenade F1 Grenade

Plus the Mortar Shell, Homemade Landmine, Propane Explosive Bomb and Survey Charge, and — through Explosives — the Timed Explosive Charge and Satchel Charge, which do not list gun powder directly but are mostly made of it.

Utility and fireworks (16)

Flare, Flashbang, Smoke Grenade, Firebomb, Torpedo, Cannonball, and ten fireworks: the Red, Green, Blue, Orange, Violet, Champagne and Pattern Boomers and the Red, Violet and White Volcano fireworks. The fireworks are why gun powder consumption spikes on the last night of a wipe.

How to think about it

The habit that changed how I play is to stop thinking of gun powder as a thing you craft when you need ammo and start treating it as the stack you keep topped up, the way you keep cloth or metal fragments. It has the same stack size as a raw material, it crafts faster than almost anything, and every fight and every raid draws from it. A base that has a stack of powder on hand can turn sulfur into anything in minutes; a base that has to make the powder first is seventeen minutes behind.

The bind for keeping it topped up is a single line: bind numpad9 craft.add -265876753 10, one press for a hundred powder, pressed as often as the charcoal allows.

Ammo cost per round Explosives in sulfur All 37 batch-crafted items