Rusty Tools
The number I wanted when I started building this site was simple: how much sulfur does one rocket really cost? The in-game recipe tells you 10 Explosives, 150 Gun Powder and 2 Metal Pipes, which is true and useless, because Explosives are themselves made of gun powder and sulfur, and gun powder is made of sulfur and charcoal. To get a number you can farm towards, you have to expand every intermediate.
So I did that for all 626 craftable items in the dataset behind the bind maker, recursively, and this page is the explosives slice of it. The figures below are computed, not copied from a wiki, and they agree with the numbers experienced raiders carry in their heads — which is a good sign the recipe data is current.
Why sulfur is the only number that matters
Every explosive ends up as some mix of sulfur, charcoal, metal fragments and a few odds and ends. Of those, only sulfur is genuinely scarce. Charcoal falls out of a furnace as a by-product of smelting the ore you were smelting anyway. Metal fragments are what you have thousands of by day two. Sulfur has to be mined from sulfur nodes or bought, and every raider on the server wants it. That is why raid cost is quoted in sulfur and nothing else.
Charcoal does still matter for one practical reason: rockets need more charcoal than sulfur, so if your furnaces have been running on wood for lighting rather than smelting, you will run out of charcoal before you run out of sulfur. The table shows both.
Following a rocket down the recipe tree
Reading it bottom-up: the ten Explosives each want 50 gun powder, so that is 500 gun powder before the rocket's own 150. Six hundred and fifty gun powder is 65 crafts of the 30-charcoal-and-20-sulfur recipe, which is 1,300 sulfur and 1,950 charcoal. Add the 100 sulfur the Explosives take directly and you land on 1,400 sulfur per rocket.
Every explosive, fully expanded
Per single item, workbench level in brackets. “Other” is the stuff that is cheap or incidental. Explosive 5.56 is per round.
| Explosive | Sulfur | Charcoal | Metal frags | Other | Craft |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Timed Explosive Charge (C4) | 2,200 | 3,000 | 200 | 2 tech trash, 20 cloth, 45 animal fat | WB3 · 30 s |
| Rocket | 1,400 | 1,950 | 100 | 4 HQM, 40 scrap, 22 animal fat, 8 cloth | WB3 · 10 s |
 Satchel Charge | 480 | 720 | 80 | 1 rope, 10 cloth | WB1 · 5 s |
 Incendiary Rocket | 300 | 450 | 0 | 4 HQM, 40 scrap, 56 animal fat, 19 cloth | WB2 · 10 s |
 High Velocity Rocket | 200 | 300 | 0 | 2 HQM, 20 scrap | WB2 · 10 s |
 Beancan Grenade | 120 | 180 | 20 | — | WB1 · 10 s |
 Explosives (the ingredient) | 110 | 150 | 10 | 2 animal fat, 1 cloth | WB3 · 5 s |
 F1 Grenade | 60 | 90 | 25 | — | WB2 · 10 s |
 Explosive 5.56 (per round) | 25 | 30 | 5 | — | WB3 · 3 s per 2 |
Two things jumped out at me building this table. The first is how much of a rocket is not sulfur: there are four high quality metal and forty scrap in every one, via the metal pipes, and on a server where HQM is tight that is the thing that actually stalls a raid. The second is that a satchel is a third of a rocket's sulfur, which sounds like a bargain until you look at what it does to a wall.
Cost per wall
Sulfur per explosive is only half the question. The other half is how many of each it takes to open a given wall, and those are the standard figures every raider works from: a stone wall takes 4 rockets or 2 C4, sheet metal takes 8 or 4, armoured takes 15 or 8. Satchels are far less efficient per hit — 10 for stone, 23 for sheet metal, 46 for armoured. Multiplying through:
| Wall | Rockets | Sulfur | C4 | Sulfur | Satchels | Sulfur |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stone | 4 | 5,600 | 2 | 4,400 | 10 | 4,800 |
| Sheet metal | 8 | 11,200 | 4 | 8,800 | 23 | 11,040 |
| Armoured | 15 | 21,000 | 8 | 17,600 | 46 | 22,080 |
So the answer to “what is cheapest” is C4, every time, by a clear margin: about 20% less sulfur than rockets on every wall type. Satchels come out roughly level with rockets on stone and slightly worse on everything harder, with the extra downside that they can dud and have to be re-lit. The reason people still fire rockets is not cost; it is that rockets work from range and splash through to whatever is behind the wall. The launcher itself is a one-off workbench 2 craft (4 metal pipes, 40 HQM), so a group only needs one person with workbench 3 access to make the rockets for everyone.
The one honest case for satchels is the early wipe, when nobody has a workbench 3 and a satchel is the only thing on this list you can make at a level 1 bench.
What a full raid kit actually takes to farm
Say you want a modest raid: 8 rockets and 4 C4, enough for two sheet-metal walls or a stone base with a bit spare. That is 11,200 plus 8,800 sulfur, 20,000 sulfur in round numbers, and 15,600 plus 12,000 charcoal, so roughly 27,600 charcoal. If you smelt the sulfur in a large furnace, the charcoal comes out of the same burn, which is the part that makes this achievable in one evening rather than two.
It is also 1,600 metal fragments, 32 HQM, 320 scrap and 8 tech trash, none of which you will notice until you are one tech trash short of the last C4.
Queueing it all with one key
This is the crafting job that most rewards a bind, because it is three different items, two of them with intermediates, queued in an order that matters (Explosives first, then the things made from them). The loadout bind guide has a raid-night line ready to paste, and the bind maker will build a custom one and apply the craft-yield arithmetic for the explosive ammo, which comes out two per craft.
One thing binds cannot do for you is check the boxes. Pressing a rocket bind with 900 sulfur queues nothing, silently. The numbers on this page are what to farm before you press it.
Ammo cost per round
Gun Powder, the ingredient behind all of it
What workbench 3 unlocks