Field Manual // Section 03

Ballistics & Ammunition Metallurgy

There is no ammunition vendor in this game. Every round you fire has been smelted from a dead vehicle battery and pressed on a bench you built yourself. This section covers the lead chain from wreck to cartridge, and what each round is actually for.

The Lead Chain

WRECK → ROUND

The supply chain has four links and you have to own all of them, because breaking any one stops your guns entirely.

Salvage. Dead vehicles carry lead-acid batteries. A wrench pulls them; the highway wrecks in SECTOR-04 are the densest source, but any abandoned car works. This is the only renewable lead in the valley and it does not respawn quickly.
Smelt. Battery plates go into an iron crucible over a fire and come out as ingots or pellets. The crucible is a one-time build; after that, lead is just fuel and time.
Powder. Sulfur comes out of the fog basin — SECTOR-03, the ravine floors where you should not be spending the night. Charcoal comes from your own fireplace. Mixed, they give you the propellant. This is why the fog basin matters economically and not just narratively.
Press. The bench tiers gate what you can load. Tier 2 handles pistol and shotgun; Tier 3 is required before a single .308 round exists, and Tier 3 needs machined parts, not just scrap.

The practical consequence is that ammunition is a base resource, not a loot resource. You do not find rounds, you manufacture them, which means a firefight costs you materials you will spend the next two days replacing. Treat every magazine as a withdrawal from a fixed account.

Press Recipes

3 CALIBERS

9x19mm Parabellum

TIER 2 BENCH // 50 ROUNDS

Lead ingots10
Gunpowder15
Brass casings50

Cheap to press and cheap to waste. This is the round you use on walkers so you can keep the good ammunition for people.

12-Gauge Buckshot

TIER 2 BENCH // 25 SHELLS

Smelted lead pellets15
Gunpowder20
Plastic hulls25

The doorway round. Wide spread staggers a charging infected at contact range, which is the only range that matters inside a cabin.

.308 Winchester

TIER 3 GUNSMITH // 20 ROUNDS

High-caliber slugs12
Gunpowder30
Match brass20

Tier-3 bench only, and the single most expensive thing you will make. This is the round you walk into the fog basin for sulfur to afford — and the one you do not spend on a walker.

Choosing a Round

TARGET → CALIBER

Most squad wipes trace back to one mistake: burning long-gun ammunition on targets that a pistol would have handled. The three calibers are not a progression, they are three different jobs.

Target	Correct round	Why
Single walker, open ground	9x19mm	Cheapest to replace. A head shot does not care about caliber.
Walker queue at a doorway	12-gauge	Spread covers a corridor width; you are not aiming, you are denying a gap.
Screecher, at range	.308	You need it down before it finishes calling. One shot is the entire point.
Armed raider with cover	.308	Penetration. The only round that reliably answers a barricade.
Horde mass, held doorway	12-gauge	Stagger beats damage when the problem is a queue, not a target.

Shot discipline during mist

A .308 fired during a volumetric mist event broadcasts about 160 metres of acoustic signature — well past the horde pull radius for that phase. The round is not the mistake; the timing is. If the mist is up and you can already hear infected, a rifle shot does not solve a problem, it schedules a larger one for ninety seconds later.

The exception is a screecher mid-call. Letting it finish is worse than the noise, because a completed call pulls the whole ravine anyway and does it on the screecher's schedule rather than yours.

Wrecked highway with salvaged vehicles used for ammunition materials — WRECKED HIGHWAY // SECTOR-04 // PRIMARY LEAD SOURCE

Developer Console

SANDBOX ONLY

Open with the tilde key. Sandbox and private-server use only — enabling these in a shared session affects every connected player.

TDWK_CONSOLE_V1.04STATUS: AUTHENTICATED ADMIN