Guide to Sustainable Machine Gunning

Game Talk The Bunker
1

…for those who hate to hold back!

As a fairly new player (first post here, actually!), I was poking around the reloaded ammo recipes, and getting a massive headache from the labyrinth of bleach, ammonia, lye, etc. I finally sat down and worked it all out, and discovered that virtually all ammo in the game can be crafted from only logs (infinite), water (infinite), scrap metal (might as well be infinite), and casings (limited, but recyclable), and using vehicle-mounted, solar-powered tools (infinite). This means that once you find casings, you should never run out of ammo (assuming you have the tools/skills/recipe books required). I’m sure the experienced players know all this, but hopefully this will help other newbies.

A few general tips to start with:

  • Casings can not be crafted, so your max ammo load-out will always be limited to the number of casings you find. (So you probably don’t ever want to leave them behind when doing the inventory shuffle)
  • Make a brass catcher. Now. I didn’t know these existed until I stumbled upon the recipe while looking for something else. Automatically puts casings back into your inventory instead of on the ground, saving massive amounts of time.
  • Make several charcoal kilns, and try to always keep them burning. They take a while, and don’t process if you’re not in the immediate vicinity, so make sure they’re running all the time.

Tools you need to find/make:

  • Cooking skill of 8 (I think), fabrication 4-5
  • Hand press and die set (vehicle mounted version can be found as part of the FOODCO Kitchen Buddy)
  • Swage and die set
  • Chemistry set (can be mounted on a vehicle)
  • Charcoal kiln
  • Tool w/ hammering 1+
  • Tool w/ chemical making 2+
  • Tool w/ boiling 1+
    If making ammo that requires copper tubing, you’ll also need:
  • Aluminum tongs
  • Metalworking chisel
  • Anvil
  • Forge (mounted electric forge)
  • Tool w/ hammering 3+

Most regular ammo pretty much requires the following four or five components:

  • Appropriate casings (must be found)
  • One of four types of primer (they all have the same recipe)
  • Gunpowder
  • Lead
  • Copper tubing (not all require this one)

Primers
Primers require scrap metal and oxidizer powder. Scrap is easy to find (or disassemble other steel bits to get).
Oxidizer powder can be made from water and logs via the following process:
Log -> Charcoal Kiln -> Charcoal (+ Water) -> Lye Powder (+ Water) -> Salt (+ Water) -> Salt Water -> Bleach (+ Water) -> Oxidizer Powder
One batch of 200 primers requires 4 scrap metal, 1.125 water, and 0.0208 logs (dirt cheap, since you only need one per round).

Gunpowder
Gunpowder requires oxidizer powder (see above), ammonia, and charcoal (also see above)
Ammonia can be crafted from water, scrap metal, and charcoal
One batch of 200 gunpowder requires 3.25 water, 1 scrap metal, and 0.4 logs (not as cheap, since you need 4-12 per round - or 30, if you’re going for .50 BMG).

Lead
Apparently all of our survivors are alchemists, because they seem to be able to turn steel into lead (can be crafted from chunks of steel or scrap metal), so this should be easy to come by.

Copper Tubing
Again with the alchemy… can be made from scrap metal and lead. Easy to come by the materials, but needs a lot more tools.

Hopefully this helps, and you can now go unleash hell on the Zs, confident that you can reload when you get home. :slight_smile:

2

You forgot to put the most viable resource ever: time (finite)

3

It’s a good guide, but this quote is invaluably true.

4

Time in the game is not finite. It’s only limited by player patience.

5

We need more guides like this, good lord. Step by step. Love it. A++

6
Time in the game is not finite. It's only limited by player patience.
In game terms time is finite as long as you have finite amount of food and water. Both can be solved by finding and installing Marloss Berries and Aero-evaporator/Pool.

In real life terms time is finite for one human. We have finite amount of time before we die.

7

True, player time is limited by patience and IRL. Nevertheless, this is a useful guide (though it may lead to the gunpowder recipe getting nailed, unfortunately) and should be posted on the wiki.

Nice opening, SpeedDaemon, and welcome to the forums.

8

Yeah time and shit. I love the threads drift in this place, very entertaining. I gotta quit drinking.
Freaking awesome guide dude. Probably should get a cookie or at least 1 internet for best first post in forum unless someone has a contender.

9

I’m glad to see somebody’s figured out this production cycle and written it down.

I was starting to wonder if folks would realize that with sufficient skill and the right recipes, you can make mountains of your own bullets from spare brass and raw resources.

10

It would be nice to have batch function on the bullet puller too.

11

Doh! Sorry everyone :slight_smile:

The current recipe has the charcoal powder and oxidizer powder (normally potassium nitrate). The oxidizer powder recipe isn’t quite accurate to potassium nitrate production, but is probably sufficient for gameplay terms. What it’s missing is sulfur. Perhaps there should be a way to get elemental sulfur from scavenged automotive batteries (filled with sulfuric acid) using the chemistry set, which means you’d quickly use up any convenient supply. Maybe also could be rarely found in pure form in military surplus and sporting goods stores (sulfur dust is often used as an insect repellent while camping/hiking by dusting your shoes & socks).

12

Issue is that black powder != commercial smokeless propellant, so handmade powder shouldn’t be a good substitute. With a black powder recipe in (and it takes sulfur, which is also in, go Aenye!) the commercial-grade powder recipe seems due for deletion.

13

Nitrocellulose is pretty easy to manufacture… assuming you have nitric acid and cellulose (any wood or paper product.) It’s just getting the nitric acid is the issue.

In theory you could refine it from atmospheric nitrogen using an electric arc generator, then distilling the resulting low concentration acid (industrially they use ammonia, high pressures, and high temperatures to manufacture it, but I doubt a lone survivor could realistically scale down that particular process.)

14

Doh! Sorry everyone :slight_smile:

The current recipe has the charcoal powder and oxidizer powder (normally potassium nitrate). The oxidizer powder recipe isn’t quite accurate to potassium nitrate production, but is probably sufficient for gameplay terms. What it’s missing is sulfur. Perhaps there should be a way to get elemental sulfur from scavenged automotive batteries (filled with sulfuric acid) using the chemistry set, which means you’d quickly use up any convenient supply. Maybe also could be rarely found in pure form in military surplus and sporting goods stores (sulfur dust is often used as an insect repellent while camping/hiking by dusting your shoes & socks).[/quote]

Perhaps you’d also be able to find it in the gardening store. Among the wide variety of fertilizers there are a few that contain sulfur(well, not the pure stuff, a salt containing sulfur). But that’s not the only useful thing you could extract from fertilizer a few examples of other salts that might be very useful and commonly found in fertilizers: potassium nitrate, sodium nitrate, calcium nitrate, ammonia nitrate(which is the perfect one for plants that need a lot of nitrogen salts in the soil, unfortunately is also fucks with the pH of the soil. Also good for making explosives). So yeah, a crafty survivor with a chemistry kit might be able to make use of all the stuff that’s in it.

Also if you want to go to the realm of the crafty. It’s possible to get pure sulfur from rotting meats and rotting eggs(yup I’m talking about hydrogen sulfide) through a few ways. The simplest one boiling down to having the gas containing the hydrogen sulfide flow through a pipe containing wet rust(iron(III)oxide) which will turn the rust into iron(III)sulfide, which then can be converted back to rust and pure sulfur by putting the stuff into an aerated bath of water.
Another method involves burning part of it with oxygen to form water and sulfur-dioxide and then having the sulfur-dioxide react with hydrogen sulfide(with a catalyst and/or high temperatures) to form more water and sulfur.

Let’s just say if you are crafty, have a chemistry set and aren’t afraid to pick up a chemistry book finding the ingredients for gunpowder isn’t that hard.

[quote=“Belteshazzar, post:13, topic:8504”]Nitrocellulose is pretty easy to manufacture… assuming you have nitric acid and cellulose (any wood or paper product.) It’s just getting the nitric acid is the issue.

In theory you could refine it from atmospheric nitrogen using an electric arc generator, then distilling the resulting low concentration acid (industrially they use ammonia, high pressures, and high temperatures to manufacture it, but I doubt a lone survivor could realistically scale down that particular process.)[/quote]

Or dissolve calcium nitrate(yup back to the fertilizers) into water and mixing that with sulfuric acid. The result would be nitric acid dissolved in the water and calcium-sulfate(gypsum) in solid form on the bottom. I would give you a decent concentration of nitric acid, but like before you can always distill it for a higher concentration.

15

Well, how about replacing a commercial grade smokeless powder recipe with one for pyrocellulose, an early smokeless powder developed in the 1880s? Solid nitrocellulose (nitric acid and a wood byproduct/paper/plant matter), gelatinized nitrocellulose (nitrocellulose and ether), and paraffin (possibly substitute with wax from bee hives).

Not super sure about the quantities of raw materials, but the production tree, in my head at least, looks something like this:

Nitric Acid:
Ammonia (consumed)
Platinum (not consumed, acts as the catalyst, so…tool?)
Water (consumed)
Chemistry set (tool)
Pressure chamber (tool)
Container to put it in

Ether:
Alcohol (consumed)
Chemistry set (tool)
Tool of boiling quality 3 (so a pot)
Container to put it in

Pressure Chamber:
Soldering Iron or Welder or Integrated Toolset
Screwdriver or Integrated Toolset
Rubber Tubing (in/out)
Pot or (some) Scrap Metal (vessel)
Hotplate (to heat it up and increase pressure)
Small electric motor (to pressurize things up to about 9 bar)

It’d be a combination of 6 parts dry nitrocellulose, 3 parts gelatinized nitrocellulose, and 1 part paraffin. Naturally it’s not as potent as modern smokeless powder but it’d be more powerful than black powder.

Or you could just leave the recipe alone for those that take the time to hand load. It’s already a big enough time sink to craft the available materials that it’s often faster just to find a new town to raid for ammo and either deconstruct it or use it as is.

16

As it happens, Aenye’s working on a system of those ATM.

17

A bit of a side note, but I do love the prospect of sulfur being in the game. Maybe not as much from the standpoint of another ingredient to hunt down for gun ammo making. But more as raw sulfur. Anyone want some brimstone arrows or brimstone pellets(for sling/slingshot). Burning sulfur is classy as hell, literally.

18

Well, how about replacing a commercial grade smokeless powder recipe with one for pyrocellulose, an early smokeless powder developed in the 1880s? Solid nitrocellulose (nitric acid and a wood byproduct/paper/plant matter), gelatinized nitrocellulose (nitrocellulose and ether), and paraffin (possibly substitute with wax from bee hives).

Not super sure about the quantities of raw materials, but the production tree, in my head at least, looks something like this:

Nitric Acid:
Ammonia (consumed)
Platinum (not consumed, acts as the catalyst, so…tool?)
Water (consumed)
Chemistry set (tool)
Pressure chamber (tool)
Container to put it in[/quote]For people concerned that platinum would be rather silly to dip jewelery with, there are different sources of it. Specifically, from mufflers. Far as i am aware most modern car mufflers have some sort of catalyzer inside them, with the primary active ingredient being platinum, however small those quantities are.