Gun Powder

There's only one recipe, so there's no better way to make it — just don't queue a batch short on either ingredient. Craft it at any Workbench 1, no research needed; it's a default blueprint you have from the moment you spawn.

Where the ingredients come from

Charcoal is the easy half — it's a free byproduct any time you smelt ore or run a campfire, so if you're short on it specifically, you're probably not smelting enough, not that you need to go find some separately.

Sulfur is the actual bottleneck. It's smelted from Sulfur Ore, which you mine with a pickaxe or jackhammer from the grey-yellow streaked rocks (not the plain grey stone ones), or pick up loose around monuments and in barrels. We're not publishing an exact ore-to-sulfur smelt ratio here yet — we'd rather leave it out than give you a wrong number, so treat sulfur income as trial-and-error for now.

The actual grind

Once your furnace is running, gunpowder itself is basically free — the grind is farming enough sulfur ore to keep feeding it. Queue big batches rather than crafting 10 at a time between other things; the ratio scales cleanly, so working out how much ore you need for a target amount of gunpowder is just multiplication, not guesswork.

What it's actually for

Gun Powder isn't an end product, it's the input to almost everything that goes bang — ammo, grenades, and the explosives chain that feeds C4 and rockets. Farm sulfur, and you're really farming your raid budget for the night. The table below is computed live from the same craft data as every recipe on this site, so it can't go stale.

Don't over-craft it

It recycles back into charcoal and sulfur if you break it down, but you lose some in the round trip both ways. Keep raw ore and charcoal banked instead of pre-crafting a big gunpowder stockpile — nothing's wasted if your plans change mid-wipe.