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Combat and Ammunition
September 9, 2026 at 01:09 AM
Initial version (2026-09-08)
Combat in DUST: Origins is isometric twin-stick shooting with the ammunition turned down hard. The studio's stated design goal is that positioning, ammunition conservation and environmental hazards make every encounter skillful and tactical, and everything below follows from ammunition being the limiting factor rather than aim or reflexes alone.
This is worth stating plainly because the isometric shooter framing invites the wrong expectation. The studio published a clip specifically to correct it, titled around the point that every bullet matters. The station may be hell, but the game is not a bullet hell. Ammunition is scarce, resources are limited, and the studio's instruction is to use your brain. Encounters are not screen-filling projectile puzzles to be dodged through; they are small, dangerous problems to be solved with the resources on hand.
Ammunition is the scarcest resource in the game and the one that shapes the pace of every fight. It has to be found through scavenging or crafted from collected materials, and materials spent on ammunition are materials not spent on permanent upgrades or mods. That trade-off means the cost of a fight is not only the bullets used but everything those bullets could have been instead.
The practical consequences the studio has described:
Positioning matters more than volume of fire, because a good angle costs nothing and a bad one costs ammunition.
Environmental hazards are part of the toolkit, which makes the room itself a weapon.
Not every fight is worth taking. One of the studio's clips frames the choice as flight to fight: sometimes running is correct, and sometimes bringing the fight to the enemy is.
The opening of the game is deliberately threadbare. The player is outmatched and outgunned, and a broken shiv plus a handful of bullets can be the entire loadout.
Enemies are not meant to be out-damaged. The studio has said creatures are aggressive and lethal, and that surviving encounters requires observing their behaviours and exploiting their weaknesses. That puts pattern recognition ahead of raw firepower, and it means a first encounter with a new creature is partly an information-gathering exercise.
There are two broad threat classes aboard Limbo-6.
Threat class | Description |
|---|---|
Human hostiles | Violent criminals thawed out into the chaos, and guards who have begun executing inmates. No one aboard is a friend by default. |
Escaped bio-experiments | Alien organisms collected and experimented on when the station was a bio-engineering and terraforming site. Containment has failed and they now roam freely. The studio has hinted that some are more than they seem. |
Equipment is arranged as a custom loadout of weapons, armour and mods, with limited inventory space that can be expanded by upgrades found on the station. Better equipment is gated by depth: the further into the station the player gets, the more they gain access to.
Only one weapon has been confirmed by name so far. The studio announced a flamethrower in a short clip in August 2026, with no stats or acquisition details attached. Exotic weapons and mods also exist as unlockable extras, but those are tied to New Game Plus rather than to a first run.
Treat ammunition as a budget for the sector, not for the fight in front of you.
New creature types are worth watching before engaging, since the game is explicitly built around exploiting behaviour.
Disengaging is a supported tactic, not a fallback.
Crafting decisions made away from combat set the terms of the fights that follow, so resource planning is part of combat preparation.
The weapon roster beyond the flamethrower, including any melee weapon other than the improvised shiv.
Ammunition types, whether they are shared across weapons, and carry limits.
Whether there is a dodge, roll, block, parry or cover mechanic.
Any creature name, behaviour pattern or weakness.
Whether armour has stats or resistances, and what mods actually modify.
Whether combat has a stealth or avoidance layer beyond simply leaving.
