Revision 15

Gunpowder is the ammunition resource for pistols, muskets, and blunderbusses in Windrose. It is scarce in the early game, but it is no longer just a pirate-camp loot item. In the live Early Access build, the full long-term solution is to unlock Sulfur, produce Ash through the charcoal chain, and craft Homemade Gunpowder at the Millstone.

Current Sources

Homemade Gunpowder Recipe

The Millstone crafts 10 Homemade Gunpowder per 45-second cycle from 10 Sulfur and 20 Ash.

Full Crafting Chain

1. Reach the Foothills resource tier so Iron Ore and Sulfur become part of your normal progression loop.

2. Upgrade to an Iron Pickaxe, because Sulfur nodes are not meant for lower-tier tools.

3. Mine Sulfur on Foothills islands and keep a dedicated stash rather than burning it immediately.

4. Run wood through the Charcoal Kiln so you build up Ash as a byproduct.

5. Place and use the Millstone to turn that Sulfur plus Ash stockpile into Homemade Gunpowder.

The easy mistake is focusing only on Sulfur. Sulfur is the obvious gate, but Ash is the hidden one. If you are not deliberately preserving Ash from the charcoal workflow, your Millstone still sits idle even after the mining side is solved.

Best Early-Game Loop

• Clear Pirate Camps on a rotation because their crates and enemies refresh on the daily respawn cycle.

• Place a Fast Travel Bell near a productive camp route if you plan to farm ammunition seriously.

• Loot every crate. Skipping crates is the easiest way to feel starved for firearm ammo.

Why Most Players Save It for Bosses

Even with crafting unlocked, Gunpowder stays scarce enough that most launch-week guides recommend reserving it for bosses, ship boarding spikes, and hard dungeon encounters. Melee weapons handle ordinary enemies more economically. Firearms are strongest when they solve a dangerous moment quickly.

A clean musket opener or point-blank blunderbuss burst can trivialize the opening phase of a difficult fight. Spending the same ammo on ordinary trash mobs usually just converts scarce resources into convenience.

Common Pitfalls

• Thinking the system is still demo-locked. It is not. Millstone crafting exists in the live Early Access build.

• Ignoring Ash and only planning around Sulfur.

• Trying to push sulfur gathering before your tool progression is ready.

• Burning too much gunpowder on normal enemies and then entering a boss fight understocked.

See Also

• Pirate Camps - early farming route and camp behavior

• Resources - broader material progression across the archipelago

• Combat - where firearms fit into real combat pacing

Smuggler's Cache on the Starting Island

Before the Foothills Sulfur chain comes online, the most reliable fixed location for early gunpowder on the starting island is the Smuggler's Cache chest. It sits along the coastline and is guarded by a Drowner, a tough single-enemy encounter that most players hit well before their first musket fight.

The cache contains a small amount of Gunpowder, plus a chance at a Fast Travel Bell that pays for itself over the rest of the early game. The Drowner can be pulled with a ranged weapon or shovel-and-sword cadence; once down, the chest can be opened without further resistance and will remain accessible after the enemy is gone.

Treat the Smuggler's Cache as a one-time pickup rather than a farming loop. There is only one chest, and it does not refill the way pirate camp crates do on the daily respawn cycle. Loot it on your first pass through the area and move on.

Conservation Principles

Even after the Millstone crafting chain is online, Gunpowder stays expensive enough that burn rate decides whether a long session ends with a full ammo pouch or an empty one. A few rules of thumb that launch-week guides converge on:

• Do not shoot wildlife. Dodos, crabs, pigs, and similar low-threat targets fall to a single melee swing; a firearm shot on them is pure waste.

• Save shots for boss fights and dungeon encounters where the opening damage window meaningfully shifts the fight.

• Ship boarding actions are the second legitimate use case. A clean opening blunderbuss shot on a crowded deck can clear half a boarding crew before swords come out.

• Loot every supply crate in every Pirate Camps visit, even when your ammo pouch feels full. The crates will refresh tomorrow either way; leaving them closed today gives no benefit.

• Stockpile before boss runs. Entering a dungeon understocked is a reliable way to die at the boss door specifically because your ranged damage ran out.

Old Packages in Pirate Camps

Pirate-camp loot crates are the usual early source, but the camps also scatter Old Packages across their floors. These are large, sparkling wooden bundles that sit in the open between tents and watchtowers, distinct from the locked crates. A normal melee swing or axe hit breaks them open, and they reliably drop small gunpowder stashes alongside cloth and rope scraps. Sweeping every Old Package on a camp clear noticeably improves the per-run gunpowder yield over chest looting alone.

Unlocking the Millstones Station

The Millstones station is not in the default build menu. It has to be unlocked through the Discovery system before it appears. The trigger is the Corn key discovery: picking up a single ear of Corn from a wild crop instantly adds the Millstone Parts recipe to the Workbench. Corn grows naturally on the Foothills islands and occasionally in point-of-interest fields, so the discovery usually happens organically once the Foothills unlock, without a dedicated farming trip.

After the Corn pickup, the production chain runs as two stops rather than one:

• Craft Millstone Parts at the Workbench. The parts are a stacking inventory item, not a placed structure.

• Open the build menu, place the Millstones structure using the parts plus a small wood cost, and site it inside the Bonfire radius so the station can pull stored Sulfur and Ash out of nearby chests.

Because the parts craft first at the Workbench and the station places second in the build menu, new players sometimes mistake the parts for the finished station. The parts themselves do nothing until they are consumed by the build-mode placement step.

Ammo Slot and Auto-Refill

Firearms in Windrose consume two inventory items per shot: the physical round (musket ball, pistol ball, or blunderbuss shot) and the gunpowder charge. Both sit in dedicated ammo slots next to the equipped firearm in the inventory screen. When a gun refuses to fire in combat, the usual cause is that one of the two slots has emptied or that an inventory reshuffle knocked the gunpowder out of its slot; opening the inventory and dragging the stack back into the ammo slot fixes the issue without rebinding the weapon.

The inventory screen also exposes an auto-refill toggle for the ammo slots. With auto-refill on, the game automatically pulls fresh gunpowder out of the backpack into the ammo slot as soon as the slot empties, which removes a manual inventory step mid-fight. Most players enable it once the gunpowder pipeline is producing a surplus and leave it on permanently.

When Firearms Earn Their Cost

Even after the Millstones are online, gunpowder stays the most expensive consumable in the early crafting loop, because Sulfur mining and Ash production both compete with other material pipelines (copper smelting, alchemy brewing, and ship repair). The practical rule most experienced players converge on is to keep firearms holstered during routine exploration and trash-mob clears, and to hotbar them specifically for boss openers, elite ship-boarding rushes, and the first volley of any dungeon-scale encounter. A clean opening musket crit or point-blank blunderbuss burst trivializes the opening phase of a hard fight; spending the same ammo on a Dodo or a lone pirate scout does not.

Blackbeard Pirate Camps and Supplemental Chest Loot

Among the camp variants on the starting island and the tutorial islands, Blackbeard Pirate Camps are the highest-yield farming targets for pre-Foothills gunpowder. Their crates, sacks, and old packages can roll gunpowder, and the pirates patrolling inside the camps can also drop it on death. When a daily respawn cycle comes up, prioritize the Blackbeard-flagged camps ahead of ordinary pirate camps if your goal is ranged ammo rather than cloth or rope scraps.

Chests in Caves and Ruins

Outside the pirate-camp rotation, chests inside caves and inside Ancient Ruins can also contain gunpowder. The drop rate is lower than the camps' dedicated storage containers, but caves and ruins are usually cleared for other reasons during exploration, and gunpowder pickups along the way are free supplementary ammo rather than a dedicated farming trip. Sweep every chest you find inside these locations rather than skipping them once the obvious quest loot is cleared.

Loot Before You Can Craft

Crafting Homemade Gunpowder at the Millstones is not an option until the Foothills resource tier is online, the Corn discovery has unlocked the Millstone Parts recipe, and the station itself has been placed inside a bonfire radius. Until that full chain is built, every musket or pistol shot comes out of the loot stockpile rather than the production loop. Aggressive early looting of camp crates, cave chests, and ruin chests is not optional: it is the only supply for the first several gameplay hours.

Vendors

Small quantities of Homemade Gunpowder can be bought from the Tortuga Goods Seller for 2 Piastres per unit. The vendor stock is limited per reset and should be treated as a supplement rather than a primary source.

Story-Quest Gates Before Crafting

Players sometimes try to short-cut the homemade gunpowder route by sailing for sulfur the moment they spot it on a Foothills cliffside, then bounce off because their tools and stations refuse to engage. The actual prerequisite is a chain of main-story progression that has to land in order before the Millstones loop is craftable end-to-end. Nothing here is hidden in optional content; the chain runs through the main quest line, and most players hit it naturally on their way to Israel Hands. The order below is the minimum path.

Why Revenge Is Best Served Cold matters specifically. Defeating Thomas Richards is the trigger that opens the Foothills Discover page. Without that step, the system blocks the player from smelting raw iron into Iron Ingots, from learning the Millstone recipe via the Corn discovery, and from crafting an Iron Pickaxe. The Foothills islands themselves are sailable earlier, but the resource pipeline gates wait on the Richards kill regardless of how many sulfur boulders the player can see.

Easy gunpowder while the chain is still in progress. The four enemy camps that hide the Black Mark fragments during Revenge Is Best Served Cold are reliably loaded with Homemade Gunpowder in their crates and on dropped pirates. A player who is gunpowder-starved before the Millstones come online can clear those four camps in a single afternoon for enough rounds to keep firearms in the hotbar through the Coastal Jungle and into the Foothills.

Charcoal-to-Ash Conversion at the Millstones

The standard Ash supply runs as a byproduct of the Charcoal Kiln loop: every wood-to-charcoal cycle leaves Ash behind in the kiln output. When that byproduct stockpile runs short before the next Millstone gunpowder cycle, the Millstones themselves can convert the more abundant Charcoal back into Ash on demand.

Conversion: 2 Charcoal grinds at the Millstones into 6 Ash. The conversion is one-way and only worth running when the Ash side of the gunpowder recipe is the actual bottleneck. Charcoal is a competing input for the smelting chain, so burning it for Ash specifically rather than for Copper Ingot or Iron Ingot smelts is a tradeoff. The standard advice is to lean on Charcoal Kiln Ash byproduct as the primary supply and reserve the 2-charcoal-to-6-ash conversion for emergencies before a boss run when the Millstones are otherwise idle.

Complete Loot Sources Table

Narrative guidance above covers the three main supply loops (pirate camps, vendor, and Millstone crafting). This table is the complete chest and mob drop list from the version 0.10.0 database for players who want to target specific POIs for farming. Guaranteed starter and dungeon chest drops sit at 100%, while recurring pirate-camp chests roll at 1% for larger stacks per roll.

Chest drops (100% guaranteed)

Chest drops (recurring, 1% roll)

Mob drops

Quest rewards

• How My Shore Adventure Began: one-time reward for completing the early-game quest.

• The Bitter Pill: one-time reward from the quest chain.

Vendor

Construction Use

Beyond its role as firearm fuel, Homemade Gunpowder is consumed in one construction recipe: each Explosive Barrel station costs 40 Homemade Gunpowder. Players planning ship-boarding raids or base defenses should keep the Millstone cycle running past the point where their firearm ammo pouch is full, because Explosive Barrels burn through supply faster than a single firearm loadout ever will.