Co-required ammo for every ranged shot
Windrose Bullets: How to Get & Use
Windrose bullets are the second half of every ranged trigger pull and the resource most players forget exists until their gunpowder runs out. Each shot from a musket, pistol, or blunderbuss consumes one Gunpowder and one of these brass-tipped projectiles together, so a healthy stockpile of windrose bullets is non-negotiable once the gunpowder loop is running. This page covers how the round-shaped consumable is crafted, how loot supplements the supply early on, and the simple weekly math that keeps your ammo and powder stockpiles aligned without conscious effort.
How to Get Bullets in Windrose
Windrose bullets ship from two distinct sources, and most camps lean on both. The first is loot — pirate camps, shipwrecks, and patrolling merchant caravans all roll small stacks of the projectiles in the same loot tables that drop early Gunpowder. Early-game players who farm camps regularly often have enough on hand to skip the crafting recipe for the first dozen hours.
The second source is the Workbench. Two units of Iron Ore convert into ten Bullets per craft, with no rare ingredients and no station upgrades required. The recipe is unlocked by default the moment you have an Iron Pickaxe and a stack of Iron Ore in your inventory, which means the supply chain is open the same evening the gunpowder loop opens.
There is no merchant who stocks the projectile in volume. A handful of late-game vendors carry small standing inventories, but the prices are several times the Workbench cost and the trade is only worth it when you are completely out and not near a camp.
Windrose Bullets Uses
There is exactly one use for windrose bullets, and it is the dominant constraint on every ranged combat encounter. Each shot from a musket, pistol, or blunderbuss consumes one of the projectiles paired with one Gunpowder. The pairing is rigid — there is no version of any firearm that fires powder without ammunition or the reverse.
Because the cost is symmetric across all three weapon classes, planning is simple: every shot is one of each, and your stockpile size for both should match. The Consumption Calculator surfaces this directly, returning a per-week bullet figure alongside the gunpowder figure so you never end up with a hundred shots of one and ten of the other.
No side recipes consume the projectile. It is exclusively combat consumption, which makes the planning math the cleanest of any resource on the gunpowder tree.
Pair this page with the Consumption Calculator and the main gunpowder guide to plan a run end to end.
Best Bullets Sources
There is no in-world farming location for windrose bullets, so the meaningful question is which crafting route to lean on. For the first ten to fifteen hours of a save, looted ammo from pirate camps and shipwrecks is more than enough — clearing a camp circuit returns roughly twenty units alongside the gunpowder it drops.
After that point, Workbench production takes over. The two-units-of-Iron-Ore-per-ten-rounds ratio is generous, and a single Foothills mining trip pays for several weeks of crafted ammo at typical play volumes.
Windrose Bullets Tips & Strategy
Three habits keep windrose bullets supply painless. First, craft in batches of fifty or one hundred rather than ten at a time — Workbench setup time amortizes cleanly, and the resulting buffer covers a much larger window of play. Second, run the Consumption Calculator alongside the Production Planner so the round and powder figures stay aligned; one without the other is a false sense of security. Third, never skip a pirate camp circuit while your stockpile is still under fifty units; loot ammo is genuinely free relative to the time cost of a dedicated mining and crafting run.
Related Resources
Continue across the gunpowder chain.
Pair every craft of gunpowder with a matching craft of windrose bullets and the ranged combat loop never surprises you mid-expedition.