Combat in Windrose focuses on two main weapons: swords and guns. During your travels, you’ll stumble across different variations of these weapons, such as halberds, clubs, muskets, blunderbusses, etc., but your strategy with them remains largely the same throughout the game. While melee weapons require no additional items to use, guns are another story. You’ll need both bullets and gunpowder to make your guns work in Windrose, and gunpowder is much more difficult to come by.
Gunpowder can be looted and crafted, but you’ll find one of those methods is far simpler than the other. We’ll explain more about how to get gunpowder in the guide below.
Where to get Gunpowder in Windrose
While gunpowder can be crafted, you’ll have a much easier time looting it in the first several hours of Windrose. Crafting gunpowder requires advanced gear, a high level, and a large chunk of the map to be explored, so it’s best to learn how to loot it for the early game.
Fortunately, Gunpowder is fairly common in certain parts of Windrose, so you should have a decent supply of it as long as you know where to look. For the most part, you’ll find gunpowder inside chests or supply caches, which are mainly located within Blackbeard pirate camps. You’ll explore several of these camps as part of the main questline in Windrose, so looting every chest you find will yield a decent amount of gunpowder.
These pirate camps are found all over the different islands around the starting area in Windrose. Naturally, you’ll want to acquire your first ship before embarking on any naval journey, or you’ll drown before you get too far off land.
With your ship, you can travel to different islands and head to the “?” icons. Most of the time, these are either Ancient Ruins, which also contain chests, pirate camps, or ore deposits. When you find a pirate camp, you’ll likely have to defeat several sailors, musketeers, or sergeant enemies before you can safely loot any chests or caches.
Luckily, these enemies can also drop gunpowder once they’re killed, so make sure to deal with any you can find. You’ll likely need a good amount of healing items to deal with the number of enemies at some of these camps, though, so make sure to stock up before you leave base.
On your map, you can look at the camp’s icon and see a fraction below it (e.g., 0/3). This tells you how many chests you’ve looted compared to how many chests are available at the camp. Once you see the complete fraction and a checkmark on the map icon, you know you’ve finished your search of the camp. However, you still want to take a look around the whole camp, as supply caches don’t count as part of the completion.
How to craft Gunpowder in Windrose
If you don’t want to go out searching for gunpowder in Windrose, you’ll have to wait quite a long time before you can make your own. Gunpowder is crafted at a Millstone, which is a base station that isn’t unlocked until you gain the ability to mine Iron Ore.
Iron Ore is used in the construction of the Millstone, but you also need an Iron Pickaxe to mine sulfur, which you need to craft gunpowder. Ash is also required to craft gunpowder, and you’ll need to combine it with sulfur in a Kiln to make the resource. Gunpowder requires 25 ash and 25 sulfur, so you’ll definitely need to stock up on both materials.
How to use Gunpowder in Windrose
Finally, let’s talk about what you need to do with gunpowder once you find or craft it.
Once gunpowder is added to your inventory, it will automatically be added to one of your ammunition slots. However, gunpowder alone isn’t enough to power your guns. If you only have gunpowder, you’ll get a message on your screen saying “No bullets or gunpowder” when trying to fire a gun.
As you can likely assume, you also need bullets equipped in your ammo slot to shoot a gun. You can craft bullets rather easily at a Workbench in Windrose, but there are different “Ballistic” levels for tiers of bullets that determine their damage. You start at Stone Bullets, but can upgrade to Copper and Iron Bullets as you progress.
