How to Get Gunpowder in Windrose: A Crafting and Farming Guide

Your pistol is just a very ugly paperweight until you figure out gunpowder, and Windrose doesn't explain any of this clearly.

Learned that one the hard way. First boar I met on the beach, I pulled my gun, pulled the trigger, and got a satisfying click and absolutely nothing else. Turns out bullets alone don't do a thing. You need the explosive powder to actually send them anywhere, and without it your ranged weapon is a blunt object with delusions of grandeur.

Where Gunpowder Comes From Early On

Crafting is off the table for the first stretch of the game. No recipe, no station, no raw materials to speak of. Whatever gunpowder you've got in the early hours came from someone else's pocket, which means stealing it from the people currently trying to shoot you.

Blackbeard Pirate Camps are the best source of this. You'll run into them naturally once you pick up the quest to rescue your crew and grab your first ship (worth checking our Windrose's ship progression guide if that questline hasn't kicked in yet). Killed sailors drop small stacks of Homemade Gunpowder, but the real prize is the Old Packages scattered around these camps. Square, sparkly, easy to spot. Smash them and they'll almost always cough up a stash worth grabbing.

Don't skip the smaller stuff either. Ruins, caves, random points of interest on the starting islands, all worth a full sweep. The odds of any single crate holding gunpowder aren't great, but it stacks up if you're the type who opens every chest out of principle (I am).

A Quick Note on Ammo Slots

Before getting into the production side, it's worth flagging a mechanic that trips people up: bullets and gunpowder occupy separate slots, and both need to be filled for your gun to fire. Loot or craft gunpowder and it should drop into its own Ammo slot automatically, sitting next to your bullets. If your gun goes quiet mid-fight for no obvious reason, that's usually the first thing to check. The inventory occasionally loses track of things if you're shuffling items around too fast. There's also an auto refill toggle in the inventory menu that's worth switching on before you go picking fights with anything wearing a captain's hat.

Building an Actual Supply Chain

Looting camps is fun for a while, but it's not something you can build a real ammo supply around. Eventually you'll want a station that produces gunpowder on demand instead of hoping the next chest cooperates.

That station is the Millstones, and unlocking it starts in an unexpected place: corn. Find a single ear of it out in the wild (it grows naturally, so it's mostly a matter of exploring long enough to stumble across some), and the Millstone Parts recipe unlocks at your standard Workbench. The parts themselves are cheap, just 15 Stone.

From there, take the parts to your build menu and combine them with 15 Wood to actually place the Millstones. Put it near your Bonfire so it can pull ingredients straight from your storage instead of making you run materials over by hand.

The Ash and Sulfur Problem

Homemade Gunpowder needs two ingredients: Ash and Sulfur, 25 units each.

Ash basically makes itself. Run a Charcoal Kiln for your smelting operation and it'll spit out ash as a byproduct without you thinking about it. If you haven't gotten a kiln going yet, the clay gathering guide covers getting that side of your base started.

Sulfur's the one that'll slow you down. It comes from yellowish rock nodes that show up occasionally in the coastal jungle, but they get a lot more common once you push into the Foothills. Bring something better than a stone pickaxe. Mining sulfur with starter tools is a genuinely miserable use of your time.

Once both ingredients are flowing in, gunpowder stops being something you scrounge for and just becomes another thing your base quietly produces while you're off doing something else. Which, frankly, is how it should've worked from the start.

If the ammo slot stuff above didn't quite click and you're still getting wrecked before you even get this far, the beginner's survival guide covers the basics of not dying long enough to worry about gunpowder at all.