Crafting
How It Works#
There is no crafting table and no menu to open. Press E and the top two rows of your own inventory are the recipe buttons, refreshed constantly as you pick things up.
Each button shows what it makes and a live ingredient checklist, ticked green for materials you have and red for what you are missing. When a recipe is affordable the icon lights up and glows. Click it to craft.
The four ammunition recipes sit in the small crafting grid on that same screen instead of the top rows.
Crafting is for humans only, and it switches off the moment the round ends.
Materials#
| Material | Used For |
|---|---|
| Scrap Metal | Guns, ammo, armor, grenades, blades, nail bats |
| Gunpowder | Ammunition and grenades |
| Cloth | Bandages and Molotovs |
| Thread | Bandages and cobwebs |
| Stick | Cobwebs, nail bats, knives, katanas |
| Alcohol | Bandages, Molotovs, syringes |
Scrap Metal is the bottleneck for almost everything. Nearly every recipe worth making competes for it.
Weapons#
| Item | Materials |
|---|---|
| Blade | 4 Scrap Metal |
| Nail Bat | 2 Sticks, 1 Scrap Metal |
| Kitchen Knife | 1 Stick, 1 Blade |
| Katana | 1 Stick, 3 Blades |
| Grenade | 5 Scrap Metal, 2 Gunpowder |
| Molotov | 1 Alcohol, 1 Cloth |
Guns#
Guns cannot be built from scratch. Each one needs its base, a component that only drops from loot chests, plus scrap.
| Gun | Materials |
|---|---|
| Glock-19 | 1 Glock-19 Base, 3 Scrap Metal |
| S1897 | 1 S1897 Base, 3 Scrap Metal |
| UMP-9 | 1 UMP-9 Base, 3 Scrap Metal |
| Scar-L | 1 Scar-L Base, 3 Scrap Metal |
| Remington 700 | 1 Remington 700 Base, 3 Scrap Metal |
Bases are common in ordinary chests and get rarer as the gun gets better: Glock-19 bases turn up constantly, Remington 700 bases almost never. Finding a base is usually a better outcome than finding a mid-tier gun outright, since three scrap is easy.
Ammunition#
| Ammunition | Makes | Materials |
|---|---|---|
| 12 Gauge Shells | 2 | 1 Scrap Metal, 1 Gunpowder |
| 9mm Rounds | 1 | 1 Scrap Metal, 2 Gunpowder |
| 5.56mm Rounds | 1 | 2 Scrap Metal, 3 Gunpowder |
| 7.62mm Rounds | 1 | 3 Scrap Metal, 4 Gunpowder |
12 Gauge is the cheapest ammunition in the game by a wide margin and the only recipe that makes two at a time, which is a large part of why shotguns are the default human answer to a rush.
There is no recipe for .44 Mag Rounds. The SW .44 Magnum and Desert Eagle can only be fed from loot, which is the real reason they are rarer in practice than their damage suggests.
Armor#
| Item | Materials |
|---|---|
| Iron Boots | 4 Scrap Metal |
| Iron Helmet | 5 Scrap Metal |
| Chainmail Leggings | 7 Scrap Metal |
| Chainmail Chestplate | 8 Scrap Metal |
All four are damage protection, not infection protection. Leather cannot be crafted at all: if you want the infection resistance, you have to find it.
Medical#
Barricades#
| Item | Materials |
|---|---|
| Cobweb | 2 Sticks, 2 Thread |
Cobwebs both place as new barricades and repair damaged ones, so a survivor with sticks and thread can hold a doorway well past the point where it should have fallen.