Explosive Round

Lore & Background

In the scattered settlement logs that hint at the world before the player's arrival, the Shotgun and its Explosive Rounds appear as the standard-issue tool of the frontier. Where the Pistol was a personal sidearm and the Uzi a crowd-control measure, the Shotgun was the instrument of last resort—capable of taking down a large group of spitters or a single heavily armored raider in one burst. The round itself is unremarkable to the untrained eye: a small iron casing with a plastic shell, but the plastic component is what sets it apart from the simpler Bullet, giving the projectile a different fragmentation profile on impact. The requirement for Plastic ties the Shotgun's ammunition to the petroleum economy. A player who has not yet built an Oil Refinery and Chemical Plant simply cannot produce these rounds, making the Shotgun effectively a mid-game weapon despite its relatively simple crafting recipe. This design choice mirrors a broader theme in the world: the more devastating the tool, the deeper the supply chain must reach into the earth and the refinery. Fans often note the quiet irony that the Shotgun, the most 'brutal' weapon in the early-mid game, depends on the same Plastic that goes into conveyor belts, pipes, and storage tanks. The factory that feeds the war effort is the same factory that builds the infrastructure of civilization, and the Explosive Round is the small, sharp reminder that those two purposes are inseparable.

In Their Own Story

The night the spitter swarm came, Mara had only three magazines of Explosive Rounds left. She cycled the first shell into the Shotgun's chamber and felt the familiar click. Outside, the bioluminescent glow of the swarm pulsed against the factory walls, a slow tide of green and black. The conveyor belts groaned. Somewhere deep in the refinery, a pumpjack thumped its endless rhythm, indifferent to the war happening above it. Mara raised the Shotgun. The first burst tore through the front ranks, iron fragments and plastic shrapnel scattering in a starburst that lit the night. Two more rounds. Two more bursts. Then the magazine was empty, and the swarm was still coming, and the factory behind her was still, stubbornly, still building.

Reader's Guide

The Explosive Round is a crafting recipe (not an assembler recipe), so it is produced by hand or in a Crafting Machine. Inputs: 1 Iron Plate + 1 Plastic → 1 Explosive Round. No assembler is required, which means it does not compete for assembler slots. Upstream chain: Iron Ore → Furnace → Iron Plate. Crude Oil → Pumpjack → Oil Refinery → Petroleum. Water → Pumpjack → Chemical Plant (Petroleum + Water → Plastic). The Chemical Plant is the critical mid-game building that gates this recipe. Downstream: The Shotgun consumes Explosive Rounds as ammunition. The Shotgun itself is crafted (4 Iron Plate + 4 Plastic + 1 Electronic Circuit, approximately), so Plastic is a shared dependency. Optimal ratio: 1:1 Iron Plate to Plastic per round. The bottleneck is almost always Plastic, since it requires both Petroleum and Water in a Chemical Plant, whereas Iron Plates are trivially produced in a single Furnace. As the factory scales, ensure your Chemical Plant throughput matches your Iron Plate output; a common mistake is over-producing iron and starving the plastic line. Scaling: Because this is a crafting recipe, it does not scale with assembler count. You either craft by hand (slow) or assign a Crafting Machine (faster, but still limited to one machine per recipe slot). For large-scale Shotgun production, dedicate one Crafting Machine to Explosive Rounds and ensure the Plastic supply line is robust. The chain scales linearly with Chemical Plant count and Furnace count, but the Crafting Machine step is the soft cap.

Did You Know?

• The Explosive Round is one of only a few ammunition types in Factorio that does not require Sulfur or Gunpowder, making it the go-to round when your sulfur supply is stretched thin.
• Because it is a crafting recipe rather than an assembler recipe, the Explosive Round never competes for the limited assembler slots that more complex items demand.
• The Shotgun, which uses Explosive Rounds, is the only weapon in the game that uses this specific ammunition type, giving the round a singular and unambiguous purpose.
• Plastic, a key ingredient in the Explosive Round, is also required for conveyor belts, pipes, and storage tanks—meaning your ammunition supply and your factory infrastructure literally share the same material source.