Every ammunition type used by the weapon tables. Ammo is bought and sold in stacks; a 💰 Bulk Trade is 6 slots’ worth — the quantity shown in the Bulk Trade column.
Prices shown are base value. What you actually pay depends on the merchant — see 💰 Bartering.
Loads
Most calibres come in more than one load. A weapon holds one type at a time — you declare which when you Reload, and you carry each load as its own stack. Each ammo page lists what it comes in.
Two loads are standard across nearly every calibre, and they pull in opposite directions:
| Load | What it does | Take it when |
|---|---|---|
| Armor-Piercing (energy: Focused) | Piercing 2–3, at −1 damage | The target has armor. Piercing is subtracted from 🛡️ DT per hit, so it compounds hard on Burst Fire |
| Hollow Point (energy: Wide-Beam) | +1–2 damage, but the target’s DT counts as +3 | The target has little or no armor |
Neither is a straight upgrade. Against an unarmored raider, Armor-Piercing is simply a worse round you paid three times as much for; against a Combat Armor torso, Hollow Point is close to useless. Shotgun shells work the same way and have since Chat 3 — 12ga carries six of them.
Specialty loads cannot be crafted
Ammunition needs primers, casings and calibrated tooling — the industrial-workshop rule on 🔨 Crafting rules it out at a field workstation. Specialty rounds are bought or scavenged, which is what keeps them from becoming your default load.
Against 💎 Hardness — Cover Objects and 🦾 Power Armor — an Armor-Piercing load counts for half its Piercing, rounded down, because Hardness is a doubled threshold rather than a subtraction. A .50 Cal AP round trims 1 off a plate; punching through power armor properly wants a weapon with Sunder X.