Unlocking Windrose Gunpowder Crafting and Survival
The moment I looked down the barrel of my pistol in Windrose, pulled the trigger, and heard a frantic click instead of a bang, I realized I had made a critical mistake. While I possessed plenty of Stone Bullets for the local enemies, the weapon remained useless without its essential component: gunpowder. This embarrassing oversight led to me standing helpless while roaming hordes of Drowned tore me apart, a lesson learned the hard way after my friends heard the desperate clicking sounds. If you want to avoid this fate and learn how to make gunpowder in Windrose effectively, you must understand the specific requirements and progression needed to craft this vital resource.
Prerequisites for Crafting Gunpowder
Before you can successfully combine ingredients to create gunpowder, you must complete a series of main quests that unlock the necessary tools and recipes. You cannot simply gather resources immediately; the game gates this crafting capability behind specific narrative milestones. Specifically, you need to finish the main quests "Rescuing the Crew" and "I Need a Bigger Boat." Following these, you must defeat Thomas Richards and complete the quest "Revenge is Best Served Cold." Without defeating Thomas Richards at the end of that questline, you will not unlock the Discover page for the Foothills, which means you cannot smelt raw iron into ingots. Consequently, you won't be able to craft an Iron Pickaxe or build a Millstone, both of which are absolute requirements for producing gunpowder in Windrose.
Once these quests are complete, the recipe becomes available at the Millstone: combine (10) sulfur and (20) ash. However, obtaining these materials requires you to travel to the Foothills biome. There, you must mine Foothills Iron Ore for ingots to craft your pickaxe first. Only after equipping the Iron Pickaxe can you mine sulfur deposits, which often appear as regular stone with subtle yellow marbling that is easy to miss unless you inspect them closely. Alternatively, you might find a clumpier, gravely version of sulfur covered in bright yellow, making it far more obvious than its camouflage counterpart.
Gathering Sulfur and Ash Efficiently
While sulfur deposits are only mineable after reaching the Foothills, they can be found in both the Coastal Jungle and Foothills biomes once your tools are ready. The key to gathering efficiently lies in recognizing that sulfur does not always look like a distinct yellow rock; sometimes it resembles standard stone with faint yellow marbling that requires you to get closer to inspect. Once you have secured the necessary sulfur, the second ingredient, ash, is much easier to acquire since burning wood at the Charcoal Kiln naturally leaves plenty of leftover ash.
If you find yourself low on ash and need more for your gunpowder crafting in Windrose, you can grind up charcoal at a Millstone to convert it into ash. The conversion rate allows you to turn (2) charcoal into (6) ash, providing a significant boost if needed. However, I strongly advise against wasting too much charcoal on this process, as charcoal is also a critical requirement for processing iron ingots later in the game. If you are struggling to make gunpowder yourself due to these progression gates, consider focusing on the first few steps of the "Revenge is Best Served Cold" quest, which often rewards players with Black Mark pieces hidden inside enemy camps while unlocking the path to essential resources.
