Welcome to my guide.

So you want to learn about the ammo system in From the Depths, do you? I presume so since you are reading this.

On its most basic level the ammo system is quite simple. Are your weapons not firing? Then your ship needs more ammo barrels for storage and needs more ammo processors to produce ammo for them. This is the base level of understanding that players quickly grasp when they start playing the game and is often the advice given to you if you ask someone at random about it. Congratulations, you know how the ammo works in a TLDR fashion. ^^

If that base understanding is all you wanted then you need not go any further into this guide. Thank you for reading this far.


Seriously. There are -NUMBERS- ahead. If you are going to continue reading then consider yourself warned. ^^

Everything that follows is current as of alpha 1.88. So, moving on...

Going a bit more in-depth now, ammunition on your ship is something that needs serious consideration. I will be going into this first, then moving on to the figures for custom missiles and cannons.

Ammunition on your ship is stored in ammo barrels and produced in ammunition processors. This is the basic level of understanding, so let's look at these two blocks in turn.


Ammo Barrels
An ammo barrel is a small wooden barrel which stores up to 100 points of ammunition inside it, taking up a 1 block space.

The less well known fact about an ammo barrel is that, by itself, it will passively generate 1 ammo per second until it is full at no additional cost to you. Adding more barrels adds to this total. So hey, free ammo! =D

Knowing this, it is possible to make a ship that will not consume any resources to fire its weapons. The downside is that ammo barrels are highly explosive and have low hp so they will detonate if ANYTHING hits them, damaging every nearby block. So they must be built into protected magazines to try to limit the damage if they are hit by enemy fire. Otherwise your ship can be extremely vulnerable to internal explosions.

Ammunition Processors
An ammunition processor is a 2x1 block that can produce ammo quickly. It does not store any ammo by itself but it does not explode like an ammo barrel does either. That is the basic level of understanding about it.

Going into more detail, you in fact need AT LEAST one ammo barrel as well as an ammunition processor, otherwise it will not run. The processor does not supply your weapons directly, it only supplies barrels.

Price-wise a single ammunition processor is only slightly more expensive than a single ammo barrel to make but it generates ammo a lot faster. The processor produces 20 ammo every 2 seconds which it dumps straight into the ammo barrels of your ship. When compared directly it produces 10 ammo every second, 10x more than an ammo barrel does, and does it in less space (2 squares vs 5 squares) while also not being explosive.

That, in itself, is a great trade-off isn't it? Sadly there is also a cost involved... every cycle of an ammunition processor consumes 5 metal from your global stockpile (or 2.5 every second) and it also costs your ship 20 power while it is running. Luckily they only run if your ammo barrels short by at least 10 ammo so it is not constant -EXCEPT- during the heat of battle where they can rob power from the rest of your ship. So keep that in mind if you do not have much spare power on your ship!

There is also one last note concerning the ammunition processors. If it dumps ammo into your ammo barrels and they become full, any excess ammo from the cycle is LOST. In itself this is not so bad on small ships but if you have a lot of processors they all start up when your ammo barrels have some space, so this can mean you are losing a lot of metal because of over-producing ammo. How affordable this is depends on your circumstances at the time, it is only important if you have limited resources to play with.

Local Stockpiling[/b]
With the addition of the new localised storage system ammo storage on ships has another factor to consider; the fact that the global stockpile might not be available. With this mode ships need to carry their own stockpiles to work from.

With this it is now possible to carry your ammo stockpile in the form of metal rather than live ammo while using ammo processors to convert it when needed. This is a far more compact and less explosive way for carrying ammo although you will not the free ammo that ammo barrels generate.

Now for the numbers. As already mentioned, 5 metal produces 20 ammo, meaning stored metal will produce 4x as much ammo through ammo processors. So, if full of metal, a small misc. storage can provide up to 4000 ammo while a small metal storage can supply up to 40,000 ammo. For a single block that is a lot, just make sure to protect that block!


Summary
And that sums up the ammo supply systems on your ship. Building just ammo barrels is perfectly good if your ammo needs are low or if your ship is large enough... going that route is more bulky and you MUST protect them (or explode a lot). Processors are much safer and more compact but they also cost resources and power to operate.

Exactly which route or what balance of these blocks will work best depends on your ship and what you are building it to do.

As you should already know, your HUD includes by default your ship's total ammo supply in the bottom right of the screen. However it does not show you exactly how much ammo you generate per second, you will have to work that out for yourself.



Also, as a further note, a single resource extractor in a resource zone that contains metal pulls in 2 metal every second. Not enough to supply even one ammunition processor in constant use since that uses 2.5 metal per second. You need more.

Whelp. This is something that you guys wanted to be talked about, even if I thought it did not ft in with the rest of the guide. So here it is. XD (This stuff also applies to fuel storage by the way)


AMMO BARREL SAFETY!

Ammo barrels. Explosive little weak points in your ship, they are needed but they also have to be protected as much as possible. When detonated they smash almost anything within 3 blocks of themselves (a metal beam can survive a single ammo barrel if it is two blocks away, if more than one barrel is detonating they will destroy any other block within 3 blocks of them).

A solid general strategy is, as you find yourself needing more ammo barrels, to arrange them into 'magazines' (or in the same place) so that if you get hit you won't go up like a string of fire-crackers and damage can hopefully be limited to one area. Or, on larger ships, more than one so you don't loose all your ammo in one go.


I guess first is the thing NOT to do. Leave them exposed on the deck or in an open-topped room. That might be an aesthetic choice for some ships but it is also just asking for a shot to come in and detonate them.

A ship needs at least one. So common practice is to bury your ammo supply deep in your ship, somewhere where you think shots are not likely to reach, usually behind or below everything else. This is a necessary evil on small ships but if it gets hit you will take a lot of damage, especially if you are relying on ammo barrels to keep you supplied rather than an ammo processor. Many of my smaller ships blow themselves in half if hit in the wrong place for just this reason.

Larger ships often have space to spread out their ammo barrels, this is the first viable way to try to protect them in your design rather than relying on defences around them. Spreading them out means incoming shots have a lot more that they could hit without setting off an ammo explosion and they have more space to keep vital systems away from said ammo explosion so it won't cripple your ship.


So what, really, should you have around your ammo barrels? In small ships it's nearly impossible to avoid having something critical nearby but you really should be trying for solid blocks for protection. This is a middle-ground, adding protection but meaning more blocks get destroyed if the ammo is hit and is fairly bulky if you have much ammo. It is an option but remember that those destroyed blocks will distract your repair systems from other potentially critical damage elsewhere and also cost resources to replace.

Which means the IDEAL block to have around your ammo barrels, at least as I see it, is... empty air. Yeah, I am not kidding. If the ammo explodes it will be the barrels and whaver block is holding them in place that get blown up (I suggest wood beams, it is cheapest) which keeps repair costs and time and demads on your repair systems from the explosion to a minimum.


MAGAZINE

With that said, let us move on to the design I came up with for magazines that minimize the damage of an ammo explosion. You need fair sized ship to use this but it does make an explosion a lot less damaging.

Start off with a wooden beam. Take an ammo barrel on its side and attach that to the narrow end. Then keep adding barrels in a line until you have enough, this is the heart of the magazine and the explodey bit. Put another wooden beam on the far end.

Now build out from the opposite end of your original beam, using whatever material you like (beams are recommended since they are tougher, if possible). The plan is now to build a cylinder around your ammo barrels. If you are bad at doing circles that is okay, you can use your blocks as you build to measure the gap, just make sure that you are putting the cylinder FOUR blocks away from the barrels. Again, use whatever material you like but I would suggest metal for this one. Once you reach the opposite end close it off.

And that is it, my basic design for a magazine. If the ammo explodes the total damage will be the barrels and two wooden beams, nothing else is within the blast radius (unless you messed up your cylinder a bit). It is easy to scale up, just add more rows of barrels and increase the thickness of the cylinder. The most efficient layout is a cylinder of barrels surrounded by a cylinder of air surrounded by a cylinder of armour.

So there you go. ^^ Make it longer and / or thicker as you need, split it in half by having a set of wooden beams between two sets of ammo barrels if you like (meaning only part of the magazine goes up if it detonates). Honestly, this magazine design is most useful on larger ships. But as always, multiple magazines are recommended if possible.

Here is a cross section for you, if you read this before I add pictures...

x = ammo barrels
- = air
h = hull (ideally metal)

---hhhhhh---
--hh-----hh--
-hh-------hh-
hh---------hh
h----xxx----h
h---xxxxx---h
h---xxxxx---h
h---xxxxx---h
h----xxx----h
hh---------hh
-hh-------hh-
--hh-----hh--
---hhhhhh---

And I know, the exact number of - is off. That is just to give you the overall layout of it.

Up next is the section about keeping your custom missile launchers supplied.

This is before cannons because it is simpler, missile launchers draw directly from the ammo barrels on your ship. So the ammo storage and production of your ship, as detailed in the previous section, is what dictates how easily it can keep a missile launcher up and firing.


Single Missile
Let us start with a single missile. A custom missile launcher consumes ammo based entirely on its length (how long the missile is) so that is where we must start our calulating. It is true that a longer missile reloads more slowly but that does not really do much to affect things.

The first important thing to know is that a single piece of a missile costs 25 ammo to reload. This is important because it dictates how large a missile your ship is capable of firing, one ammo barrel can hold up to 100 ammo which is enough to reload a 4-block long missile. If your ship can not hold enough ammo to reload the missile then it CAN NOT reload it. Ever. Unless you add more ammo barrels.

Next comes the size (and firing speed) of the launcher. Every block slows down how fast it reloads but there is a progression so the exact ammo requirements can be calculated. Through testing I have determined that, to fire continuously, the ship must supply 10 ammo per second for a launcher 1 block long. But after this initial expense because of the dropping rate of fire every additional 5 blocks put on the length of the missile only needs an extra 2 ammo per second.

This has been tested as far as a missile 21 blocks long and it has held true. A 1 block long missile (close to useless) needs 10/second, up to 6 blocks needs 12/second, up to 11 blocks needs 14/second, and so on. Missiles at 21 blocks long (18/second) reload SLOWLY so they are not all that useful at greater lengths.

As a note, eventually (somewhere around 40-50 blocks long) you will need extra ammo barrels to even reload the missile if you are using them exclusively to supply your ammo needs.

Also, the actual ratio is actually something like 1 ammo per second for every extra 2.5 missile blocks after the first one, but that is not very useful since you cannot get half a missile block and you also cannot generate ammo on a ship except in multiples of 2 ammo per second (since that is what an ammo barrel gives you).


Multiple Missiles
You knew this was coming. Few people stop at one missile.

Multiple missiles, either on the same or on different launch systems, all place the same demand on the supply of ammo. So it is simply a question of multiplying the size of the missile by how many missiles you have to work out how much ammo your ship needs per second.

The only thing you really need to note here is the ammo storage for your ship. So long as your ship generates enough ammo it will keep all of your missiles supplied and firing at maximum speed... it will just stagger their fire evenly if there is not enough storage space to refill all of your launchers at once.

The absolute minimum ammo storage your ship needs is enough to reload its longest missile but, to be safe, I would recommend your ship have enough space to reload that missile two or maybe three times over. Ideally for this kind of recommendation I would suggest enough storage space to hold the total output of the ammo processors on the ship plus 25% or so, whichever is the larger total storage, but that is just me. And spare ammo is always a good idea.


Summary
The above has covered more or less everything. The absolute minimum to keep a custom missile firing as fast as it possibly can is enough ammo storage to reload a single missile, combined with enough ammo production on your ship to keep them supplied. They will stagger fire though... if you want to keep firing all your missiles in volleys you will need to be storing enough ammo to reload ALL of them at the same time.

That should cover everything you need to know about custom missiles and their ammo needs. So, moving on...

The last main section of this guide is dealing with the ammo needs for your beautifully crafted custom cannons.

I saved this until last because it adds a couple of layers of complexity to the situation. So let's get those out of the way.


The TRUE ammo needs of your cannon
Your cannon needs deeper magazines. Stick more ammo boxes into it to let it fire longer! So runs the basic understanding on this issue.

But that is not where this guide is going to stop. Oh no...

For this one you will generally need a calculator, unless your cannon has hit some of the easily-calculated statistics. But what you need to know about it, as a minimum, is your cannon's reload time and your cannon's ammo use. You can find both of these stats by looking at the cannon's firing piece.

The cannon's reload time is how long, in seconds, it takes for it to reload and fire another shell. For faster firing systems this is below 1 second. If you cannot be bothered to use a calculator for this and want to guesstimate you should lower this number until you can do the calculation mentally, making sure you have a number too high is better than one too low...

The cannon's ammo use is how much ammo it uses to fire one shell. This starts out at 10 per shell but gets higher as you put guage increasers on the cannon. Easy as pie.

Now you just take those two and devide the ammo use by the reload time, which gives you your grand result for how much ammo this cannon will use per second.

That is the hard part over with now. ^^


The ammo box bottle-neck
Sooner or later your cannon will stop firing continuously and just fire bursts of shells. According to the base wisdom you should add more ammo boxes so that it takes longer to reach this state.

The truth of the matter is, however, that your cannon has exhausted the ammo it is holding inside its own ammo boxes and is limited to how quickly it can reload from your ship. It does not matter if your ship can keep up with the voracious ammo demands of your cannon, if you have not dealt with this bottle-neck it will start stuttering sooner or later.

The problem is as follows; a single ammo box can only reload 5 ammo from your ship's own ammo stores every 5 seconds. This works out as 1 ammo every second that can be brought in for your cannon to use.

So, knowing that, the solution becomes obvious. Follow the conventional wisdom, MOAR AMMO BOXES for your cannon! The difference, however, is that you know exactly -HOW MANY- ammo boxes your cannon needs to maintain constant fire indefinitely if your ship can support it. You need a mounted ammo box for every ammo per second your cannon uses when firing. Problem solved!


Summary
That should be everything you need to know to make sure your custom cannons keep firing until the enemy is reduced to smouldering debris. Knowing how to sustain them means you can plan your custom cannons better, make full use of the limited space if you are building them into cramped turrets or really finding out how big your ship's MASSIVE BOOMSTICK needs to truly be behind the oversized barrel.

Math can be quite destructive sometimes, wouldn't you agree?

Now let us deal with Advanced Cannons and keeping them supplied with enough ammo. The ACs (as I shall call them from here on in) are very simple to tie in to the ammo supply of your ship.

Originally they were a complex separate system but now it is far more streamlined, much like the ammo to feed a custom missile system.

Let us go over the involved blocks.


Ammo Router
The Ammo Router is almost always an essential part of this arrangement. The only time you do not need it is if your AC is built directly into the hull of your ship (not on a turret or spin block). It also might be a placeholder of some sort and so might be changed later, this information is current as of v1.861.

An Ammo Router is a block that, supposedly, manages the flow of -SHELLS- (not ammo) from your ammo controller to the magazines of your AC. You need one block anywhere on your ship itself (it truly does not matter where) and one on the turret or spin block that your AC is mounted on. This allows the ACs to connect to your Ammo Controlers.

I am not sure if this is a bug or not but you would think that an AC and Ammo Controller on the same turret or spin block could connect without Ammo Routers, right? But you would be wrong. Even if they are in the same place Routers must be present on the turret or spin block and the main ship before the shells can be transferred.


Ammo Input Feeder
Input Feeders are built on to the front or back of Autoloaders or Ammo Clips on the AC itself, meaning they must be properly connected to an Advanced Firing Piece before they will work (if the AC is not set up properly they cannot be configured).

Once built you need to press Q on them to open the interface. Any Ammo Controllers it can draw from are listed on the left, if it does not list any you may not have placed your Ammo Routers yet. Select the controller you want and it will list the available ammo controllers and what shell they make, you need to click one of these to assign them to the Input Feeders on your AC. You do not need to do this one by one, however, as there is a button on the right that will automatically assign all unusued Input Feeders to the selected ammo controller. There are no longer any intermediate stages, the Input Feeders will now draw directly from your ship's ammo barrels to create the shell you want.

Input Feeders supply shells to the autoloader they are attached to and -ANY- clips that are plugged into it. This means that you can speed up the transfer of shells to your AC's clips by building more Input Feeders onto the clips and autoloaders. In fact, if you are using larger and longer shells, this becomes mandatory if you want your AC loaded in any useful length of time.


Summary
And that is it. Ammo is taken from your ship, changed into shells, loaded into your cannons and then (hopefully) sent in the direction of your enemy. Sorry about the lack of maths in this section but the solid numbers depend entirely on your shell design and cannon. I cannot work that out for you, you will have to work that out for yourself.

I can, however, offer some general information...
~The ammo cost to make a single shell is multipled by how many customizer blocks are used in its design, the exact design does not matter. However, reload times only increase by 50% for each added customizer block after the first.
~Doubling the diameter of the shell nearly trebels (3x) the parts cost to make it and the reload times.
~Gunpowder casings in your shell affect the cooldown time of your AC. Each gunpower after the first increases cooldown time by 50%. Doubling the shell diameter nearly QUADRUPLES (4x) the cooldown, bigger shell cooldowns can slow the AC's rate of fire reducing its overall ammo needs.
~The value given for cooldown in the shell design does not account for the design of your AC (cooling units and bore evacuators can reduce it) so you will need to test fire for the true number. You can also overclock the AC in its settings, trading reduced cooldown for reduced accuracy.
~The time to pass the shell to the clip is always double the time to load a shell from the clip into the AC for firing. In theory this means two feeder links can supply the shell as fast as it can fire but the cannon might have more loaders or the loader might have multiple clips attached to it which can increase and decrease the reloading time respectively. More feeder links is generally better, especially with bigger shell designs.



I must apologise to those of you hoping for an in-depth run down of how to put together ammo for these cannons but there are just far too many variables and that would be a guide in and of itself. This guide deals with the ammo supply of the ship as a whole and how to keep feeding any weapon systems you mount on it. So it's just like how I did not go into how to fit out your missiles when I talked about the missile system.

That said, if you are after a shell for a small cannon I recommend two shell customizers set with 1x gunpowder, 2x HE warhead bodies and a composite head, set the shell size on the cannon to 0.055m (5.5cm), With just a 3 block long barrel this is a fast firing and highly accurate little shell that is dangerous to wooden or poorly armoured opponents. It's worth checking out.

Okay, so there is a little bit of math I can give you for the Advanced Cannons. Unfortuantely I had to split it from the last section because, well, it got too long. Go figure, it is as if I type many many words... XD

Anyway, this is situation specific. Here goes.


The advanced cannon in question has been fitted with one 1m autoloader and one 1m ammo clip. It has one barrel of 6cm diameter (no guage increases). There are two ammo feeders connected to it meaning the clip reloads as fast as the autoloader can load the cannon. It is to fire a basic shell from a two-block long ammo customizer.

Each shell requires 1.31 parts to make and takes 1.3 seconds to load into the cannon. The cooldown time is lower than the reload time so that can be ignored.

... and that is it. XD 1.3 every 1.3 seconds means that feeding that cannon with one autoloader will demand 1 ammo per second from your ship and using only 1 shell parts block. Thrilling, huh?


But how much can we squeeze out of that cannon? If we remove the bottleneck (the feeders and autoloaders) the next one becomes the cannon's cooldown, which in this case with a single gunpowder component is 0.57 seconds. Again, this is pretty straight forward.

The cooldown is just under half the reloading time but putting more autoloaders onto the cannon actually slows them down by 19% for the second, meaning we need 3 which slows them by 31%. (By the way, the penalty for each extra autoloader gets smaller for each extra one.) Add to each of those a clip and two feeders to keep them supplied.

Now for our maths. The increased reload time is irrelivent since the loading is no longer the bottleneck. So our new ammo use is 1.31 / 0.57 which comes out at 2.29 ammo per second. To maintain that we need three shell parts blocks supported by two ammo barrels.


From there it becomes a question of scaling up to suit your cannon. As I mentioned in the previous section making a longer shell is just a matter of multiplying things to suit your shell and cannon design. Right now the longest useable shells are 4m long (the 8m clips are bugged as of the time of writing) and thicker shells cost more than longer ones so the most expensive shell you can make would cost 63.2 ammo per shot. If you halve the diameter and double the length that drops the cost by roughly 1/3 to 44 ammo per shot. You really need to get stuck in designing your shell before you can calculate any solid numbers unfortunately.

And lastly, a tip on cooldown... if you are trying to get around it you can increase the number of barrels, each barrel has its own cooldown timer, though to hit a desired shell diameter you will need guage increasers (you can use up to 8). How many barrels you can cram onto a single advanced cannon depends on how thick you want the shells to be.



But what about overclocking, I hear you cry? Couldn't that have been used to speed things up even further? Well, yes, but... um... look, it does nasty things to the cooldown. Overclocking the cannon to ignore its cooldown produces variable results from what I have seen. The overlay says you can cut up to 4 seconds off the cooldown and it's true, with small enough shells you can fire them instantly until all autoloaders are forced to reload. Especially good with belt fed autoloaders if you can handle the insane recoil. But hard numbers... it has proved impossible for me to get those for you. Sorry. Just know that overclocking DOES make your gun fire faster (and burn more ammo) by sacrificing accuracy.

Now you have reached the end of this guide. Congratulations on making it this far. ^^

In the previous sections it has been explained how you can work out how quickly your ship can generate ammo for its weapons and how to work out the ammo needs of the customiseable missile and cannon systems.

Now you can use all of this to work out how much your heavily armed ship needs to supply all of its amazing and awesomely destructive armaments! Just keep track of the needs as you design it! ^^

That is about it now. Thank you for reading and I hope all of this is helpful to you.



Oh, one last thing. So that you cannot say this guide is incomplete, here's the ammo needs for all of the simple weapon systems. Yes, these things are actually useful and people do use them... XD

Small Cannon
Uses 10 ammo every 4 seconds, or 2.5 per second.
Large Cannon
Uses 30 ammo every 4 seconds, or 7.5 per second.
Autocannon
Uses 10 ammo every 3 seconds, or 3.4 per second (10 ammo = 9 fired bullets).
Laser
Uses 10 ammo every time it fires. It has a 5 second warm-up, fires for 10 seconds and then a 5 second cooldown before it can fire again. 10 ammo every 20 seconds or 0.5 per second.


Simple torpedo and seeker missile launchers have been removed from the game. The drill does not use any ammo.