QUICK ANSWER
Select ammunition by target effect first: armor penetration for hardened targets, explosive effects for soft or area targets, STAR for illumination, and smoke for screening. Confirm the mission wording before spending specialist shells.
Operator briefing
IRON NEST includes more than 30 ammunition types and abilities. This page deliberately separates stable tactical roles from community-tested radii and costs that may change after patches.
Use the procedure below as a decision sequence, not as a substitute for the live mission order. Random coordinates, balance values, and mod compatibility can change; stable facts and version-sensitive evidence are labelled separately.
Field procedure
- 01
Identify the target class and the effect the order actually requests: destroy, suppress, illuminate, screen, or disable.
- 02
Choose the shell family before calculating the shot. A perfect firing solution with the wrong effect can still fail the objective.
- 03
Check Requisition cost and inventory. Reserve specialist ammunition for moments where a conventional round cannot satisfy the order.
- 04
Record the shell code on the same firing card as charge and elevation so the loading station cannot drift from the calculation.
- 05
After a patch, verify radii, costs, and special behavior in-game before treating a community table as exact.
Checks before you commit
- Official materials confirm the breadth and roles of the ammunition system, not every community-measured radius.
- Tables on this site will carry a game build and verification date when exact values are added.
- Do not copy a previous mission’s shell choice without re-reading the required effect.
When the live game conflicts with this page, keep the live observation, game build, and source date. That evidence becomes the next revision instead of being silently forced into an old answer.
Sources and evidence
Sources are included for verification, not copied as site content. Official pages establish product facts; community and video sources document tested workflows.