Cover, suppressors and brass

Rounds go through what real rounds go through. Hiding behind something only helps if it can stop a bullet.

Cover and concealment

• Interior walls, doors, floorboards, fences and sheet metal only hide you. Most rounds go through them and still hurt whoever is behind.
• A car door stops a .45 and takes most of the punch out of a 9mm, but a rifle round goes straight through. Get behind the engine block, not the door.
• Brick, breeze block, concrete, stone, thick steel and big tree trunks are real cover. Only a full-power rifle round gets through a single skin of brick, and nothing goes through concrete.
• Each wall a round goes through takes some of its damage away. After two, it stops.

Ricochets

A round that hits concrete, steel, the road or water at a shallow angle can skip off it and keep going, weaker. Indoors it can bounce twice. Don't fire along a corridor wall, and don't stand where a ricochet can come back at you.

How far a shot is heard

• Every shot is heard by the infected. A 9mm carries about 95 meters, a rifle 150 and a magnum rifle 200.
• Downwind it carries up to a third further, and upwind as little as half as far. The wind marker on your HUD tells you which way that is.
• Open ground and valleys carry a shot further. Dense forest swallows it. In a street between buildings it runs up and down the street. Rain, storms and snow muffle everything.
• A suppressor takes the blast off, but not the crack of a bullet that is faster than sound: a suppressed rifle is still heard at about 60 meters. With subsonic rounds, a suppressed 9mm is heard at about 13 meters.

Subsonic rounds

Subsonic 9mm and 7.62x39 come in boxes of twenty. Use the box in your inventory to open it. They're quieter, but they hit softer and don't go through as much. They fire first if you load them on top of other rounds, because the last rounds into a magazine are the first out. To load a particular stack, use it from your inventory.

Brass and handloads

• Most guns throw out their empty cases where you stand. Look for the little brass case on the ground and use Pick up brass, or just stand over your own for a few seconds and you'll pick them up. Revolvers and break-action shotguns keep their empties, and you pocket them when you reload.
• Load them again at an armory bench with a reloading press, primers, powder and bullet heads. Anything you load by hand is a handload, and now and then one won't fire. The better your Crafting, the rarer that is.
• A handload that clicks is a dud: rack it out with R. A weak pop with no kick is a squib: the bullet is stuck in the barrel. Don't fire. Press R and hold still while you clear it.

Factory rounds from loot and traders never misfire. Save them for when it matters.