Field guide · mission resources
IRON NEST Requisition and Powder — What Actually Resets Between Missions
Requisition Credits are what you spend between and during missions to bring in shells, punchcards and support assets like a Scout Plane. Powder is a separate resource tied to how much you've fired. Both carry some state between mission attempts, and that carried-over state is exactly what confuses players when they replay a mission.
Published 2026-08-20
01
What remains unconfirmed
One player reported Requisition stuck at 100 in Skirmish mode and asked what formula governs starting or inherited RP. We checked our extracted schema and mission data for an explicit Skirmish starting-value or inheritance formula and did not find one. This remains an open question — we're not going to publish a guessed formula as if it were confirmed.
02
What Patch #3 confirms
A separate and more answerable report: a player replaying the same mission saw Powder change from 50 to 32 between attempts, while Requisition reset — and asked why the two resources behave differently on replay. We don't have a field-level answer for exactly which resource resets to what value, but we do have real evidence that the underlying reset mechanism itself was buggy and got fixed. Patch #3's official notes (pulled from Steam's news feed, not paraphrased) list two relevant fixes:
- Mission events not resetting correctly when replaying the same mission
- Turret position and movement not resetting correctly between missions
03
Why older reports can disagree
That means players who compared notes on resource-reset behavior may genuinely have been playing different patch versions of the game — the inconsistency they argued about wasn't necessarily one of them misremembering, it was the game's own reset logic changing under Patch #3. If you're still seeing inconsistent resets on the current build, that's worth reporting through this site's correction link rather than assuming it's expected behavior.
04
Minimum safe distance depends on the shell
For the friendly-fire minimum-distance question players have also asked about (how close is safe when enemy and friendly units overlap), that answer depends on which shell you're using — see that shell's own page for its blast/impact radius rather than repeating shell-specific numbers here.
A real, verifiable Requisition-saving comparison
This is the kind of number that requires the extracted punchcard cost table, not just a description.
| Option | Requisition cost | What it does |
|---|---|---|
Scout Plane (unlimited-use variant) | 60 | Request a flyover of a location for reconnaissance |
Scout Plane (one-time-use variant) | 15 | Same flyover, single use |
STAR Shell | 2 (fired as a shell) | Parachute-delayed illumination shell that lights the target area for scouting |
What the cost difference means
One player specifically asked why a low-Requisition medal on an early mission points toward STAR Shell instead of the Scout Plane suggested by in-mission prompts, and how much that actually saves. Based on the cost table above: a single STAR Shell (2 Requisition) can substitute for a scouting flyover that would otherwise cost 15–60 Requisition, depending on which Scout Plane variant is available in that mission — a difference of 13 to 58 Requisition Credits per use, which matters directly for a "minimum Requisition spent" medal threshold.