Death Stranding - How to Create and Use Grenades

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In Death Stranding, the means of which you have to fight the BTs are in very short supply, and more often than not take the form of special Grenades – but many are made through peculiar means and may be confusing to understand.

Different types of Grenades will have different effects – both on the living and the Beached Things, and understanding how they work is key to surviving. These Grenades include BT-oriented EX and Hematic Grenades, non-lethal Stun and Smoke Grenades, and of course the very lethal regular Grenades.

How to Create Grenades

The first time you are able to spend time in a Private Room, you’ll be able to interact with many elements of the room. Curious among them is the shower / bathroom on the corner of the room, as it has many utilities.

By taking a shower, Sam will wash off all the muck, tar, and Chiral dust off of himself, and the water will be collected to make EX Grenade 0. It’s not currently clear how dirty you need to get to create these grenades, but spending time in the rain, or getting attacked by BTs and covered in tar is usually a good bet you’ll need to wash off. Ex Grenades are the weakest of the EX series, and when thrown at a BT, will cause them to slowly flee in a random direction, allowing you to bypass them for a short time without worry.

By using the toilet in the shower to urinate, Sam’s pee can be used to make EX Grenade 1, which is a stronger variant of the EX Grenade to make BT’s scatter. As you might imagine, the more monster energy you drink, and the more you hold it in, the more grenades you’ll get each time you go relieve yourself in the private room.

Finally, going number 2 will give you the aptly named EX Grenade 2. The fecal matter extracted is a bit more rare to obtain, but will create large stunning clouds to get you past or away from BTs.

Important: Each of the EX Grenades that are created will NOT appear directly in your inventory. They will all be moved to your Private Stash at the current facility you are resting at, and will not move from that location. Because of this, you need to always remember to access your Private Stash before heading out and equip the necessary Grenades. If you find yourself out of these Grenades, you can also check the storage of various facilities by highlighting any place on the map that has a small box icon in the corner and pressing X to view stored cargo.

You’ll also be able to make blood-based Grenades called Hematic Grenades by the end of Episode 2. These are your key weapons for defeating BTs as they deal a ton of damage – but they transfuse your blood in order to do so. Because of this, you’ll want to have Blood Bags available to draw blood from, instead of from your own body. Luckily you can fabricate both the Hematic Grenades and Blood Bags at terminals – but you can also gain a new Blood Bag each time you rest at a Private Room – which will be stored in your Private Stash. Just be sure to manually “equip” a Blood Bag so that any blood lost will be taken from the bags first!

Finally, you’ll also learn how to create other Grenades in Episode 3 that can be used against enemies like MULEs for non-lethal attacks: Smoke Grenades learned from the Engineer Prepper can obscure the vision of your attackers, while Stun Grenades learned from Junk Dealer and electrocute and knock out enemies.

How to Store and Use Grenades

Each Grenade created comes in a cargo container that holds 5 of that grenade, allowing you to throw them repeatedly before running out. Since you’ll want to have multiple types and quantities of grenades to deal with various threats, storing them can be tricky.

Grenades are always stored in “small” containers, meaning that if needed, they can be stored on the arms and legs of your suit to free up space. However, once you reach the Cosplayer Prepper outside of South Knot City, you can befriend them to unlock pouches for your backpack to easily store more Grenades and Blood Bags without taking up cargo space!

To use Grenades, press right on the D-Pad to select them from the radial menu. If you don’t see them right away, you may have too many items to show in one menu, so press in on R3 to select the next page of items. Once equipped in your hand, you can hold L2 to begin aiming and hold R2 to increase the range of your throw – and finally let go of R2 to throw (or let go of L2 if you need to cancel the throw.

Remember that because each Grenade container has a total of 5 uses, you should try to use each one in turn so that you don’t waste space with several containers only having 1 or 2 grenades left. Unfortunately, you cannot combine containers, but it’s sometimes worth it to recycle or deposit nearly empty grenade containers and simply fabricate new ones.