How to get the Shotgun recipe in Atomic Heart

Atomic Heart is a game that gives you access to a variety of weapons fairly early on. You’ll be given a melee weapon to start the game with, which can cut through robots with a few hits. However, players will always want to be on the lookout for something more powerful. Luckily, Atomic Heart gives you a shotgun within the first hour or so, which can really make a difference in the heat of battle.

The problem is, many players don’t even know they acquire this shotgun, as the game doesn’t make that big of a deal out of it. If you want to know when you acquire the Shotgun and its recipe in Atomic Heart, keep reading the guide below.

Getting the Shotgun recipe in Atomic Heart

You acquire the shotgun directly after meeting Granny Zina above the ground in the first couple of missions in Atomic Heart. Granny Zina will send you down an elevator to an underground laboratory, and here you will encounter hordes of robots waiting for you. However, before that happens, you will wake up in the underground lab and hear a man screaming for help.

When you go to investigate this, you will come to a half-closed door and see the man being pulled away by some robot arms through a hole in the ceiling. While this is unfortunate for the man, he will drop a shotgun that you can pick up. You now have the shotgun in your inventory, and you can swap back and forth between it and your Swede melee weapon.

Upon first getting the shotgun in Atomic Heart, you will only have one shell for it. You will either need to find more ammo or craft it yourself, which we already have a guide on. To upgrade the shotgun, you need to progress Atomic Heart until you reach NORA, which happens later in the quest where you initially receive the shotgun.

If you want to read our other Atomic Heart guides, you can check out how to increase your FPS on PC, how to fix the FOV issue, or where to find the Dominator gun recipe.