Atomic Heart is absolutely full to the brim with ways to upgrade your ever-growing arsenal of weapons. And as you progress through the game, you’ll quickly find that adding an elemental touch to your bullets and melee weapons can give you a life-saving advantage. To that end, here’s how to use slot cartridges in Atomic Heart.
How to Load Weapon Cartridges in Atomic Heart
Atomic Heart has no shortage of ways to upgrade your weapon, from the ability to control recoil to adding special moves. But you’d be amiss to skip out on adding slot cartridges to your weapons.
Slot Cartridges is an upgrade that can apply to both melee and firearms, which will give your chosen weapon the capability of dealing elemental damage.
To do this, head to your closest Nora and navigate to upgrades. Choose the weapon you’d like to upgrade. Once you’re in its menu, select cartridge gun. Even if it’s a melee weapon, it will still say cartridge gun. Obtain the Basic Level, which will unlock a cartridge slot.
Now that your weapon has the capacity to use cartridge slots, head into crafting. Navigate to cartridge guns and you’ll see you have three choices: fire, ice, and electric. Each one will require resources to craft, and yes, your weapon’s ability to do elemental damage is finite and based on how many cartridges you have.
Craft whatever cartridge you’d like. Now, here’s how to equip a cartridge in Atomic Heart.
To equip a cartridge in Atomic Heart, you’ll need to leave Nora and instead access your weapon wheel. For Xbox users, holding X will allow you to access the wheel. For PlayStation users, it’s the square button. For PC users, you’re quite blessed. To equip a cartridge, you’ll just need to click the middle mouse buttons.
For console players, once you’ve opened the weapon wheel, navigate to the shadowed out hexagon at the bottom of the wheel using your joystick. Use your trigger button, and you’ll go into a submenu that will show all of your available cartridges.
Navigate to the cartridge you’d like to equip, then click your trigger button again. This will equip your chosen cartridge on your equipped weapon, assuming it has a slot cartridge available. If you’ve selected the wrong weapon, you can repeat the process you used to equip it in order to remove the cartridge from the weapon.
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So, let’s sum it up real quick for the long suffering console players. Once you have a cartridge:
- Press X or Square to access your weapon wheel
- Navigate to the hexagon at the bottom of the wheel
- Press trigger
- Navigate to the cartridge you want to equip
- Press trigger
And voilà! Your gun is now capable of burning, freezing, or shocking any enemy who dares to get within bullet range. Many bosses and enemies have elemental weaknesses, which you can peek at when you scan them, making these cartridges extremely useful.
