Resident Evil Requiem: How to Conserve Ammo – Early Grace Guide

Why Ammo Feels So Brutal With Grace

After spending my first few hours in Resident Evil Requiem’s care center as Grace, I hit that classic survival horror wall: two bullets, three zombies, and a whole lot of panic. Grace hits like a feather, her guns are shaky, and every missed shot hurts. I restarted a couple of times before I really learned how to stretch every single round.

This guide runs through 12 practical things I now do every single run to conserve ammo, especially in those early-care-center sections. These are all tactics I’ve personally tested on PlayStation and Xbox, mostly on Standard and Hardcore – if they worked for me under pressure, they’ll work for you too.

12 Ammo-Saving Tactics That Actually Work

Tip 1 – Aim Only for Heads and Legs

The first big breakthrough for me was accepting that body shots are basically throwing bullets away. With Grace’s weak firearms, center-mass shots just chew through your magazine without putting things down reliably.

Instead:

• Headshots do noticeably more damage and have a small chance to pop the head entirely, which prevents reanimation.
• Leg shots stagger or drop zombies, giving you time to shove past, inject them, or line up a careful follow-up headshot.

Once I forced myself to slow down and wait for clean head or leg shots instead of panicking, I started clearing rooms with half the ammo. You’ll also see more infected blood drops from clean kills, which feeds into crafting (more on that later).

Common mistake: Rapid-firing into the torso when a zombie gets close. If you’re already in trouble, go for the leg to drop them, shove, and create space instead of dumping the whole mag into their chest.

Tip 2 – Use Knives Smartly (Not Just as Panic Escape)

I wasted so many knives by mashing them during grapples. Yes, using a knife in a grab can save your health, but Grace physically leaves the knife in the enemy. If it doesn’t break, you have to kill that zombie to get the knife back – which often costs more ammo than you saved.

Now I treat knives as a primary tool, not just a panic button:

• Slash standing zombies after a leg shot instead of spending a second bullet.
• Use knives on breakables and minor obstacles instead of shooting them.
• Only use knives in grapples if you’d otherwise be in danger of dying or using a rare healing item.

Crafted makeshift knives cost two scrap, and you can break them back down into one scrap when they’re almost broken. That 1 scrap can then be turned into bullets with infected blood, so even a nearly-dead knife still has value.

Don’t make my mistake of blowing three knives early on just to avoid a bit of chip damage. I ended up with no melee option and had to spend real ammo on every single zombie afterward.

Tip 3 – Sneak and Bypass Fights Whenever You Can

The best way to save ammo is simply not to spend it. On my first run I tried to “clear” each room like a traditional shooter. That’s exactly how you end up with an empty inventory and a hallway full of reanimating corpses.

With Grace, think like a thief, not a soldier:

• Use leaning and peeking to see where zombies are before stepping into a room.
• Close doors behind you to break line of sight and prevent surprise grabs.
• Avoid walking right past “dead” bodies on the floor – some only stand up if you get too close.
• If an area isn’t a major hub you’ll revisit, you often don’t need to kill every zombie in it.

Once I started treating zombies like moving obstacles instead of mandatory kills, my ammo problems almost disappeared.

Tip 4 – Use Leg Shots to Create Opportunities

Leg shots deserve their own mention because of how much they change your options. One bullet to the knee does three important things:

• Staggers or drops most regular zombies.
• Lets you shove and run past in tight hallways.
• Sets up a safe window to use a hemolytic injector or a few quick knife slashes.

In narrow spaces, I’ll often do this sequence: leg shot → stagger → shove → sprint around them. No extra bullets needed. If I need them dead (high-traffic area), I’ll leg-shot, then stab or inject.

Tip 5 – Grab the SNS Pistol Early and Stick With It

You get the B934 pistol fairly early, but it honestly feels underpowered and ammo-hungry. The SNS pistol is the first real upgrade – more damage and a better magazine size make every bullet more efficient.

Here’s how I safely grab it in the West Wing bar and lounge:

• From the second floor, lure the singer down the western corridor toward the stairs.
• Fight her there using a mix of B934 shots and knife attacks so the main room stays clear.
• Once she’s down, go back into the lounge and slip behind the bar in the corner to grab the SNS.

It comes with a few bullets loaded, which can bail you out if things go wrong on the way out. From that point on, I put upgrades into the SNS first. Stronger guns = fewer bullets per kill, which is the whole point of ammo conservation.

Tip 6 – Start Crafting Ammo and Hemolytic Injectors ASAP

The run changed completely once I picked up the blood collector in the East Wing. Suddenly every corpse and every scrap of metal turned into potential ammunition.

• Infected blood + scrap = pistol bullets (you can get a full batch of bullets from just one scrap and a vial of blood).
• Infected blood + empty injector = hemolytic injector, an instant kill on a staggered or unaware zombie.

When I’m down to my last couple of shots, I always check my crafting menu before panicking. More than once I’ve gone from “two bullets and doom” to “a full clip and an injector” just by processing the blood I’d been hoarding.

Priority rule I follow: if I’m above ~10 pistol rounds, I craft injectors; if I’m low, I convert everything into bullets first.

Tip 7 – Turn Worn Knives Into Bullets

Makeshift knives are secretly just “bullet coupons.” It costs two scrap to craft one, and when that knife is nearly dead, you can dismantle it back into one scrap.

That one scrap plus infected blood crafts a full batch of pistol ammo (eight bullets). So a knife that’s only good for a single hit can still become eight shots if you break it down at the right time.

My rule now: once a knife is down to the last sliver of durability, I stop using it and dismantle it instead. It feels wrong the first time, but eight bullets are always worth more than one desperate slash.

Tip 8 – Prioritize Stabilizers Over Basic Health Injectors

Once you find the ruby, you can unlock the parlor next to the West Wing kitchen. That room is huge for ammo economy because it sells permanent upgrades for antique coins – including the stabilizer.

Using a stabilizer on Grace does two big things:

• Reduces recoil and weapon sway so you miss fewer shots.
• Boosts firearm damage, meaning fewer bullets needed per kill.

Later, once you have level 1 security clearance, you can return to the blood lab and solve the reversed blood specimen puzzle to unlock craftable stabilizers and steroids. From that point on, I almost always turn empty injectors into stabilizers instead of basic health injectors.

In my experience, a damage boost that saves you multiple bullets in every fight is worth more than a single extra heal you might never need if you’re playing carefully.

Tip 9 – Take Down the Chef for the Knife Charm

The cleaver-wielding chef looks like an ammo sink at first, so I avoided him on my first run. That was a mistake. When I finally came back later and killed him, he dropped the Pantry Key, which unlocks a pantry containing the Stakeout Takeout charm.

Equipping that charm massively improves Grace’s knife damage and durability. Suddenly those makeshift knives last longer and cut down zombies in fewer swings – which means you spend fewer bullets cleaning up.

You also get a Requiem bullet in that room, effectively refunding one of the special shots you might have used on the chef. If you like conserving ammo via melee, this charm is absolutely worth the investment.

Tip 10 – Treat the Reququum Hand Cannon Like Gold

The Reququum sidearm is absurdly strong: it one-shots almost any regular zombie and can delete beefy threats like the Chef or Chunk with just a couple of hits. Its rounds also pierce, so a well-placed shot can drop two or three zombies lined up in a corridor.

Because the ammo is rare, I only use it for:

• Mini-boss-style enemies that would otherwise eat a full magazine.
• Blister-heads when an injector isn’t an option.
• Corridor cleanups where I can line up multiple zombies for a single piercing shot.

You can craft more 12.7×55 ammo once you:

• Open the level 1 security closet in the East Wing waiting room to get the converged blood specimen.
• Analyze it to unlock the Reququum ammo recipe.
• Use rare metal (found via lockpicks on simple locks around the care center) plus the special blood.

Even with crafting, though, I never spam this gun. Think of every Reququum shot as saving you 6–10 pistol rounds, and use it only when that math makes sense.

Tip 11 – Manage Reanimators and Blister-Heads Carefully

Nothing ruins your ammo budget like enemies getting back up. Two things to watch out for:

• Standard reanimators: Some corpses only stand up when you get close. If you don’t need to pass right by them, give them space and you can often avoid waking them up at all.
• Blister-heads: These swollen-head variants are faster, tougher, and take multiple headshots. Shooting them with regular pistol ammo is a trap – you’ll dump your whole inventory into one enemy.

Here’s what worked for me:

• In low-traffic rooms, just leave suspicious corpses alone and hug the opposite wall.
• In high-traffic areas, try to decapitate enemies via lucky headshots or later with Leon’s finishers so they can’t reanimate.
• If you must deal with a blister-head, use a hemolytic injector on a knocked-down or unaware one, or a single Reququum headshot instead of dumping pistol rounds.

Blister-heads are designed to punish thoughtless shooting. Pick your battles and tools carefully and you’ll spend a fraction of the ammo.

Tip 12 – With Leon, Finish With the Hatchet, Not Bullets

Once the campaign swaps to Leon, the pace shifts to more action-heavy combat – but you can still conserve ammo if you lean hard on his hatchet.

Two key things about Leon’s hatchet:

• It has durability, but never permanently breaks.
• You can resharpen it at any time by holding the parry button and then pressing Square on PlayStation or X on Xbox.

The real value is his melee finisher. When a zombie is staggered (from leg shots, headshots, or other damage), sprint in and trigger the hatchet finisher. This usually destroys the head entirely, permanently preventing reanimation and saving you the bullets you’d otherwise use to “confirm” the kill.

In high-traffic corridors, my loop as Leon is: shoot to stagger → hatchet finisher → resharpen when safe. It feels aggressive, but it’s actually one of the most ammo-efficient ways to keep areas clear.

Putting It All Together

Once I combined these habits – aiming only for heads and legs, treating knives and blood as ammo, prioritizing stabilizers, and saving the Reququum for the worst threats – the early Grace sections went from constant dry-fire clicks to a steady trickle of bullets that always seemed to last just long enough.

The care center is meant to feel oppressive, but it’s also a training ground. If you can stay calm, pick your fights, and squeeze maximum value out of every resource here, the rest of Resident Evil Requiem opens up in a much more manageable way. Stick with these 12 tactics and you’ll not only survive Grace’s ordeal – you’ll arrive at Leon’s chapters with the instincts of a proper survival horror veteran.