IRON NEST Medals — Every Medal and Its Bronze, Silver and Gold Thresholds

How medals work

Each medal is one measurement with three thresholds. BUILD DATA A medal scores a single metric — seconds until your first shot, average impact distance, requisition spent, longest kill streak — and awards bronze, silver or gold depending on which threshold you clear. Several medals add a second clause: Rapid Engagement Medal requires a fast first shot and a kill count, Unaided Fire Distinction requires kills and that you requisitioned no aerial reconnaissance.

Medals are assigned per mission, and this is the single most useful thing to know about the system. BUILD DATA COMMUNITY Each mission has its own set of medals in play. If a medal is not in that mission's set, you cannot earn it there no matter how well you perform — which is why players sometimes hit a gold threshold exactly and receive nothing. See Rapid Engagement for the worked example.

Same medal, different mission, different numbers. BUILD DATA Because the mission decides the threshold set, "the requirement for Austere Service Medal" is not a single number. There are six, and they range from spending 250 or less for bronze down to spending 10 or less for gold.

Where you see them. COMMUNITY Medals are shown on the post-mission results screen as a row of icons. That comes from community reports and screenshots rather than any official documentation.

Can you re-earn a medal by replaying a mission? UNVERIFIED We do not know. We have no reviewable source either way, and we would rather say that than guess.

One boundary. The build also contains four ending entries alongside the medals. They have no metric and no bronze or silver — only a gold condition tied to reaching that ending. What those conditions are belongs on the endings guide, not here.

Why Rapid Engagement Medal can look impossible

This is the question nobody had answered — not the guide sites, and not the official community server, where a player asked and got no reply in the thread we searched.

The report. COMMUNITY A player fired at 48 seconds and destroyed 30 targets — clearing both gold conditions on their face, with room to spare — and received nothing. They asked publicly when FirstShotTime starts counting. No answer came back.

What is actually going on. Medals are assigned per mission, and Rapid Engagement Medal appears in only one mission's medal set. COMMUNITY Everywhere else, the medal is simply not being scored, so clearing its thresholds does nothing. The mission attribution comes from a single third-party source and we have not been able to verify it against the build — the mission graphs in the build do not carry medal payloads — so treat the specific mission as likely rather than certain. The mechanism behind it, that medals belong to mission sets, is solid.

And the timing question they asked. IN-GAME TEXT The game answers it in the medal's own description: the shot has to be swift "after receiving orders". The clock does not start when the mission loads or when you take the controls. It starts when the order arrives.

This is not a bug and it is not a broken medal. It is a medal you can only earn where it is on the card.

How to work toward gold

Evidence: SITE-GROUPED, built on BUILD DATA metrics

The thresholds are facts; the advice below is ours, grouped by what each medal actually measures.

Accuracy. AverageImpactDistanceFromNearestTarget scores your average impact distance across the whole mission, and gold asks for 0.3 or lower. Averages are unforgiving — a single wild round can put gold out of reach for the rest of the mission, so it is usually worth spending an extra correction rather than sending a hopeful shot.

Ammunition efficiency. Two different medals score this. One counts shots fired outright and wants very few. The other scores kills per shot — and crucially, it carries a minimum kill requirement alongside the ratio, so firing three perfect rounds and stopping does not qualify. You have to be economical and productive at the same time.

Streaks and windows. One medal scores your longest unbroken kill streak, another your fastest three-kill window. Both reward preparing several firing solutions before you start shooting rather than solving each target from scratch.

Friendly fire. Gold on the friendly-fire medal is zero. Not "few" — zero. This is the one medal where a single mistake ends the attempt.

Requisition — and mind the direction. Two medals score requisition spending in opposite directions. Austere Service Medal wants you to spend as little as possible. Quartermaster's Distinction wants the opposite: 150 or more for bronze, rising to 600 for gold. You cannot chase both in the same run, so decide before you start buying. What the money buys is on the requisition console reference.

Reconnaissance. Unaided Fire Distinction requires that you requisitioned no aerial reconnaissance at all, on top of a kill count. Buying a single scout plane ends it.

Shell choice feeds several of these. Which shell you load does not change your firing solution, but it changes what happens at the impact point — which is what accuracy, kill-count and single-impact medals are scoring. See shell types.

For how to actually fly a specific mission, use the mission walkthroughs. This page gives conditions, not routes.

Medals and Steam achievements

They are two separate systems. In-game medals are the bronze / silver / gold awards described on this page: 15 names, 28 threshold sets, read from the build. Steam achievements are a separate list attached to your Steam profile.

Where they connect: fifteen of the Steam achievements are tied to taking gold in a given mission. That is the real link between the two systems, and it is why people conflate them.

The 33 / 14 / 15 / 4 breakdown comes from a single third-party source and we have not independently verified it; Steam's own achievement page for the game is the place to check it. The four ending-linked achievements are covered on the endings guide. We are not reproducing the achievement list here — a page that carries both counts is how the two systems get confused in the first place.