Offer your weapon to the Bungie gods the right way, and they'll reward you with free ammo!

(5:49) Various levels and difficulties. To accompany a detailed new article at my website, here's a movie about an old trick you may know as "infinite ammo". I've coined the term 'drop reloading' for the actual deed. It's not something I'd use in serious combat but it can be useful in novel gameplay and tricking, which is why I've covered it. I've only seen it described for clip-based weapons but it actually applies to the shotty as well, though you need to drop it very fast and might lose a shell or two.

Released April 1st 2018, gameplay recorded March 28th-30th 2018.

00:02 (Rocket launcher & sniper rifle) For this intro segment using a rocket launcher and sniper rifle, I used an old Heroic save in which a load of covies are strung out and fairly static, forming a nice shooting gallery. It was a situation I got by accident once, when experimenting with set-up work for the twin bridges megabattle. Fun to play about with, so I kept it. Two key points covered: you have to drop your weapon early enough, and mustn't pick it up too soon. All the details are in my article. With the launcher, the first two reloads are initiated manually and the second two automatically. I made a point of showing both types.

Incidentally, when I'm sniping the leftmost covies I get an Elite double kill without realizing. Didn't notice until I reviewed the footage later.

02:01 (AR & pistol) Some more AOTCR play. This time I'm vandalising the first bridge and showing drop reloading for the AR and pistol. With the pistol you have a bit less time to drop it than with the AR.

02:39 (Needler) The needler needs to be dropped relatively fast too. Here's some play using a couple of vanquished covies as pin cushions for entertainment. A novel thing about the needler is that there's a visual indication of reload completion, so there's no problem knowing when it's ok to pick up.

03:09 (Shotgun) Moving to 343 Guilty Spark on Easy, here's some fun with a Grunt to show drop reloading with a shotgun. As expected, I lose a reserve shell with the manual reload because I can't drop the shotty fast enough before a shell gets near the chamber. If you check frame by frame you'll see that the shell doesn't actually enter. Afterwards, I show that with an automatic reload I can get complete success.

04:06 (Needler with low reserve) If your reserve is less than the reload amount needed, the drop reload is multi-phase, with the reserve acting as a limit on how much can be loaded at a time. Here we've got a needler with reserve 2, hence the reloading proceeds 2 needles at a time. This was on Heroic. Of course, I'm being quite a bad cyborg in this segment for the sake of comedy. Just after this footage, the remaining Marine turned on me.

04:55 (AR with low reserve) Playing on a little further after that needler situation (which was checkpointed so I could revert for retries), here's a more extreme low reserve situation. An AR with only 1 round in reserve. I zoom in with a sniper rifle to show the readout increasing, one by one. I did quite a few takes for this segment, but I liked this one best because I got the AR to spin one revolution so the readout came back into view. All the other times I tried it, the spinning didn't work out so favourably.

Closing remarks I was reminded of this old trick by a YouTube comment from Sniper16 (who used to frequent High Impact Halo) on my previous movie. That led me to investigate. Coincidentally I've got a movie topic coming up which could make use of this trick; so maybe I'll be giving it another mention soon.

All the AOTCR play was on Heroic, while the 343 Guilty Spark play was on Easy, being the only difficulty for which the shotty is available.

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