Bmats are short for Basic Materials. They are the lifeblood of the war effort in Foxhole. With them you can make anything from bullets and rifles to bunkers and defences.
Not only is it paramount for the war effort for them to be constantly produced, it's vital that those Bmats get from where they're made, to where they're needed. Be it a factory for making things, or a front for building and repair works.
In this guide, I'm gonna walk you through where Bmats come from and the best ways to get them from A to B.
The Refinery
Refineries are easy to spot on the map as a hammer symbol
Welcome to the refinery where Bmats are born. When a soldier really hates themselves, they will hide away in a salvage field and find comfort in the toil of scrooping.
The accumulated salvage from all that scrooping gets dumped into the refinery where it can be made into fuel, explosive material, or more importantly for our purposes, Bmats!
Ok. What is scroop or scrooping or whatever? I keep seeing it in chat.
This writer scrooping all the materials he needs to make this guide. Go on, son! Hit that salvage!
It's a holdover term from back in the days when the chat box would automatically censor the word "Scrap" to read "S***". As scrap is a shorter word than salvage. "Scroop" became the go to word and it has affectionately stuck ever since.
While those who dump to public so Bmats can be constantly churned out are the blessed unnamed heroes, you may need to scroop some yourself if the refinery is dry. Thankfully, Bmats are plentiful and the scroop flows as long as good soldiers are there to scroop it.
Transferring Bmats
Bmats are no good to anyone sitting in the refinery. They need to be in factories being made into useful supplies or shipped to the front as building material. So how are we gonna shift these babies? Here are 5 methods from bad to good.
5. Fat walking
The colloquial term for loading your butt with stuff to the point where you are massively over encumbered. Then walking at a snail's pace to where it needs to be. It goes without saying that this is the least efficient way to move, well, anything at all really.
Just about the only time you should need to fat walking Bmats around is if you're taking them somewhere very nearby. A good example would be taking 100 Bmats over to the garage to hammer yourself a truck…
The Garage can be located on the map with a truck symbol. There you can build yourself a truck by pressing E, choosing the truck and hammering 100 Bmats into the blueprint here.
…Or 25 Bmats to craft a lovely sign.
Don’t forget to commend your Logi unless it's me. I am a forever OCdt and I like it that way.
You’ll notice as well in that last picture that I have a backpack uniform on. These are very useful uniforms and are available to both factions. They reduce the encumbrance of materials like Bmats.
To load yourself up with Bmats and crush the skeleton of your poor soldier, simply interact with the refinery with E key. There you will be presented with the refinery menu. Click on the public Bmats if there are any and you will assemble them into your inventory.
The stockpile to the right is all materials that are public and anyone can grab them.
Onward, soldier. Drag your heavy burden to where it is needed. Hopefully the war won't be over by the time you get there.
And I will walk 500 Mats and will walk 500 more just to be the man who walked 1,000 mats to fall down on the floor…
4. Trucking
Now that you've given your poor soldier countless musculoskeletal injuries, it's probably time you gave them a rest. Thankfully, there are more efficient ways of moving around Bmats.
If, like me, you decided to fat walk 100 Bmats over to the garage, you'll be able to hammer yourself your very own truck.
The humble truck. Workhorse of Logi
This lightweight, supply truck has its own version per faction but both are essentially the same. They can carry any kind of cargo from one place to another. Up to 15 slots for crates and stackable items. In our case, we want them to haul Bmats.
Thankfully, Caoiva's road network is quite extensive and transferring Bmats by road is one of the most favoured and accessible methods to move your Bmats around. The truck can haul up to 1,500 Bmats fully laden and can transfer them straight into the stockpile of any base or bunker.
Pulling Bmats from the refinery works exactly the same way as before.
Simply drive your truck to the front of the refinery and press E. You will be presented with the exact same screen as before and you can pull the Bmats straight into the truck's inventory. From there, you can drive them to either a factory to make things or put them straight into a frontline base.
Most players will leave a map marker for a Logi list. A place for players to tell Logi what they need. You can also hover over the base icon and see what they have in their stockpile. A radio is essential as it will keep map intel like this updated.
From here, I could see that a base near me needed some Soldier Supplies or “Shirts”. So I took my newly minted Bmats and transferred some of them into the factory to get some made.
The factory can be found on the map with the factory symbol but they usually are never far from a refinery.
Driving up to the factory, all you need to do is press E and use the tabs on the production menu to find what you want to make and queue it up. Press the go button and the timer will begin.. It’ll take the Bmats straight from your truck's inventory and give you a time on when it will be done.
In this example, you can see that I have some “crates” of Bmats in my truck as well. This is merely a way of “reserving” Bmats so you can still move them from a refinery or stockpile and put them into private or reserved stockpiles.
This is how large clans and regiments build up surplus for operations without people taking their resources. Crated Bmats need to be unpacked to be used but can be submitted straight to a base and will function just the same.
It’s also a good tip to have some Bmats in your truck regardless of what you’re hauling. You can repair your truck with them as long as you keep your hammer on you.
You can also build signs and observation posts on your route if you find there are parts of the roads that are uncovered by OP’s (Observation Posts). These provide your faction with up to date intelligence and an early warning of partisans waiting to ambush Logi.
As before, driving your truck up to the bunker base or town base and pressing E will open up its menu. There is no need to get out of your truck at any point.
Once you’ve reached your destination. In this case, the frontline base in desperate need of shirts and Bmats, press E to open its menu. Right click on anything in your inventory and hit “Submit all to Stockpile” to transfer all those Bmats and the four crates of shirts I made into the base.
If you have cargo bound for other bases, simply choose what to submit and what not to with the “Submit to Stockpile” option. Harvest your commends and be on your way for your next delivery.
Truly the workhorse of Logi, the trusty truck will do you no wrong. The best method for supplying the front line. Make sure you take a radio with you. Check your routes and watch out for partisans when you get closer to the front lines.
3. The Flatbed Mule
The flatbed truck in all its glory. Normally, these are in plentiful supply in most public stockpiles. Kinda like a shopping cart, it's usually a return after use type deal.
1,500 Bmats sounds like a lot but we can do better than that. Especially if we want more Bmats to go where they're needed. That's where the humble, civilian flatbed comes in.
A marvellous machine that is utilised by both factions, this can haul anything that is packable and shippable on its bed. While we can't load this up with Bmats, we can absolutely load a shipping container onto it. A shipping container that we can fill to the brim with a whopping 6,000 Bmats!
The stockpile menu at a seaport. Under the shippables tab you’ll find any public available, empty containers such as this one I’m assembling here.
To get yourself a shipping container, you can either build one yourself at a construction yard for 100 Bmats. Or, like I’m doing here, grab one from the public stockpile. Assemble it on the deck and, using the crane that all stockpiles have attached to them, transfer it onto your flatbed.
Holding the right mouse button and aiming will move the crane. Hover over the top of the container until you see this symbol. Click left mouse button and the crane will pick it up.
Hold the right mouse button and aim at the flatbed’s truck bed. The crane will swing your container around to it.
When the container is over the trucks bed, the cog symbols will tell you that it's able to be dropped. Left click and the crane will drop it onto the flatbed and you are ready to go.
It’s also important to note that shippables like the shipping container cannot be accessed while they are packed for transit. To package and unpack them, press E next to them to interact with them. Press the box button at the bottom of the menu that says “Package” when you hover over it with your cursor. Then your packaged container is ready to move with a crane.
Refineries come with a crane attached and a pad for dropping shippables.
Once you have your empty container, drive it over to a refinery and repeat the crane process there but in reverse.
Loading the container with resources works exactly the same. Plus the refinery menu will show up automatically as soon as the container hits the pad.
As you can see in this example, I have 2,500 Bmats that I prepared earlier in true Blue Peter fashion. All you have to do is retrieve them and they will be loaded into your shipping container. Don’t forget to hit that “Package” button when you’re done to save you have to get out of the crane. Once you’re loaded, crane the container back onto your flatbed and you’re ready to roll.
Just like with our humble truck, we will have to go by road but that's ok. We can see some lovely Caoivish sights along the way. Make sure you take a radio and keep an eye on your map for partisans the closer you get to where you're going.
Unfortunately, you cannot place these Bmats straight into a town or base. You can, however, unload the container with a crane at a stockpile or seaport. There you can submit the container's contents to the stockpile.
Place the container back onto the pad of a stockpile and submit its contents in the same way you would with a bunker base.
If you’ve made the Bmats yourself and pulled them from the refinery “as crates” then they can be placed into reserved or private stockpiles to be saved for later. If you’re doing the lord's work then submit them to public and harvest those commends.
This method is a good way of getting a large amount of Bmats from a refinery in the rear, to a stockpile closer to the frontline. There, smaller trucks will be able to pull those Bmats and distribute them to the bases and bunkers in the region.
2. Shipping
6,000 Bmats is quite a bit but trucking them by road and having to load and unload your container at each end can get a little tedious. What if we could move five times as much Bmats in one trip? And we won’t need roads at all.
Boats! Boats! Boats!
Say hello to the BMS Ironship. A freighter that can hold 5 shippable objects in its cargo hold. That's 5 whole shipping containers dropped by the crane into its open doors. Giving it a potential capacity for 30,000 Bmats in one trip. If you fancy getting your Foxhole sea legs, then this is the method for you.
Open wide for Kezzer’s Cargo!
To load this bad boy, you’ll need to get in it with the Q button and press F to open its cargo doors. There, presuming you are right next to a seaport, you’ll be able to assemble and fill your containers. Using the crane, load them one by one into the cargo of your
Don’t let the animation fool you. This will hold 4 more containers or anything else that can be shipped for that matter.
Once loaded, close your cargo doors, smash a bottle of champagne on the hull to christen your vessel and away you go to sail the Caoivish seas, sailor.
The downsides here are that you are limited to where you can ship them. Friendly seaports or player built ports are really your only options. Still, as with the flatbed, the goal isn't to get these Bmats to the front. It's to get them quickly and efficiently to a safe point, closer to the front. Where they can be quickly distributed to front like bunkers and bases by road.
This is a vital part of Foxhole's logistics economy for both factions. A true testament to the grand scale of this game where individual players move these materials around the continent sized map so that players fighting in the trenches have all the bombs and bullets that they need.
1. Rail
The BMS Blackbolt
This is a newer addition to Foxhole and one that a lot of players had been asking for for a while. One that I was unfortunately unable to recreate in game due to it being very early in the war at time of writing. It's also one that requires a huge amount of team cooperation and organisation to pull off.
The ability to ship materials by rail opens up all kinds of avenues for players to get large amounts of stuff around quickly. With the train car and its coal car attached, the BMS Blackbolt can pull an additional 13 cars. What does that mean for us? Well it means we can haul 13 flatbed cars with a full shipping container full of Bmats. That's 78,000 Bmats!
Of course, using a train has its drawbacks. You are not only limited to the tracks it runs on but those tracks need to be built and maintained. Also, loading and unloading the train at its start point and end point will be a mammoth task for one poor soldier on their own.
I would recommend finding some friends or a dedicated clan if this is the way you wanna haul your stuff. You’ll also need a wrench in order to connect the cars to one another.
As it's still a relatively new addition to the game and has only just had some exciting additions to it this update, it is very exciting to see just how far rail networks can go. If previous wars were anything to go by, it's definitely a very versatile method for shipping and maintaining the war effort.
Conclusion
Regardless of how you want to transfer Bmats or anything else within Foxhole, as you can clearly see, there are plenty of ways to go about it. It’s all a matter of scaling and cost effectiveness within the war effort. How much time, effort and planning is needed, is entirely dependent on the scale of what’s required.
In huge, weeks long wars, the production and delivery of war materials is a ceaseless but vitally important grind. One that many players dedicate hours to, to keep the war going and their team winning. You may never meet these players but taking part in the larger logistical war effort is a truly rewarding part of Foxhole. One that really puts into perspective the scale and scope of this unique game.
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