It sounds like it might be a joke, but The Callisto Protocol‘s Skunk Gun is one of the most useful weapons in your arsenal as you’re learning the ins and outs of Black Iron Prison. It’s also easily missed, as it’s the only weapon in the game that is, in the traditional sense, hidden.
Here’s where to go and what to do in order to find the blueprints for the devastating Skunk Gun in The Callisto Protocol.
Where to Find the Skunk Gun Schematic
In Chapter 3, “Aftermath,” your trip through the prison’s medical lab will end in an unplanned elevator ride to the basement. Here, you’ll have to deal with a biophage infestation, including a new kind of organic trap.
When you first land in the basement, after you get jumped by the head trap, you may notice a dead gate switch nearby (above), which requires a fuse to work. There’s a lot down here to distract you from this, though, and it’s easy to leave the basement without seeing what’s behind this gate.
Make your way to the other end of the basement, where several biophages are on patrol around an unattended fuse. This is arguably the toughest fight in TCP up to this point, and if you go loud, it’s very difficult to win with the tools you have at the moment.
One thing that the game never explicitly tells you, however, is that GRP kills don’t technically break stealth. If you throw a biophage into a spike wall or bounce a fuel tank off its head, other nearby biophages will chalk that up to random misadventure and won’t realize you’re there.
If you’re careful, you can kill all the biophages near the fuse with GRP tricks without having to expend a single bullet. If you do end up having to fire a shot, watch out for another biophage that can spawn from a vent on the wall nearby.
Either way, once all the biophages have been dealt with, grab the gate fuse off the floor.
From here, backtrack to your entry point and use the fuse on the switch mentioned above. This opens the gate nearby, which gives you access to an open ventilation shaft.
That shaft takes you to a locked workshop, where you can find and acquire the Skunk Gun Schematic and an Energy Converter. The schematic takes up an inventory slot, but is automatically uploaded the next time you use a Reforger station.
Once you’ve got the schematic, backtrack through the ventilation shaft, retrieve the gate fuse, and progress with the chapter as you normally would.
You can now buy the Skunk Gun from the Reforger for 800 credits. While the name suggests it might be some kind of non-lethal stink bomb, the Skunk Gun is actually a one-handed shotgun. It’s devastating up close, and still inflicts significant damage at medium range. More importantly, it hits everything in the area code in front of you when you fire, which makes the Skunk Gun excellent for casual crowd control. On your first run through the game, it’s a great problem solver.
Once you own the Skunk Gun, it stays in your inventory throughout the rest of the game. Its ammunition is added to the random drop table, so it can be found anywhere you’d get Hand Cannon rounds, and you can buy more from Reforgers for 70 credits per stack of 4 shells. This is roughly half as expensive as any other weapon’s ammo.
As a downside, the Skunk Gun only holds 4 shells after its capacity upgrade, there isn’t much it does that the Riot Gun doesn’t do better (aside from being available a full two chapters earlier), and it’s effectively useless at long range. It’s also a short gun, which means it shares the same trigger mount as the Hand Cannon; Jacob can’t simply switch from one to the other, but has to laboriously take one apart then put one together. In a pinch, you won’t have the time to do that.
