Firing a gun leaves spent casings where the shots were fired. Nobody sees them from a distance and nothing announces them; they are found by searching the ground. This guide remains a draft while the full two-player recovery, booking, and comparison flow is still being verified.
What firing leaves behind
Shots fired from a firearm leave brass at the spot the shooting started. Melee weapons and tools that take no ammunition leave nothing.
Casings do not appear as objects you can see or walk over. They are not a marker, an alert, or a police notification: firing a gun does not summon anyone. Somebody has to be at the scene and search for them.
Brass does not stay recoverable forever. A scene nobody works eventually stops yielding anything.
Search the ground
- Stand on foot at the spot you want to search, where you can act freely.
- Use
/casings. - Stay still until the search finishes. Moving away, getting into a vehicle, being restrained, or being incapacitated ends it.
- Read the result.
Use the stop action under /casings to end a search early. An interrupted or cancelled search recovers nothing and changes nothing.
A search that finds nothing means this patch of ground is clear. It tells you nothing about any other spot, and it does not prove that no shots were fired here.
A large scene is not cleared in one search. Standing still to work it takes real time, and that time is the risk.
What the search does depends on who you are
An on-duty officer holding the assigned recovery capability bags what the search finds as evidence items, which arrive in their inventory.
Everybody else clears what the search finds. The brass is gathered up and pocketed, and no evidence item is produced. This is the ordinary way to clean up after a shooting, and it is available to any character willing to stand at the scene long enough.
Two people searching the same ground do not both get the same find. Whoever finishes first takes it.
Book and compare recovered casings
Recovered casings are ordinary items. They can be given, dropped, stored, and taken, and every movement leaves a custody record, so losing them before they reach a locker loses the evidence.
An officer books them at an authorized evidence locker and submits them for examination the same way as any other exhibit. See Evidence custody and forensic reports for booking, examination, and reading a report.
A completed report on casings describes the ammunition and how many rounds were fired. It may also connect them to a firearm the same organization has already booked, and to other scenes where casings from that firearm were recovered and booked.
The comparison covers what the evidence room held when the examination was ordered. Recovering a firearm afterwards does not rewrite a finished report; that comparison has to be ordered again.
Reports are roleplay intelligence. They do not create a charge, a conviction, or any automatic consequence, and they do not name a shooter.
Persistence and recovery
Recovered casing items, bookings, completed reports, and the record of who cleared a scene all persist across reconnects and restarts.
- Your search was interrupted: nothing was recovered and nothing changed. Start again when you can stand still.
- The search found nothing where you expected brass: somebody may have already cleared it, or the scene may be too old. Do not repeat the command to test the mechanic.
- You were told another search got there first: somebody else finished on that find before you. Nothing was lost on your side.
- You were told you have nowhere to put them: free inventory space and search again; a find that cannot be carried is left on the ground for the next search.
- A casing item is missing: check your inventory and custody history before assuming it was taken.
Scene timing, search mechanics detail, and comparison internals are intentionally omitted.