IRON NEST has four endings, and you can collect all of them by reloading the final mission rather than replaying the campaign. Three are decided by what you choose to fire into the city. The fourth is decided by turning the guns around.
The four outcomes
Each ending is a distinct narrative branch with its own name:
- A City Silent — the target city is wiped from the map entirely.
- A City in Celebration — the liberated city comes out to meet your forces.
- A City Subdued — the city surrenders and accepts peace.
- The Road Not Taken — the city is spared through an alternative path.
The naming is not decorative. Three of these describe what happens to the city, and the fourth describes what happens to you, which is a fair summary of how they differ mechanically.
Three endings are a choice of ammunition
The first three outcomes come down to which round you put into the city, and this is the cleanest ending system in the game precisely because it maps onto the mechanic you have been practising for fifteen operations.
Firing lethal rounds produces the silent city. Firing less-lethal rounds — tear gas is the documented example — produces the celebration outcome. Firing a STAR or propaganda round produces the subdued city, which surrenders rather than being destroyed or liberated.
Because all three route through the same final mission, the efficient way to see them is to complete the mission, note the outcome, then reload and change your loadout. Nothing earlier in the campaign locks any of these three off.
The fourth ending is a different problem
The Road Not Taken requires killing your own command structure rather than firing on the city, and it is substantially harder than the other three. It is not a dialogue choice you can take at leisure.
The moment you turn on your own command, you lose all requisition. That has an immediate consequence: with no requisition you cannot reposition, which converts the remainder of the mission into a timed problem you must finish from where you happen to be standing. Everything you need has to be computed and loaded before you commit.
This is why the betrayal route requires preparation the other three do not. The other endings ask you to choose a shell; this one asks you to have already solved the whole fire mission before you make the choice, because you will not get another chance to work the map.
Preparing the betrayal run
Treat it like a counter-battery mission rather than a story beat. Plot every target you will need before you fire anything, write the solutions on the card, and confirm your charges against the range from your current position — not from where you would have moved to.
Load what you can in advance. With the second gun prepared while the first is still settling, you buy back some of the time the requisition loss costs you. Batching targets on similar bearings matters more here than anywhere else in the campaign, because traverse is the one expense you cannot budget your way out of.
What counts as "the fastest ending"
Community discussion around this mission tends to frame the betrayal route as a speedrun problem, since killing the command structure ends the campaign directly. Whether it is genuinely the shortest path depends on how much preparation time you count, and that framing is worth treating with some care — a run that ends quickly but requires twenty minutes of map work beforehand is not obviously fast.
Spoiler and version caveats
Everything above is a description of endings, so it is inherently a spoiler for the campaign's final operation. There is no way to write this page otherwise.
The specific ammunition names attached to each branch — which exact less-lethal round, which exact propaganda shell — are unconfirmed on this site. The mechanism is confirmed by multiple community sources, but the individual round names have not been verified here against the current build.
Whether any ending is affected by choices made earlier in the campaign is also unconfirmed. Community reports describe all four as reachable from the final mission alone, which implies they are not, but that is an absence of evidence rather than a confirmation.
Where this gets discussed
Two Steam threads carry the bulk of the community's ending discussion, both spoiler-marked. They are the fastest place to check whether a patch has changed a trigger, and they are where the ammunition-to-outcome mapping was worked out in the first place. The official Discord covers the same ground with developer participation.