Every mission in IRON NEST awards a bronze, a silver and a gold medal, and the game ships with over a hundred of them in total. Gold is the one people search for, and the honest answer is that the game does not tell you what gold requires. The thresholds exist, they are per-mission, and they are not surfaced anywhere in the interface.
Why the requirements are hidden
IRON NEST does not display medal conditions before, during or after a mission. You finish an operation, you are told which medals you earned, and you are left to infer what the next tier wanted. For a game built entirely around reading instruments, the omission is conspicuous enough that the community treated it as a puzzle rather than an oversight.
The requirements that circulate publicly were extracted from the game's installation files rather than observed in play. That matters when you read any medal list, including this one: those numbers are as accurate as whoever read the files, and they can change with a patch without any announcement. Treat every specific threshold as provisional until you have hit it yourself.
What the conditions are built from
Across missions, gold conditions are assembled from a recurring set of measures rather than one universal rule. The categories confirmed to appear are kill streaks, total enemy kills, requisition limits, reconnaissance restrictions, accuracy, and counter-battery response time, plus objectives specific to individual missions.
That mix explains why gold feels inconsistent between operations. A mission that grades you on requisition rewards restraint — every ranging round you fire is budget spent — while a mission graded on counter-battery time rewards the opposite, since hesitating at the map table is what kills you. Reading which category a mission is testing is most of the work.
Some categories interact badly with each other, which is where the difficulty concentrates. Accuracy and requisition pull together, since ranging rounds cost both. Counter-battery time pulls against both, because the fastest way to a target is often a ranging round you would rather not spend.
Two named examples
Two medals are documented by name with their conditions, and both follow the same shape: earn gold on all performance medals within a single mission.
- Marksman's Honour — earn gold on all performance medals in the mission Fire and Light.
- Duty Fulfilled — earn gold on all performance medals in the mission Calibration Fire.
This tells you something structural. Some medals are per-mission performance grades, and others are meta-medals awarded for clearing the full performance set within one operation. If you are chasing completion, the meta-medals are the ones that require a clean run rather than a good-enough one.
It also means the medal count is not simply three per mission. Meta-medals sit on top of the performance grades, which is part of how a fifteen-mission campaign reaches a total above a hundred.
Medals are not Steam achievements
The two systems are separate and easy to conflate. IRON NEST has 33 Steam achievements and over 100 in-game medals. A guide that quotes "33" for medals is describing the achievement list, and a guide that quotes "100+" for achievements has the same error in reverse.
Practically, this means completing the achievement list does not clear the medal board, and clearing the medal board does not unlock every achievement. If your goal is the Steam completion badge, work the achievement list; if your goal is the in-game display, work the medals.
The demo complicates this further: it lists the medal system with 100+ medals available, but whether demo medals carry into the full game is unconfirmed.
How to approach a gold run
Because the conditions are hidden, the reliable method is to play a mission once for information and once for score. On the first pass, complete the objectives without optimising and note what the mission put pressure on — did it constrain your requisition, did it start counter-battery early, did it hand you a recon limit.
On the second pass, plan the whole fire mission before firing. Pre-computed solutions cost nothing at the map table when nothing is shooting back, and they are what make accuracy and response-time conditions achievable. Batching targets on similar bearings reduces traverse time, which is the single largest consumer of your clock in any timed condition.
Requisition-limited missions invert the usual advice. Ranging rounds are the obvious expense, but repairs draw from the same budget, so taking damage early can quietly put a gold out of reach before you have fired anything meaningful.
Triangulation accuracy is the common bottleneck
Most performance categories trace back to one skill. Accuracy depends on the solution being right the first time. Requisition depends on not needing ranging rounds to correct it. Counter-battery time depends on the plan already being on the card.
All three improve from the same practice, which is why the triangulation drill matters more for medal hunting than any mission-specific trick. In particular, re-measuring from the nest rather than copying an observer's bearing is the difference between a correction cycle and a first-round hit — and the correction cycle is what costs you the medal.
What is not yet confirmed
The exact numeric threshold for any individual medal — how many kills, what accuracy percentage, how many seconds — is unconfirmed on this site. Community lists exist, but they originate from file extraction rather than developer documentation, and none of them has been checked against the current build here.
The full medal roster, with each entry mapped to its mission and tier, is also unconfirmed. Building it properly means reading the game files directly and re-verifying after each patch, which is the work this page will be replaced by rather than a list copied from elsewhere.
Where the community numbers get worked out
Steam's discussion boards are where medal conditions actually get resolved. The Gold Medal Hunter thread collects per-mission findings, and individual threads exist for the medals people get stuck on — the Liberation — Minimum Assets medal has its own discussion because the condition is not obvious from play.
The official Discord serves the same function with faster turnaround, since the developers read it. If a threshold on any site contradicts what you are seeing in-game after an update, those two places are where the correction will appear first.