Iron Nest Medals: How to Earn Gold

Iron Nest medals are per-mission performance awards graded Bronze, Silver, and Gold. Each mission sets its own thresholds, and the community Medal Guide groups the objectives into four recurring types: how many Requisition Credits you spend, whether you hold a streak of consecutive hits or kills, whether you avoid friendly casualties, and whether you accept restrictions on reconnaissance or support.

You do not need every medal — or every Gold — to keep advancing. Players confirm that progression to the next mission is not gated behind medal completion, and some challenges are clearly designed to be revisited once new equipment becomes available. Medals are a layer of mastery on top of the campaign, not a wall in front of it.

How medals work in Iron Nest

Medals are earned inside individual missions, not across the whole campaign. When a mission ends, your performance is measured against that mission’s medal conditions, and each medal is awarded at the grade you reached: Bronze, Silver, or Gold.

The most important rule is that exact thresholds vary by mission. A spending limit or kill streak from one operation should never be assumed for the next. Before chasing a grade, open the mission’s own medal listing and read its conditions as written — the community guide warns against carrying a condition from one mission into another.

The community Medal Guide is the reference players point each other to when medal questions come up. It lists mission medals alongside their Bronze, Silver, and Gold requirements, and it is organized per operation precisely because the numbers do not transfer between missions.

The four medal condition types

The community Medal Guide describes medal objectives as measuring four general kinds of performance:

• Requisition Credit spending — conditions built around the mission budget, rewarding crews that keep expenditure under a stated ceiling.
• Consecutive hits or kills — streak conditions that punish wasted shots and reward clean, confirmed fire.
• Avoidance of friendly casualties — conditions that hold your fire discipline to a zero or low friendly-loss standard.
• Reconnaissance or support restrictions — conditions that limit how much outside help you may call on during the operation.

A single mission can combine several of these at once, and each combination has its own Bronze, Silver, and Gold cutoffs. Because the exact numbers shift from mission to mission, treat any threshold you see quoted for one operation as local to that operation unless the mission listing says otherwise.

Read together, the four categories reward discipline rather than speed: budget discipline on spending, shooting discipline on streaks, and restraint on friendly fire and outside support. A crew can finish a mission cleanly and still leave higher medal grades on the table.

Earning a medal vs upgrading it to Gold

There is a real difference between earning a medal and upgrading it to Gold. Earning the medal at Bronze already counts as earning it; pushing the same medal to Gold is a separate, stricter pass against tighter thresholds.

Treat the first clear of a mission as a baseline, not a verdict. Whatever grade the mission awards on that run records how the machine was crewed that day, and the medal remains open to upgrade whenever you return with a better plan or better equipment.

A first playthrough does not require every Gold medal. Community reports note that some Gold medals are easier — or only practical at all — after returning to an earlier mission with cheaper shells or later unlocks. If a Gold condition looks unreasonable on your first visit, log it and move on rather than burning attempts on equipment you do not yet have.

Planning a Gold medal replay

Replay is where most Gold medals are actually earned, and preparation matters more than reflexes. Before re-entering a mission, record its exact conditions for the grade you want: the requisition limit, the kill or hit streak, the reconnaissance rules, and the friendly-casualty ceiling.

The community guide suggests a useful checklist shape for each attempt: mission name, medal name, the Bronze/Silver/Gold conditions, recommended ammunition, whether reconnaissance is allowed, and the actions that invalidate the result. Ammunition choice feeds directly into the spending and streak conditions, so review the shell types guide alongside the medal listing, and check the missions guide for the operation you are replaying. For a single-medal walkthrough, see the Austere Service Medal guide.

When a medal does not unlock

Community reports describe occasional inconsistencies between displayed conditions, the conditions the game actually tracks, and all-Gold achievements. Thresholds should be rechecked after patches, since a condition read from an old run may no longer match the current build.

Before assuming a bug, separate two questions: did the run meet the displayed condition, and did the game track the same condition it displayed? Community reports describe mismatches between the two, so a medal that looks earned on paper can still fail to register.

Whether every all-Gold achievement requires meeting every Gold condition in a single run is not settled — it may, or the failure may be a current-version bug. If a result fails to unlock despite meeting the stated conditions, preserve screenshots, check the patch notes, and report the issue through Steam Community or the official Discord so the discrepancy is on record.

Bottom line

Medals in Iron Nest are mission-local performance grades built from four condition families: spending, streaks, friendly-fire discipline, and reconnaissance restraint. Earn Bronze as you go, and treat Gold as a deliberate replay project with cheaper shells and later equipment.

Keep a written record of each mission’s exact conditions, recheck them after patches, and you will know whether a missing medal is a failed attempt or a tracking bug worth reporting.