Best Fire Works Augments in BO7 Zombies

Fire Works is one of the stronger offensive Ammo Mods in Black Ops 7 Zombies. The build that gets the most out of it pairs Fire Wheel up top with Short Fuse and High Yield underneath.

We ran every Fire Works Major and Minor across normal survival and high-round Cursed runs. Here is what actually held up. We also cover where the other three Majors earn their slot instead of Fire Wheel.

The Best Fire Works Augment Build

Fire Wheel is the only Major here that keeps working after the flares are spent. That is where our biggest activations came from. The wheels stay out and keep hitting a train long after every other option has finished its burst. Short Fuse then buys you more activations per round, and High Yield makes each one land on a group instead of a single straggler, which is the pair that matters once a horde is on top of you.

What Fire Works Actually Does

The in-game description is simple: “Each bullet that hits a Normal or Special Enemy has a chance to launch fireworks that target enemies.” Treyarch’s own blog frames it as returning from Black Ops 3, and that framing is where most of the confusion starts. The Black Ops 3 version killed the zombie that triggered it outright. This one does not kill anything on its own, it launches flares that go looking for a target, and everything about how you use it follows from that difference.

The most detailed testing we’ve seen on the base numbers, from YouTuber Doughnuts, puts the cooldown at 36 seconds, with 5 flares per activation and a baseline of roughly 6 kills once you count the trigger zombie plus the flares. Damage scales with round number, not weapon rarity or Pack-a-Punch. Each flare deals about 100% of that round’s base zombie health. That same test also notes activations can fizzle if there is nothing nearby to target.

Our own numbers land close to that but higher on the ceiling. We saw it activate fairly often per round with Fire Wheel equipped. Each activation lasted exactly 6 seconds and threw off 2 area-of-effect hits on top of the flares. In a real horde we’ve had activations reach as many as 20 eliminations. That is a long way past the 6-kill baseline. It happens because Fire Wheel keeps dealing damage after the flares themselves are gone.

How to Unlock Every Fire Works Augment

Fire Works unlocks at Player Level 18, but its research diagram only opens once you have researched nine total augments across any category, per Activision’s own launch blog. Augment research overall opens at Player Level 11 and fills from in-match XP rather than a kill counter. Applying the mod to a weapon then costs 500 Salvage at an Arsenal Machine, and each weapon needs its own purchase.

The grid runs three rows of three. Row one is Starlight, Big Game and Big Bang. Row two is Weeping Willow, High Yield and Starburst. Row three is Short Fuse, Fire Wheel and Extra Slot. Shape tells you the tier at a glance: a blue diamond is a Major, a gold circle is a Minor.

That layout is the single most useful thing to know before you start, because our entire recommended build sits at the bottom of it. Fire Wheel and Short Fuse are both last-row unlocks, High Yield is in the middle, and Extra Slot, the node that gives you a second Minor slot at all, is the very last thing you research. Until you get there you are running Big Game or Starburst with one Minor attached, which is a noticeably weaker version of this ammo mod. There is no early stopping point on Fire Works that still leaves you with the build we recommend.

Is it worth researching before something else? Only one project runs at a time across the whole Research screen, and we would put the perks first. A perk augment improves every run you play from the moment it lands, while Fire Works also costs you 500 Salvage per weapon before it does anything, so the payoff arrives later and in smaller pieces. If you are choosing between grids, Quick Revive and Jugger-Nog both earn their place ahead of this one.

For us the full Fire Works grid took about 5 hours. Black Ops 6 research carries over for returning mods, but Fire Works is new to BO7, so everyone starts this one from zero. If you want to move faster than a standard run, wait for a double Player XP event and grind high rounds on Cursed during it. That was the one method that actually sped things up for us.

All Major Augments for Fire Works Ranked

Fire Wheel is the clear pick. The spinning wheels turn one activation into sustained damage instead of a single burst. That is where our 20-elimination games came from in our runs. Starburst is fine, and multiple creators run it as their default horde-clearing pick, including MZC, who calls it “the foundation of my horde control fireworks build.” It just does not scale the same way Fire Wheel does once a real horde builds up.

Weeping Willow is not good, and we’ll say it plainly. The flares land on the ground instead of targeting enemies, and in our runs the spread was everywhere. It works if you’re funneling a tight, single-file train through a doorway, but against anything resembling a real horde the coverage is wasted. Results vary by map and train discipline, but it was not consistent for us.

Big Game is the one people expect to be a boss killer, and it is worth reading what it actually says. In the game’s own words it lets Fire Works “activate on Elite Enemies, creating a bigger light show.” The damage bonus against Specials and Elites is a separate node, the Minor called Big Bang. That gap explains what we saw: against a Zursa in high rounds Big Game took a little off the health bar and did next to nothing when line of sight was blocked. Other testers report better results, and MZC saw around 75% of a Zursa’s health gone in a separate test. Treat Big Game’s damage as “half to most of a health bar” rather than a fixed number, and know that clean line of sight matters more than the description lets on.

All Minor Augments for Fire Works Ranked

Short Fuse and High Yield is our pairing, and it needs Extra Slot before you can run both at once. Short Fuse gets you back to another activation faster. High Yield widens the blast radius so the flares actually find a horde instead of one straggler. Starlight adds more flares per activation but doesn’t change how far they reach, which is the wrong half of the problem. Big Bang is the one that genuinely raises flare damage against Specials and Elites, so it only earns a slot if you have committed to Big Game and gone hunting for them.

High Yield is contested, and we should say so instead of pretending it isn’t. AC OMEGA’s own testing found it averaged around 6 kills versus Starlight’s 7, with rare 12-kill spikes “only once every 10 activations,” and called it inconsistent. We don’t buy that it’s broken. It worked well for us across our runs, and we’d recommend it without hesitation. We also noticed Elemental Pop seemed to shorten Fire Works’ cooldown a bit more in our games. That lines up with Elemental Pop’s own Minor, Chill Berry, which reduces all ammo mod cooldowns.

Which Build to Run in Each Situation

Scenario	What to run	Why
High round gameplay	Fire Wheel	Fire Wheel shreds hordes and keeps dealing damage no matter how high the round gets.
Killing HVTs	Big Game and Big Bang	Big Game and Big Bang together deal extra damage to mini-bosses and HVTs.

The 300-Kill Fire Works Camo Challenge

The challenge asks for 300 activation kills on the M15 MOD 0 and Carbon 57, and 75 on the Warden 308, Shadow SK, AAROW 109 and A.R.C. M1. It counts kills the activation itself causes, not kills you land while the mod happens to be equipped, which is why the trigger weapon matters as much as it does. A single game of farm survival cleared the 300 for us somewhere between round 25 and round 36.

Two warnings worth having before you grind it out. Swapping weapons mid-activation broke our kill count, exactly as two Reddit users described, and one flagged that it may be patched eventually. It was still an issue when we tested it, so stay on one weapon until the activation ends. And for the launcher challenges, melee the trigger and wait rather than shooting the ground, since ground shots did not reliably fire it off for us.

When to Run a Different Ammo Mod

You only get one Ammo Mod at a time, so knowing when to pass on Fire Works matters as much as knowing how to build it. The clearest case for skipping it is a fight with one big target and nothing else alive. Fire Works launches flares at whatever is near, so a lone Zursa or Elite with no adds around it gives the mod almost nothing to work with, and Big Game does not rescue that situation either.

The other case is any tight indoor room or corridor where line of sight to the horde gets broken constantly. Normally, Fire Works is less effective in these situations because it needs a clear path to activate, and a blocked activation is 36 seconds of cooldown spent on nothing. However, if you are running the Fire Wheel Major augment, this changes things quite a bit. Even in tighter spaces, Fire Works can still be very effective, especially in camping strategies where enemies are grouped up and staying close together.

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Frequently Asked Questions