MW4 DMZ Gold Bar and Gold Skull: Where to Find and Use

Gold Bars and Gold Skulls in MW4 DMZ come from Safes. In the Safes we counted, about 1 in 19 held a Gold Bar and about 1 in 35 a Gold Skull. Both sell for $25,000, and both are needed for some of the biggest 3D Printer upgrades. We tracked every Safe opened in a large batch of DMZ gameplay plus our own safe runs, so this guide shows where the gold drops, how many Safes you need, which upgrades use it and when selling is the right call.

Gold Bar and Gold Skull at a Glance

Both are Ultra valuables, the top rarity in DMZ. You can extract them and sell them at the FOB, or keep them for upgrades at the 3D Printer.

Click to enlarge A Gold Skull in a Safe at Wolves Stadium. Same $25,000 sell value as a Gold Bar, but about half as common.

Where to Find Gold Bars and Gold Skulls

Open Safes. All 20 pieces of gold we saw drop, 13 Gold Bars and 7 Gold Skulls, came out of a Safe, and none came from any other container. That matches our own runs, where we have never found gold anywhere else.

Safes are the green, heavy boxes with a keypad you find in the compounds, offices, banks and the casino. Every Safe we know of is on our Safe locations map in the Orders guide, and the POIs around them are on the interactive MW4 DMZ map.

Click to enlarge A Gold Bar from the Safe at Compound Bravo, on one of our own safe runs.

How Many Safes You Need

Gold is a Safe grind, plain and simple. This is roughly how your chances add up as you open more Safes.

Gold pays out on average about $2,000 per Safe you open, on top of the cash and documents that are always in there. For a full upgrade set of 5 Gold Bars and 5 Gold Skulls, expect somewhere around 175 Safes, because the skulls are the bottleneck.

Best Safes and the Safe Run

Most of the gold in our data came from the military compounds, Cheonwang Peak Array and Wolves Stadium. Compound Alpha stood out with five pieces of gold from just 16 Safes, but that is too few Safes to call it a hotspot. Across all compounds about 1 in 10 Safes had gold, against about 1 in 16 elsewhere. That gap is small and could still be luck.

Our pick for gold is the Safe Run from our loot strategies guide. You spawn with Operation Fallen Ember next to Compound Delta, then hit the compound Safes one after another. A run takes about ten minutes, so you open a lot of Safes per hour, and it is exactly the kind of route where the Gold Bar from Compound Bravo above came from.

Other Ways to Get Gold

Two rewards give you gold without the Safe RNG.

• Operation Silent Ledger: the story mission in the Heavenly Luck Casino rewards a Gold Bar, but only the first time you finish it. Our Operation Silent Ledger walkthrough covers the vault.
• DMZ Orders page 24: finishing the page gives two Gold Bars together with $20,000 and an Advanced SERE Kit. The tasks are in our DMZ Orders guide.

Click to enlarge Operation Silent Ledger lists a Gold Bar as its first reward. You only get it once.

Bank vaults are worth a look too. The Hanex Bank vaults and the Counting Room Vault hold Safes, and those Safes roll for gold like any other. You need the right key to get in, see our keys guide.

What Gold Bars and Gold Skulls Are Used For

Gold goes into the later upgrades at the 3D Printer. The first two are the ones most players will reach. The amounts below come from community upgrade trackers, and players on r/DMZ confirm the 5 Gold Skulls for Stash Item Upgrade IV.

We have not unlocked these tiers ourselves yet. The lower tiers in those trackers match the upgrades we did see in game exactly. Bank Upgrade IV, for example, costs $200,000, 5 Ballistic Flight Logs and 5 Regional Combat Notes and raises your bank cap to $2 million.

Click to enlarge Bank Upgrade IV in our own 3D Printer. The gold only shows up in the much later tiers.

Bank Upgrade XII also asks for three Irradiated Containers, see our Irradiated Container guide. The cheaper upgrades and every recipe are in the 3D Printer recipes guide.

Sell or Keep Your Gold Bars and Gold Skulls?

It depends on where you are. Early in the season, $25,000 a piece is a big boost when you are still buying back operators and building your bank, so selling a few is fine. We would not hoard gold for an upgrade you are months away from.

Once you get close to Stash Weapon Upgrade III or Stash Item Upgrade IV, stop selling. Five Gold Skulls is around 175 Safes of work in our data, and that is a lot of runs to redo because you sold one too early. The popular sell or keep cheat sheet on r/DMZ lists every valuable that goes into an upgrade, which helps with the rest of your documents.