World of Warships – Detonation Chance: An insight from data

Hello everyone,

Some very interesting information was posted by iku_19, on World of Warships Reddit. If you were looking for more information on how the detonation chances work, here’s some details about it.

Source: World of Warships Reddit
Author: iku_19

A ship has a magazine box, often two but sometimes one (Izumo) or sometimes up to four (Kawachi, Nikolay.)

These hitboxes are located at the bottom of the citadel at that respective area, and they respect the rules as much as any normal ship section. Meaning that they have less HP than the ship itself, but it transfers damage over to the ship’s overall hull.

The amount of HP each one of these hitboxes has is around 50% of the ship’s original HP, this is an important metric to know.

The chance of detonations scales up the more damage that hitbox has.

  • 0 to 30% damage received is 1% chance
  • 100% damage received is 10% chance

This means, any value between 30% and 100% is a linear value between 1% and 10%.

Because the chance is based off the percentage of HP the hitbox has left after getting hit, smaller ships such as destroyers and cruisers are more likely to reach 10% faster than battleships.

Prior to a recent update, guns were linked to these hitboxes meaning every time they were destroyed or incapacitated they would deal their health as damage to the linked magazine.

Since this link has been severed, damaging turrets does not damage the ship anymore. The link was also symbiotic meaning that any damage the magazine received would also be transferred to the turrets (resulting in random turrets getting destroyed or incapacitated when the magazine took damage.)

TL;DR: Chance is between 1% and 10% depending.


  • Carriers have no magazines and therefore cannot detonate.
  • Because damage gets reset when a citadel is hit, but the shell still exists – it is possible to get more than 100% damage on a single shell if it hits the magazine.
  • Magazines can only be regular penned unless there’s a surrounding plate in the armour model
  • Considering a magazine hit is also a citadel hit, 10% is fairly reasonable. However the “random” detonations from HE is the result of blast damage, and was the result of main turret incapacitation’s often resulting in 1% dice rolls.

Fun Trivia:

  • Danae is the only ship with 5 ammo hitboxes
  • Dunkerque has 2 ammo hitboxes for each of her turrets, as opposed to Izumo which has one for all three.