Weapons, grunts and the shredder
What actually shoots in ShredDead: the main gun and its grenade launcher, riflemen and shotgunners, the grunts holding the line, and the industrial shredder.
ShredDead has no turret building. What it has is a main gun that fires itself, a small squad you place by hand, and an industrial shredder that kills whatever gets past both. 
The main gun
Mounted at the outpost, auto-firing down the lane. It never stops and it never runs out of ammunition, which makes it the backbone of every build: damage invested here works while you are in the upgrade screen, while you are reading a tooltip, and while you are away from the keyboard.
It also carries a grenade launcher on a separate firing cycle. Players have asked for an auto-fire upgrade for it, which tells you it is not automatic at the start.
The squad
| Unit | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Grunts | Basic shooters holding the line | Cheap, scale with upgrades, the default wall |
| Rifleman | Longer-range damage | Wants a forward position to use the range |
| Shotgunner | Close-range burst | Belongs at the choke, not at the barricade |
| Rookies | Early bodies | Replace or upgrade as the tree opens |
Placement is the only real control you have. A rifleman parked behind the barricade wastes its range; a shotgunner parked forward wastes its damage. Move them to where zombies bunch and the same units kill noticeably faster.
The shredder
The shredder sits at the back of the outpost and kills whatever reaches it. It is the reason the game has no fail state: the worst case is that your line leaks and the shredder cleans up.
It is also tracked as a stat. Shredding (100 kills with the shredder) is 95.2% — the single most-completed achievement in the game — and Mass Shredding (1,000 shredder kills) is 70.2%. Compare those to general kills, where 1,000 is 92.1%: the shredder carries the opening hour for almost everyone, then most players stop leaning on it because their guns outpace it.
Do not build around the shredder for a fast clear. Build around it if you want to idle, because it requires nothing from you.
What there is not
No turret placement, no traps, no walls to build. The store tags mention tower defence, but the defences you place are people, and the fixed hardware is the gun and the shredder. Anyone looking for a tower-defence layout game will be surprised; the how to play page sets that expectation properly.
Upgrading units
Unit upgrades live in the skill tree alongside weapon nodes. Because the tree gates on DNA colour, the order you upgrade weapons in is really a question of which colour you are short of — covered on DNA tiers and costs. For three worked orders, see builds.
