Having enough paintball pods can mean the difference between being everybody's hero by winning the match for your team, and getting shot out when your gun runs dry. Pods allow you to refill your hopper as quickly as possible, which means less downtime. They do this by letting you dump balls directly from the tube into your loader, which have some variation on a flip up top for that purpose.
Pods are one of the simplest pieces of equipment in paintball. Most pods are simply a tube for holding paintballs, securely closed with a flip top. Standard pods hold somewhere between 100 and 165 paintballs, and these will fit inside most standard harnesses or pod pouches.
There are also smaller, more specialized pods, like 10 round tubes used for guns like the ER2 or pump guns. For a more specialized roll-out, you can also find shorter 50 round pods.
Some of the pods in our selection go a step beyond the simple standard, and come with a few bells and whistles. Some have fancier snaps or locking mechanisms, others are clear, so you can see which of your pods are still full, others have a slightly different shape from the rounded-off bottom edge that is essentially considered the market standard, which allows for a marginal increase in ball storage.
Choosing which pod will fit with your gear can be a difficult decision. If you're worried about coordinating with team colors, we offer a variety of different ones. But another factor is knowing how many pods you're going to need. If you picked up a 4 pod harness, that gives you an idea of how many you'll need. But if you're eye-balling that 6 + 7, you might want to factor that into your decision.
The difference between a cheaper, less fancy pod and the deluxe ones may not seem grand, but once you multiply that by thirteen, you might feel differently. Or maybe you usually only go through a handful of pods in a game, and prefer to use a smaller pod belt that wraps to your leg, so you're content to have your go to 3 pods be fancy, and have your back-up, in case of emergency or close game pods come from the cheaper lines. Or you can reverse that. Another thing to keep in mind is that while pods tend to be pretty sturdy, they can and occasionally will break, so there's no real harm in having a spare pod or two.
The important point when purchasing pods is to think through how you want to play the game, and then make an educated guess about what will work best for you.
What about pod swabs? Ball breaks inside a pod don't happen often, but when it does, you'll be happy to have along a swab. These work exactly like a barrel swab, but they're designed to be much wider, since pods have a larger diameter than your barrel. These can also do double duty, since breaks inside a loader can also create a headache, and especially once you've got a moment between games, a pod swab will take a frustrating situation and make it palatable. No kit is complete without some solution for cleaning out your pods, and while a towel might do, a dedicated pod and loader swab does the job right.