Wardogs Progression Guide: Cash, Role Levels and What to Buy

This is for a player inside their first thirty hours who wants to know where cash comes from, which actions feed which role, and what to buy in what order. It is also for anyone weighing up paying for progression, because the last section covers what Wardogs' publisher says about that in its own words.

• Read this if you keep dying with an expensive kit and cannot work out why your balance never grows.
• Read this if you want the Wardog number to move and you are pushing one track to do it.
• Skip ahead to the settings section if tuning your frame rate is all you came for.
• Skip this entirely if you want rank tiers or a division list. Wardogs has none, and any page listing them invented them.
• Skip this if you want a full item database. A wiki does that better; this explains the system the database sits inside.

One honest limit up front. Wardogs is four days into Early Access. Bulkhead rebalanced the XP curve the day before launch and moved two vehicles between tracks in the same patch. Treat every level number on this page as current for Season 1.0 and check the in-game vendor before you commit a large sum. Our Wardogs services are priced against the same Season 1.0 state.

Progression is two separate systems that only meet at the vendor. Cash decides what you can afford this life; role levels decide what you are allowed to buy at all. Bulkhead's Steam store page describes the current state as cash and XP based progression where every action earns rewards.

You start with $10,000, a figure the Steam store page states directly. That is enough for several cheap lives or one bad expensive one. Cash persists from match to match, which the store page also confirms, so the balance you finish a session with is the balance you open the next one with.

The part most new players get wrong is that a role level is not a reward you spend. It is a gate. Reaching Assault 20 does not hand you the M4; it lets you pay for it. Both halves have to be there at the same time, which is why a player can sit at a respectable level and still be shooting a recruit rifle.

There is no competitive ladder in Wardogs, no rank names, no divisions and no skill rating. Servers are joined through a server browser, and Bulkhead wrote in the Patch 0.11 announcement of 12 September 2026 that a game with this many players should realistically be using matchmaking and that server browsers are not well suited to it. Matchmaking is not in the game yet.

That matters for two reasons. First, if you arrived searching for Wardogs rank tiers, the pages listing them copied a template from another shooter. Second, it changes what 'good' means here. There is no bracket sorting you against players of your standard, so a lobby is a genuine mix of first-day players and people with several hundred hours from the betas. Your protection against that is not a rank, it is a cheap kit and a squad.

Patch 0.11 also split the server browser into Community and Official halves and added text search to the Community side. Bulkhead offered a 5% end-of-match cash bonus on community servers for one week from 12 September 2026 by way of apology for neglecting them. If you are reading this after 19 September, assume that bonus has ended unless the server browser says otherwise.

Almost every item in Wardogs has two separate cash prices: a one-time unlock cost paid once ever, and a vendor price paid again every single life you carry it. Most guides quote one of them and call it 'the cost', which is where the wild price disagreements between sites come from.

Unlock costs and vendor prices above are from Dexerto's Wardogs wiki, which lists both fields separately on each item page, retrieved 14 September 2026. The FAL vendor figure is from Destructoid's weapons tier list of 13 September 2026. Bulkhead's own Season 1 changelog corroborates the split: it raises the Large Hammer to $2,400 in a list headed Vendor, and to $75,000 in a list headed Support, in the same document.

Read the right-hand column as your real running cost. An M4 is a $100,000 decision once and a $2,800 decision every time you spawn. If your income is $8,000 a match and you die three times, the M4 has eaten most of it before you buy armour or ammunition. This is the single most useful thing to understand about the economy, and it is why a high level player can still be poor.

A functional kit starts under $1,500 and a heavy one passes $10,000. The gap is almost entirely the primary weapon and the armour tier, because those two are the items you pay for again on every respawn.

Component prices behind those bands: T-21 $600, AK74 $1,600, FAL $6,500, Level 1 Armor $400, Level 2 Armor $1,000, Medium Hammer $800, Large Hammer $2,400, build supplies $10 each with a stack limit of 50. Weapon and armour figures are Dexerto item pages; the hammer and build supply figures are Dexerto and, for the Large Hammer, Bulkhead's Season 1 changelog.

Wardogs does not hold loadout presets the way most shooters do. Dexerto's loadout page describes the system as a rebuy: the vendor offers your most recent kit back as a single purchase, and you can strip items off before confirming. That is convenient and it is also a trap. The rebuy will happily re-buy an $8,000 kit into a match where you have $9,000 left. Check the total before you confirm it.

Bulkhead nudged this deliberately at launch. The Season 1 changelog raised the Forward Operating Base from $2,500 to $7,500 and the Large Hammer from $1,600 to $2,400 with the stated reason of making them more of a choice. Support items are no longer background purchases.

You buy a loadout each life and losing the fight loses the gear you were carrying. Your account balance is not touched beyond that, and there is an end-of-match refund on loadout spending, which is why finishing matches pays better than quitting them.

Here is where this page will be less confident than the ones above it in search results. A refund figure of around nine tenths circulates widely, and the sites publishing it disagree with each other about when it applies: some say only if you are alive at the final whistle, others say it applies regardless of how the life ended. Bulkhead has published neither the rate nor the condition. Nobody writing about this has a source for it, including us. Treat the number as community-reported and the direction as reliable.

What follows from the direction alone is enough to play on. Staying in a match to the end is worth money. Leaving a losing match early is the expensive option, not the cautious one. And the cost of a death is the unrefunded remainder plus the ammunition you fired, which is small on a recruit kit and painful on a heavy one. The economy punishes expensive deaths far more than it punishes frequent cheap ones.

The reliable income in Wardogs is logistics and objective time, not kills. Bulkhead's store page names reviving squadmates, transporting friendlies to the zone and controlling the objective as cash-rewarding actions, and PCGamesN's money guide of 11 September 2026 lists five methods that need no gunfights at all.

Ranked by how little they depend on winning a duel:

1. Objective time. Standing inside the Control Zone pays on a timer. A recruit kit counts as a full body for zone scoring, so the cheapest loadout in the game earns the same tick as the most expensive one.
2. Transport. Ferry players from spawn to the zone by vehicle or helicopter. PCGamesN reports a fee per passenger, a bonus when a passenger you dropped gets an assist, and that players can tip you directly for a good run.
3. Mobile spawn. Drive the spawn APC somewhere safe near the zone. Every teammate who spawns on it pays you, and it keeps paying while you do something else.
4. Supply retail. Buy a supply crate at spawn, stock it with ammunition, build supplies or bandages, and drop it where your team is fighting. Anyone who buys from your crate pays you.
5. Building. PCGamesN states that each structure you successfully build earns Support XP and some cash. It is the only method here that pays both currencies at once.
6. Looting. Bodies keep what they bought. Picking a dead player's rifle up upgrades your kit at no cost, which is income by subtraction.

Exact per-action payouts are the part of the Wardogs internet you should trust least. Several sites publish precise dollar figures for a zone tick, a revive and a passenger drop; they disagree with each other, none cites a source, and Bulkhead has published none of them. We are not going to repeat numbers we cannot stand behind. If you want a measured balance instead of an estimate, our Wardogs cash farm is priced per 100,000 and states the amount you receive.

One anti-abuse detail worth knowing before you build a crate business. Bulkhead rescaled the supply crate purchase XP curve in Season 1 and dropped the XP for selling a crate item under $75 from 25 to 1, explicitly so low value items cannot be abused. Selling junk in volume is a dead end by design.

The Hot Zone is a shifting sub-zone inside the Control Zone that pays double cash and counts each player inside it twice toward zone control. Both facts are Bulkhead's, from the official Top Questions post.

Doubling applies to the earning, not to your survivability, so the Hot Zone is where the economy and the risk curve cross. The correct answer for most players is to take the cheapest kit that can hold a position and spend as many minutes inside it as possible, because the multiplier rewards presence and the kit price punishes deaths. Two players with a $600 rifle standing in the Hot Zone out-earn one player with a $6,500 one who is holding a ridge outside it.

Support work does not stop counting inside the Hot Zone. Reviving, dropping supplies and repairing all happen there too, and the zone has more casualties per minute than anywhere else on the map. A medic who commits to the Hot Zone is standing in the highest-density supply of the exact action their track pays for.

Towers are capturable structures that act as anchor points for FOBs and as sniping platforms, and collecting enough of them lets a team drag the Hot Zone toward itself. PCGamesN documented the mechanic on 11 September 2026.

To take one, go up the stairs to the control room on the mid level and use the computer next to the keypad to hack it. Towers have a cooldown after a capture or a change of hands, so a contested tower cannot be flipped repeatedly in a short window.

The payoff is not cash. Each captured tower gives your team one digit of a four-digit code. Enter the full code on the keypad beside the terminal and the Hot Zone is pulled toward your tower. PCGamesN is careful to say towers are an edge and not a requirement, which matches how they behave: worth taking when your team already has map control, not worth peeling four players off a contested zone for.

If your squad is running the tower play, it pairs with building. A captured tower with a FOB and a repair station under it becomes the position your team respawns into, which is the closest thing Wardogs has to a permanent advantage inside a single match.

There is no class selection screen in Wardogs. Bulkhead's Top Questions post states that roles are player-defined and that you buy specialist items to build a loadout that earns XP across six progression tracks. The item decides the track, not a menu.

Dexerto's equipment database makes the mechanic explicit: items carry a role XP tag. Binoculars and the Infrared Range Finder are tagged Recon. Bandages, the Adrenaline Pen and the Medical Bag are tagged Medic. C4 and AT mines are tagged Support. The M67 frag grenade and the Halligan Bar are tagged Infantry, which is the tag that belongs to the Assault role.

Notice the bottom two rows. Dexerto's equipment filter offers only four role XP tags: Infantry, Medic, Recon and Support. Driver and Pilot have no equipment you can carry, so you cannot quietly add them to an infantry loadout the way you can add a pair of binoculars for Recon or a bandage for Medic. Those two tracks require you to be in the seat, which is exactly why they are the two most neglected tracks on most accounts.

The practical consequence is that a well-built loadout earns into three or four tracks at once. Carry a rifle, binoculars and a bandage and a single life can feed Assault, Recon and Medic. Fly a helicopter with supply crates aboard and you are feeding Pilot and Support in the same sortie.

The Wardog level is not a separate XP bar. It is the total of your six role levels, which is why there is no such thing as career grinding that runs alongside role grinding. This is community-documented, and Bulkhead has never described the relationship. Dexerto's data model supports it: the Wardog page is the only progression page on their wiki with no XP resource field and no maximum level field, while all six role pages carry both.

Bulkhead itself uses the word Career for this number, as a threshold on items. The Season 1 changelog moves the artillery tank to Career 90 and the Deagle to Career 85, and has a section headed Season 1.0 Unlocks: Career. Whatever it is called in the interface you are looking at, it is the same number.

This has a sharp consequence for how you raise it. Per Dexerto's role pages the first level on any track costs 200 XP, while Bulkhead's Season 1 XP table puts level 50 on a single track at 1,000,000 XP. Six tracks taken from nothing to their first level is six Wardog levels for 1,200 XP. Pushing one track deep is the most expensive way to move the same number. If you want the Career gates open, spread wide before you go deep.

It also means you should be suspicious of anyone selling career levelling and role levelling as two products, because it is one piece of work. Our role leveling is a single service with a role selector for that reason, and the Wardog level is what comes out of it.

Assault is the assault rifle and pistol track, and it is the slowest of the six because it mostly wants kills. The in-game XP tag on its items reads Infantry, which is the source of endless confusion on other sites. Dexerto's role page shows both fields plainly: display name Assault, XP resource Infantry.

Use Assault for the role. Infantry is the label printed on the gear, not the name of the track, and there is no seventh role.

Table from Dexerto's Assault page, retrieved 14 September 2026, which counts 33 items on the track. The Galil sits between the AK74 and the M4 as the cheaper mid-track rifle; Destructoid's tier list rates it a tier below the M4 for its slower fire rate.

The awkward truth about Assault is that it is the track most new players default to and the one that pays them worst while they learn. Kills are contested income. If your first hours are going badly, carrying a frag and a Halligan Bar on an otherwise support-shaped loadout keeps Assault ticking over without asking you to win the fights that are currently going against you.

Medic earns from SMG kills, heals and revives, and it is the friendliest track for a player who is not winning gunfights. Dexerto counts 36 items on it and the weapons arrive early: the PP-19 Vityaz at level 4, the MP5 at 15 and the Super-45 at 35.

From Dexerto's Medic page, retrieved 14 September 2026. Bulkhead's Season 1 changelog moved the PP-19 50-round drum from level 33 to level 29, and Dexerto's table lists it at 29, which is a useful check that the wiki has been updated for the launch patch.

The item to buy first is the Field Resuscitator at level 2, because revives are the action that scales. A downed player in the Hot Zone is worth more to you than a kill outside it, and there is a queue of them. Later, the Defibrillator at 11 turns you into the player everyone in your squad wants alive, which is its own form of protection in a game with proximity voice chat.

Medic pairs cleanly with almost any other loadout. A single bandage in a quick slot tags the kit for Medic XP without changing how you play, which makes it the cheapest track to keep moving in the background.

Recon earns from spotting and marking enemies and from marksman, sniper and bow kills. Dexerto counts 47 items on the track, more than any other role, and only two pieces of equipment carry the Recon tag: Binoculars and the Infrared Range Finder.

That short equipment list is the whole strategy. Binoculars are cheap, need no unlock and tag your loadout for Recon XP, so any kit can carry the track along. Marking an enemy earns you something whether or not anyone kills them, which makes Recon the only track that pays you for information.

From Dexerto's Recon page, retrieved 14 September 2026. Two of its optics prices can be checked against Bulkhead directly: the Season 1 changelog raises the 6-10x MRAD scope to $40,000 and the MOA to $45,000, and Dexerto lists them at 18 and 26 with exactly those figures.

Scopes are where Recon money disappears. The SKS at $25,000 is a tenth of the cost of the glass people put on top of it later, and a $40,000 scope on a rifle you are still learning is a poor trade against the same money spent on Career armour. Take the SKS, take the LPVO at 11, and leave the long-range optics until your income is steady.

Support earns from constructing structures, dropping supplies, repairing vehicles and from explosive, shotgun and LMG kills. Dexerto's own advice for levelling it is to take the FOB kit with a large quantity of supplies, build whatever you can, drop supply pallets at the FOB and repair any vehicle you pass.

PCGamesN adds the detail that each structure you successfully build pays both Support XP and cash, which makes Support the only track where levelling and earning are the same action.

Hammer and supply figures from Dexerto's equipment pages; build supplies stack to 50. The Large Hammer vendor price matches the raise Bulkhead published in the Season 1 changelog. The Large Hammer's unlock sits at Support level 8 after Bulkhead moved it up from 7 at launch.

From Dexerto's Support page, retrieved 14 September 2026, which counts 31 items on the track.

The free C4 charge at level 2 is the best value item on any track. It costs nothing to unlock, it is tagged Support, and it kills vehicles, which are the most expensive things on the battlefield. Destroying a $150,000 Humvee with a free charge is the single largest swing a low level player can produce.

Driver earns from operating ground vehicles and moving teammates from spawn toward the zone. It has no equipment tag, so the only way to feed it is to be in the driver's seat, which is why most accounts have it sitting far behind their infantry tracks.

From Dexerto's Driver page, retrieved 14 September 2026. This table is the best-verified progression data for any Wardogs role. Thirteen of its rows match Bulkhead's Season 1 changelog exactly, including the Ural moving to level 3 at $35,000, the Dune Buggy to level 8 at $25,000, the Kodiak Flatbed to level 10 at $35,000 and the heavy tank moving off the Career track onto Driver 35.

That tank move is a live example of why you should not trust old Wardogs guides. Anything written from beta data still tells you the L2A6 sits behind a career level and costs $500,000 there. It does not; it is a Driver unlock now, and Bulkhead said in the same changelog that Driver was rejigged to give a satisfying escalation through attack vehicles.

Driver is worth more than its reputation. The Ural at level 3 is the cheapest unlock that turns you into a transport service, and passenger fees, assist bonuses and tips all arrive without you firing a shot. If you would rather not grind the seat time yourself, vehicle unlocks are sold as their own job.

Pilot earns from flying, from carrying passengers and from delivering supplies by air. It is the hardest track to start and the most valuable one to finish, because a helicopter does the transport job several times faster than any ground vehicle and almost nobody in a public lobby can fly one well.

From Dexerto's Pilot page, retrieved 14 September 2026. Three rows check out against Bulkhead directly: the Season 1 changelog raises the small armoured supply crate to $10,000, raises the Little Bird with miniguns to $50,000, and cuts the Z20 Lakota from $50,000 to $35,000.

Read that Lakota price cut carefully, because it changes the order you should buy in. The transport helicopter at level 10 is now cheaper than the armed Little Bird at level 4. The game is telling you what it wants pilots to do, and the money follows: a troop carrier full of paying passengers earns on every run, while a gunship earns only when it wins fights.

Bulkhead put real work into the flight model for launch. The Season 1 changelog lists a Z20 Lakota balance pass, a fix for sluggish pitch, helicopter input damping applied across every input device, and a reduction in the chase camera rattle. If you tried flying in a beta and bounced off it, the aircraft you gave up on is not the one in the game now.

Two controls do two separate jobs. The collective is lift: up climbs, down descends, neutral holds altitude. The cyclic is direction: forward pitches the nose down and accelerates, back slows or reverses, left and right roll you into a bank. Pedals handle yaw, which points the nose without moving you.

Dexerto's keyboard and mouse guide recommends leaving Helicopter Flight Assists on while you learn and turning them off once you are comfortable. Collective is on space and control, cyclic is on WASD.

The takeoff that works:

1. Take the pilot seat and hold the start input until the rotors spool.
2. Raise the collective smoothly until the skids leave the ground.
3. Hold a low hover until the aircraft stops wobbling. Do not skip this.
4. Only then add forward cyclic, and add it in small amounts.
5. To land, reduce forward speed first, settle into a hover, then lower the collective.

The mistake that destroys most new pilots is treating the cyclic as a steering wheel and chasing altitude with it. Pitching the nose up to climb bleeds your speed and drops you into the rotor wash you just made. Climb with the collective, steer with the cyclic, and keep the two inputs separate in your head until they are separate in your hands.

Practise on an empty or seeding server, never in a live zone. A crashed helicopter is a five or six figure loss depending on the airframe, and Wardogs charges that to you, not to your team.

Building needs two things in your loadout: a hammer, and build supplies at $10 each. Buildables fall into four groups on Dexerto's wiki: fortifications such as sandbag walls, Bremer walls, gates, doors, hedgehogs and barbed wire; structures including the Forward Operating Base, bunkers and recon towers; emplacements such as the L81 mortar and anti-air; and utilities such as the repair station, refuel station, loudspeaker and builder's radio.

Structures award Support XP. The Forward Operating Base is the anchor purchase and it is no longer cheap: Bulkhead raised it from $2,500 to $7,500 in the Season 1 changelog with the stated intent of making it a choice.

A build order that survives contact:

1. Place the FOB behind cover with a wall or building between it and the zone.
2. Wall the approach before you build anything that shoots.
3. Add a repair station if your squad is running vehicles.
4. Add emplacements last, once the position can survive being noticed.

The loudspeaker deserves a mention because it is unique to this game. Bulkhead's Top Questions post describes building loudspeakers to broadcast faction propaganda at the enemy, and with proximity voice chat running it produces the kind of match nobody else's shooter produces. It earns Support XP like any other structure.

How to build a mortar

You need a Large Hammer, which means Support level 8, plus build supplies either in your inventory or stocked at your FOB, and the cash for the emplacement. PCGamesN documented the process on 11 September 2026.

Once it is up, the mortar runs on ammunition you have to keep bringing from spawn, so it is a two-person job in practice. Aiming uses two values, heading and range, set with WASD for the coarse adjustment and the mouse for fine control. There is no map overlay while you are on the gun, so read the map and estimate the distance before you climb on.

The camera follows the shell all the way to impact, which is the feature that makes the weapon learnable: you can watch where the round lands and correct off the previous shot.

Two warnings. Build the defensive position before the mortar, because a mortar without walls is a marker telling the enemy where to shoot. And check your surroundings between volleys; PCGamesN puts it bluntly, that if snipers have a view of you they will take it. The shells Bulkhead listed in the Season 1 changelog, 155mm and 122mm, were also made bulkier in your loadout in that patch, so carrying them costs you space you used to have.

Career levels gate the survivability gear: armour, helmets, backpacks, parachutes and armour-piercing ammunition. Role levels gate the weapons and vehicles. Dexerto's Career page counts 58 items on that track.

From Dexerto's Career page, retrieved 14 September 2026. Four rows are directly confirmed by Bulkhead's Season 1 changelog, which moved the sport parachute to 35, the large backpack to 55, and the artillery tank to Career 90 at $500,000. Armour-piercing rounds sit between Career 63 and 140 at $50,000 to $75,000 each.

Now the caveat that this whole page has been building toward. Bulkhead has never published a level cap for any track. Not on Steam, not on wardogs.com, not in the patch notes, not in the EULA. The figures you see quoted as caps, most often 100 per role and 600 in total, come from third-party databases and from arithmetic. The most detailed community guide printing them, written by a player who tested both closed betas, states plainly that it expects the rewards to be reshuffled at release and again after wipes.

What is verifiable is narrower and more useful. The Career table has real unlocks as high as 150, so the career number reaches at least that far. Role unlock tables stop at 50 for the four infantry tracks and 35 for Driver and Pilot, so past those levels you are earning XP with nothing on the other side of it in Season 1.0. When we say we take a role to 100, that is a statement about the limit of our own levelling service, not a claim about the game's ceiling.

Bulkhead slowed levelling substantially for launch and published the before-and-after table itself. The steepest change lands between levels 10 and 25, which is exactly the band most players are in right now.

All figures from Bulkhead's Pre-Load Live and Season 1 Changelog, 9 September 2026. Level 20 is 124% slower than it was in the beta and level 15 is 101% slower. Bulkhead's own framing: median players at 20 to 25 hours will be around level 20, and the top few percent chasing the big-ticket items will need to grind.

Two things follow. If your levelling feels slower than a video you watched, it is, and the video was recorded in a beta. And because the curve steepens sharply between 10 and 25 on every track, the six-track spread described earlier is not a clever trick, it is the shape of the curve. Bulkhead also wrote that each season will have a different XP curve with a different item order, so this table is a Season 1.0 snapshot and nothing more.

One XP figure changed alongside it: a kill from an air vehicle dropped from 300 XP to 250 XP in the same patch.

The current consensus top rifles are the M4 and the FAL, with the MP5 leading submachine guns and the M500 leading shotguns. The rankings below are Destructoid's weapons tier list, published and updated on 13 September 2026 by staff writer Arka Sarkar, who notes the list is incomplete because the later Recon rifles have not been assessed.

The reasoning worth carrying into a purchase: the M4 has the highest fire rate at 800 RPM with manageable recoil and costs less than the FAL, which hits harder but fires slower and costs $6,500 a life. The Super-45 runs at 1,200 RPM and burns magazines. The AK74 drops to B tier on recoil, being difficult to control at longer ranges.

Now the part a tier list will not tell you. Weapon rankings in Wardogs are worth less than they are in other shooters, because the ranking ignores the per-life price. The T-21 is an A tier rifle at $600 a life that Destructoid calls the best beginner assault rifle, and it does 28 damage at 750 RPM, which is the same damage as the S tier M4 at a slightly lower rate of fire. The M4 is better. It is not ten times better, and it costs 4.7 times as much every time you spawn.

Buy up the tier list when your income can absorb the loss, not when your level allows the purchase. If you want a specific weapon opened without playing the track that gates it, that is what a weapon unlock is for, and it is priced by how deep the gate sits.

The three faction rifles are worth knowing by name because you start with one: the A-91 for Valkyra, the Bushmaster M17S for Lonestar and the KH-2002 for Manticore. Bulkhead's Supporter Edition listing names all three with their faction branding.

Turn shadows, reflections and texture streaming down before you touch anything else; Dexerto identifies those three as the settings with the biggest performance cost in Wardogs. Then turn off the post-processing effects that add visual noise without adding information.

Recommendations from Dexerto's Wardogs PC settings page, retrieved 14 September 2026. If DLAA costs you too many frames, drop to the Quality or Balanced upscaling preset instead. View Distance stays high on purpose: this is a game with 2x2 km objective zones and helicopters, and losing distant contacts costs you more than a few frames gain you.

For mouse and keyboard, Dexerto suggests starting sensitivity around 70 and tuning from there, with the ADS multiplier at 1.00, mouse acceleration at 0.00 and sensitivity scaling set to Relative. Their guide also recommends leaving helicopter flight assists on until flying feels stable.

Bulkhead publishes the hardware targets on the Steam store page and they are more specific than most. The minimum spec, an i5-8600 or Ryzen 5 3500 with a GTX 1660 or RX 590 and 16 GB of RAM, is rated for 1080p on Low at 60 fps upscaled. The recommended spec, an i7-12700K or Ryzen 7 5700X with an RTX 3070 or RX 6700 XT, is rated for 1440p Medium above 70 fps native. If you are below the minimum card, upscaling is doing the work and the settings above are not optional.

Patch 0.11 and the launch changelog both carried stability work worth knowing about: DLSS frame generation can now be switched off without restarting, shadow cache refreshes were reduced to cut hitching, two crash paths in the frame generation pipeline were fixed, and shadow quality is now clamped to Low on high benchmark scores instead of being disabled outright. If you are crashing on a GPU, update first and report second; Bulkhead was still shipping GPU crash fixes on 12 September 2026.

Cash and XP are reported to reset at the end of each season, with leftover cash converted automatically into Gold Bars, which stay on the account permanently. This comes from Dexerto's Gold Bars page; Bulkhead has not published it, and no season end date exists anywhere.

Bulkhead does corroborate the direction. The Season 1 changelog states that each season will have a different XP curve with different item orders, which only makes sense against a track that resets. The Steam store page also lists a stronger seasonal meta game among the things still to be built during Early Access, so the rules around this are going to change at least once.

Gold Bars are the endgame currency, earned by exchanging cash at an in-game market whose rate is reported to move daily. They buy cosmetics: weapon skins, vehicle skins, emotes and music tapes. Bulkhead has stated flatly that it will never monetise in-game cash or gold bars and that they must be earned through play, so there is no way to buy them with real money and no legitimate service can sell them to you.

Here is the conclusion most Wardogs guides miss, and it is the opposite of the usual advice. A large unspent cash balance is not saved for later. At a season reset it becomes a currency that buys only decoration. Cash you convert into unlocks keeps its value inside the item's track; cash you sit on converts into skins. The rational play is to hold enough float to survive a bad run of matches, put the rest into unlocks you will use, and treat hoarding as a cosmetic purchase you did not choose.

This is also why we cap and time our cash farm instead of pushing the largest order we can. A balance delivered a week before an undated reset is worth less than the same balance delivered when you are ready to spend it.

The goal for your first ten matches is a balance that grows while you learn the map, not a kill/death ratio. Spend under $1,500 a life for all ten and put every action into a track that pays whether or not you win fights.

1. Matches 1 to 3. Recruit rifle, Level 1 Armor once it is unlocked, binoculars. Stay with a squad, stay inside the Control Zone, mark everything you see. You are learning where the zone gets dangerous and feeding Assault and Recon at the same time.
2. Matches 4 to 6. Add a bandage and the Field Resuscitator once Medic 2 lands. Revive everything. Take the Medium Hammer and some build supplies into at least one of these and build walls at your team's forward position. You now have four tracks moving.
3. Matches 7 to 8. Take a ground vehicle. Drive the mobile spawn somewhere defensible near the zone and leave it there. Ferry players from spawn and accept that you will earn more doing this badly than you would fighting well.
4. Matches 9 to 10. Spend the first serious money. Unlock what your levels have opened in this order: Level 1 Armor at Career 3, the AK74 at Assault 3, the Ural at Driver 3, the Field Resuscitator at Medic 2. Every one of those is under $35,000 and each pays for itself.

If you are playing more than ten, spend the extra matches on the two tracks you have neglected, which will be Driver and Pilot, because they are the two you cannot pick up by carrying an item. An empty or seeding server is the right place to learn a helicopter.

How to tell it is working: after ten matches you should be able to afford a $2,500 loadout without your balance dropping, and your Wardog level should be in double figures, built from four or five tracks. If your Wardog level came from one track, you took the slow road. A starter bundle exists for exactly this shape of opening, across all six tracks at once.

Every one of these is a cash error, and all six are more expensive than losing gunfights.

1. Rebuying the expensive kit on autopilot. The vendor offers your last loadout as one purchase. On a bad run that is a $6,500 rifle going into the ground five times.
2. Leaving a losing match. There is an end-of-match refund on loadout spending. Walking out early forfeits it, which makes quitting the costly choice.
3. Buying optics before income. A Recon scope at $40,000 or $45,000 costs more than the rifle under it and more than Level 2 Armor. Fix your earning first.
4. Pushing one track for the Wardog number. The first level on a track costs 200 XP and level 50 on one track costs 1,000,000. Spreading is not a preference, it is arithmetic.
5. Hoarding for a big-ticket item. The artillery tank sits at Career 90 and $500,000, and the season reset turns an unspent balance into cosmetics currency.
6. Flying a bought helicopter for the first time in a live zone. A crash is a five or six figure write-off charged to you.

There is a seventh that is not about money. Do not join a server advertising XP farming, even briefly. Bulkhead stated in Patch 0.11 that it tracks every server you enter, that it knows which ones are XP farm servers, and that an account tracked as joining one for more than a few minutes is permanently banned. That is the harshest sanction on the list and it applies to curiosity as readily as to intent.

You can, and Wardogs' publisher prohibits it by name. We sell these services, so the useful thing we can do is quote the policy accurately instead of talking around it.

The WARDOGS Enforcement Policy, updated 7 September 2026, prohibits boosting and playing to farm rewards rather than to play the game, prohibits buying, selling, renting or sharing accounts, and warns players away from paid services offering unlocks, progression, cosmetics or stat boosts. The Team17 and Everplay EULA, updated 10 September 2026, classes boosting, account sharing and multi-accounting as cheating under section 14.1, and separately covers selling progression for real-world value.

The sanctions are published and they are unusually severe. The ladder runs from a server restriction to a temporary suspension to a permanent account ban, and the policy states that a permanent ban is usually accompanied by a hardware ban, that it may extend to other games the publisher operates, and that hardware bans are not appealable. Bulkhead also reserves the right to reset progression, cash and XP obtained through abuse. Wardogs runs kernel-level anti-cheat, named Elytra on the Steam store page, and it is not Easy Anti-Cheat; the EULA addendum says the standard EAC references do not apply here.

What that means for the two ways of buying:

• Piloted work requires someone else to sign in to your account. Account sharing is named in both documents above.
• Pro for Hire is self-play. Our player joins your squad while you play your own account, and no credentials change hands, so the account-sharing part of the policy does not come into it.

We are not going to tell you a Wardogs boost is safe, undetectable or guaranteed, because the publisher's own policy contradicts all three words. What we will say is that self-play is the lowest-exposure way to buy help in this game, that we never ask for credentials on it, and that you should read the enforcement page yourself before you decide. Prices for every service are on the Wardogs price guide.

Wardogs is in Early Access and Bulkhead expects it to stay there for around one to two years. The Steam store page lists what is still to come, and several items on that list will change the advice on this page.

• Deeper progression systems and a stronger seasonal meta game.
• Systems that reward the time and impact a player brings to a match.
• New vehicle types including fighter jets.
• Expanded weapon categories and more objective variations.
• More maps, weapons and vehicles.

Two announced metagame pillars have names but no dates: the Black Market and Vault, and a Player Skills and Challenge System, both from Bulkhead's Early Access and Beyond post of 7 April 2026. Bulkhead describes the metagame as designed in foundation and built throughout Early Access, which is an honest way of saying it does not exist yet.

Some context for how fast this is moving. As of 14 September 2026 the Steam Web API reports 329,145 players in game, and the store page carries 54,168 reviews at 81% positive, rated Very Positive. Bulkhead confirmed 1.25 million copies sold on 11 September and thanked players for 400,000 peak concurrent users the day after. A game with that many players four days in gets patched often, and Bulkhead has already shipped a launch stability hotfix, a Season 1 balance pass and Patch 0.11 in that window.

Consoles are announced for 2028 on PS5 and Xbox Series X and S. Linux and Steam Deck are not supported at launch, with Proton support described by the developers as something that may come later. Nothing on this page should be treated as stable for longer than a patch cycle.