Money in WARDOGS: What the Game Pays For and How Not to Go Broke

Money matters as much as your weapon in WARDOGS. You start with $10,000, you buy gear for every life and your balance carries over from match to match. Anyone who keeps dying with an expensive loadout is soon close to zero, while anyone who plays for the team earns without a single kill. This article covers what the game pays you for, what you lose when you die, how loot and player-to-player trade work, what you get for free when the money runs out, how to put together a cheap starter loadout with Season 1 prices, and what happens if you abuse the economy.

How the economy works

• Your starting capital is $10,000. Every player gets it.
• The loadout is bought for every life. With money from your account you buy weapons, gear, tools and vehicles at the vendor.
• Money carries over between matches. Your profit from a match is credited to your account and you spend it in the next one.
• Gear you buy only applies to that match. The only thing you carry into later matches is item unlocks, which you pay for once. How unlocking works is described in the article on roles and progression.

You can see your balance in the top right of the screen. Next to it is a green or red number showing your profit or loss for the current life. If it is red over a long stretch, you are spending more on gear than you earn.

There is one limit you should know about right away: money does not last forever. At the end of the season the balance is reset and whatever is left is converted into gold bars. The details are in the article on Season 1 and the reset.

What the game pays you for

According to the developers at BULKHEAD, everything that helps the team earns money. Specifically, the game pays for:

• kills and assists,
• reviving and healing teammates,
• spotting: marking an enemy gets you a small amount straight away and more money as an assist if the marked target goes down soon afterwards,
• transporting teammates to the zone by car or helicopter, with a bonus on top if the players you carried survive,
• the APC: the driver of the mobile spawn gets money for every teammate who spawns on it,
• resupplying and selling supplies to teammates (see below),
• building fortifications,
• presence in the zone: the payout in the Hot Zone is doubled and the money comes in continuously just for standing in it,
• destroying enemy vehicles, which pays better in the Control Zone and better still in the Hot Zone. Destroying an enemy APC is especially lucrative,
• the end of the match: after the match you get paid for finishing it (End of Match cash).

The amounts are deliberately left out of the list. The developers have not published an official reward table, and the numbers that circulated from the beta tests could have changed before release. The best way to tell whether your play is paying off is the green or red number next to your balance.

What death costs you

When you get shot down, you lie on the ground with two options: wait to be revived, or give up (Give up) and respawn. If nobody revives you or you give up, you lose the whole loadout and have to buy it again for your next life. A couple of deaths with a full, expensive kit and you are nearly broke.

That is why waiting for a revive pays off, especially with pricier gear. You can improve your chances with a bribe: while you are down, you can post a reward for whoever picks you up. It motivates medics to run to you first. Anyone can revive, and it is faster with a resuscitator or a defibrillator. There is more in the article on the Medic.

Loot: free gear

Every dead body can be looted and stripped of all its equipment. For the economy that comes down to one simple thing: you do not have to buy better gear, you can take it. Head out cheap and upgrade with whatever fallen enemies leave behind.

Tips, bribes and supply crates

In WARDOGS, money does not only move between the game and the player, but between players as well:

• Tips. A passenger can send the pilot or driver a tip for a good ride.
• A revive bribe. While you are down, you post a reward for whoever revives you.
• The supply crate. Whoever brings it in sets the prices of the items, markup included if they like. Teammates “buy” ammo or bandages from it and the money goes to the person who delivered the crate.

Season 1 changed two things about crates. Selling an item cheaper than $75 now earns the supplier 1 XP instead of 25 XP, and the purchase price curve in crates was rescaled from a range of 25 to 250 down to 1 to 200, so that cheap items cost a sensible amount and the system cannot be abused. Farming XP by selling odds and ends from a crate is therefore no longer worth it.

When the money runs out: what you get free

You can keep playing even with an empty account. These items are free:

• the starter rifle on every life, you only pay for ammo (Valkyra the A-91, Lonestar the Bushmaster M17S, Manticore the KH-2002),
• the Emergency Resuscitator, one per life.

With the starter rifle, a few bandages and binoculars you can earn even when your account is close to empty.

A cheap starter loadout

A cheap kit can look like this: the starter rifle or a cheap rifle, a couple of magazines and loose ammo, bandages, the free resuscitator, a Scout Backpack, a small tactical vest and binoculars. The prices in the table are accurate as of 15 September 2026, Season 1. BULKHEAD can change them every season.

Item	Price per life	Note
Starter rifle (A-91 / Bushmaster M17S / KH-2002)	$0	depends on your faction, you only pay for ammo
T-21	$600	cheap assault rifle, no unlock needed
Emergency Resuscitator	$0	one per life
Binoculars	$75	spotting, earns both money and XP

The rest of the cheap kit, meaning bandages, the tactical vest, the backpack and tier 1 armor from Career 3, is bought at prices that change between seasons. You can see the current prices at the vendor in game, which is why we do not list them here. Add magazines and ammo on top of that. Do not buy a pistol for a cheap kit, it usually does not pay off. Once you have spare money, tier 1 armor is one of the sensible first upgrades. Protective gear and backpacks are covered in the article on armor, and specific weapons and their prices in the overview of WARDOGS weapons.

Expensive purchases: when they make sense

Some items cost more for a single life than an entire cheap kit. The prices are accurate as of 15 September 2026, Season 1:

Item	Price per life
Forward Operating Base (FOB)	$7,500
FAL	$6,500
Large Hammer	$2,400
Defibrillator	$1,600

Season 1 made the FOB and the Large Hammer considerably more expensive: before the season the forward operating base cost $2,500 and the large hammer $1,600. The developers justified it by saying that buying them should be a real choice.

An expensive purchase pays off when it returns more than it cost. A defibrillator pays for itself for a medic who stays with teammates in the zone and revives, not for a player standing off to the side. With an expensive weapon it is the other way round: every death with it hurts a lot. The general rule is simple: buy the cheapest kit that lets you do your job, and do not buy expensive gear you cannot afford to lose.

Abusing the economy: what you risk

Patch 0.11 fixed “various cash exploits” and the developers published hard rules alongside it:

• Abusing a cash exploit means a temporary ban and your money and XP wiped.
• Spreading guides to exploits without reporting the bug means a permanent ban.
• XP farm servers: anyone who spends more than a few minutes on such a server gets a permanent ban. The developers track which servers you connect to.
• If you find a bug and try it once or twice, the developers say that is not a problem. They treat it as help with testing.

So quick money from a bug in the game can end with you losing all your money and XP. The ban rules and the appeal process are in the article on problems and bans.

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