WARDOGS Season 1 Patch Notes: Every XP, Price and Unlock Change

Patch notes are where most game wikis get lazy: a wall of bullets copied from wherever, with no dates and no version stamps. This page does the opposite. Every line below is transcribed from Bulkhead’s own Steam announcements, grouped by what it actually changes for you, and dated, so when a number drifts you can see which patch moved it.

Two announcements are covered: the Season 1 changelog (September 9, 2026, the build the game launched into Early Access on September 10 with) and Patch 0.11 (announced September 12, delivered with maintenance on September 14), plus the small day-one Launch Stability Hotfix in between.

What Changed in WARDOGS Season 1, at a Glance

The headline: Season 1 is a progression and economy patch, not a content patch. Bulkhead said so directly — the previous curve was balanced for weekend-long beta tests, and each season will now carry a different XP curve and different item orders.

XP Curve: Every Band, Before and After

This is the change most players feel. Bulkhead’s own framing: levels 10 to 20 are slowed and the curve flattens from 35 onward, so the median player at 20 to 25 hours sits around level 20, and the big-ticket items are a deliberate grind for roughly the top 5 percent.

Your WARDOG level is the sum of six separate career levels, which is why the Season 1 curve hits you six times over — see the leveling route we recommend.

Notice the on-screen ladder in that frame: 200 / 750 / 1,250 / 3,000 / 6,250 XP for the first five levels of a career. Those sit below level 6, the exact band Season 1 left untouched — a useful cross-check that the “unchanged” line is real.

Two XP event changes ride along:

• Player kill using an air vehicle: 300 XP → 250 XP.
• Supply crate item sold under $75: 25 XP → 1 XP. That second one is a farm nerf: dumping cheap filler items through a crate for XP is now worth almost nothing.

Vendor and Economy Price Changes

Bulkhead moved prices “so they are more of a choice” — the FOB and the Large Hammer in particular. Every line is official:

The supply-crate purchase curve was also rescaled from 25–250 down to 1–200, which the developers describe as stopping low-value items from being priced absurdly and “cannot be abused”.

The crate-selling flow whose purchase curve was rescaled and whose under-$75 XP payout was cut to 1 — the full loop is in our logistics guide.

Unlock Level Moves by Career

The same patch re-sorted where things unlock. Moves that lowered a gate are free wins; the two that raised are expensive.

Career: Sports Parachute 36 → 35 · Large Backpack 56 → 55 · 762x54mm AP 83 → 82 · 556mm AP 85 → 83 · Deagle 90 → 85 · Artillery Tank 55 → 90

Medic: PP-19 50-round drum magazine 33 → 29

Support: Large Hammer 7 → 8

Driver: URAL 4 → 3 · Kodiak Assault 8 → 6 · Dune Buggy 10 → 8 · Large Supply Crate 20 → 16 · URAL Covered 30 → 18 · URAL Attack 40 → 25 · Humvee with minigun 35 → 30 · Kodiak Flatbed 2 → 10 · Heavy Tank moved from Career 35 to Driver 35 · Music Tape H moved from Pilot 28 to Driver 23

Two structural notes worth reading twice: Artillery is now Career level 90 (was 55), which is the single biggest gate change in the patch, and the Heavy Tank is now a Driver-track unlock at level 35 rather than a Career unlock. Our artillery walkthrough and anti-tank guide both predate that move, so treat their unlock lines as beta-era.

Fixes and Quality-of-Life, Grouped

Exploits. One fix listed: an exploit that let players reach an unintended position on the church roof.

Reporting and moderation. A new report tracking system; reports are now weighted so repeat and bad-faith reporters carry less influence; cheater bans are announced in-server when match termination is turned off; the “kicked from server” message now only appears if you were actually banned.

Server browser and front end. Reworked server-browser filtering; community server images fixed scaling incorrectly; the Host a server button now links straight to the hosting page.

Voice chat. Fixed voice cutting out permanently after a failed join — stale channel rejoins, push-to-talk targeting and re-login all recover properly now; voice reliability improved under load, with a visible communication status added.

Gameplay and vehicles. Z20 Lakota balance pass plus a fix for sluggish pitch; helicopter input damping now applies to every input device; vehicle turrets now have a maximum operator rotation speed; 155mm, 122mm and flare deployables take up more loadout room; a DPI issue affecting tank aiming was fixed; the Z20 Lakota chase-camera rotation rattle came down by 6 dB.

Input damping now applies to every input device, which is the change most relevant to anyone learning to fly — our helicopter walkthrough was filmed before it landed.

Performance and stability. DLSS Frame Generation can be turned off without restarting and the render target pool is configurable; fewer shadow cache refreshes (less hitching when you take control of a character); two crash paths fixed in the frame generation pipeline; GPU crash reports carry more detail; a legacy graphics dependency removed; shadow quality clamped to Low on high benchmark scores instead of switched off; crashes fixed for network calls off the game thread, closing a chatbox entry tooltip, certain buildables, and firing a weapon whose owner had left; dropped items no longer affect navigation; and startup reliability improved, with clearer messages when something fails early and a route to recovery.

That last line matters if you have been fighting launch errors: clearer failure messages means the error text you see is now more diagnostic than it was. Work the ladder in our Elytra anti-cheat and launch failure fixes and tell us the exact string.

After Season 1: The Launch Hotfix and Patch 0.11

Launch Stability Hotfix #1 — September 10, 2026. A small client update pushed the day of launch. Everyone logged in was forced to close the game, restart, download the update, and then re-enter the login queue, with players let back in controlled batches. Bulkhead scoped it to three problems: players unable to join servers, players being unexpectedly kicked during play, and extended login queue times.

Patch 0.11 — announced September 12, delivered September 14, 2026. Roughly an hour of downtime from 08:00 UTC, and an unusually direct apology about community servers: “Community Servers have been underserved and the server browser experience as a whole has been poor … We got this bit wrong.” What actually changed:

• The front end is split into two browsers: Community and Official.
• Filters removed from Official servers (there are no official modified game modes yet), with reliability of community filtering improved.
• Text-based search added to community servers, plus Show Empty/Full on the quick bar.
• Community server IDs now persist between matches and restarts, so you can join by ID — the numbers are now much longer for security reasons.
• Server names are forced into alphabetical order regardless of special characters and numbers, and only one space at a time is allowed.
• For one week, community servers pay a bonus 5% end-of-match cash, offered explicitly as an apology.
• Various cash exploits fixed, more GPU crashes addressed, and Asian server region capacity increased.

Still in the pipeline, announced but not shipped (official status: not yet ready): community server favouriting, tiered priority queues for community servers, a Message of The Day prompt, improved warmup activities, AFK kicking during seeding, and team-switching controls.

The Ban Policy Written Into the Patch Notes

Patch 0.11 also published how Bulkhead will treat economy abuse — worth knowing before you chase a farm route:

Bulkhead’s own line: testing something once or twice is fine (“thanks for helping us QA”), but repeating a discovery is abuse. That is also why the under-$75 crate XP was cut to 1 above — read the money-making guide with this policy in mind.

What Season 1 Still Does Not Answer

We keep these open rather than guessing:

• Secure Boot / TPM. Season 1 says nothing about it and the Steam system requirements list only Windows 10 minimum / Windows 11 recommended with no firmware line — so there is no documented Secure Boot requirement as of Patch 0.11. The Steam store page registers a kernel-level anti-cheat named Elytra as the thing that gates launch.
• Consoles. Bulkhead’s September 10 launch trailer says “coming to consoles in 2028” with no platform named and no crossplay or cross-save statement — see console and crossplay status.
• Linux / Proton. Not working at launch; the developers have indicated support may come later. Unchanged by Season 1.

How We Track WARDOGS Patches From Here

Every article on this site carries a gameVersion stamp, and this page is the reference those stamps point at. Expect a new dated section here per patch, and note that the studio has said each season brings a different XP curve and item order — plus a full wipe roughly a month into Early Access, after which every number above becomes a historical record rather than current data. If a patch moves something, tell us via the contact page and we will re-verify against the official announcement.