Catalogue

WARDOGS ammunition

What a box of rounds costs, what the three loads cost against each other, why the calibre your weapon takes matters as much as the weapon, and which guns chamber which round.

Data as of Season 1 · 10 Sept 2026How to read this

Every calibre

14 · cheapest first

Calibre	Loads	Standard, per round	Per box	Weapons
.45 ACP 30 base damage	3	$1	$10	2
9×19mm 22 base damage	3	$1	$10	5
5.45×39mm 26 base damage	3	—	$15	1
5.56×45mm 28 base damage	3	$1.50	$15	8
.50 AE 49 base damage	3	$4	$20	1
7.62×54mmR 55 base damage	3	$6	$30	4
.45 Colt	3	—	$33	1
7.62×39mm 42 base damage	3	—	$40	1
.308 Winchester 60 base damage	3	$4	$40	3
.50 Cal	3	$50	$250	1
.338 Norma Magnum	3	—	—	—
12 Gauge	2	—	—	2
12.7x55MM	—	—	—	—
9x39MM	—	—	—	—

How to read this

Two prices, and they are not the same measurement. The box price is what the vendor charges for a box. The price per round is what one round works out at — the difference between a loaded magazine and an empty one, divided by what it holds. The vendor shows you the first. The second is arithmetic.

Box prices are list prices, printed as shown. The ammunition tiles carried no discount, unlike the weapon and vehicle tiles, which were read under the vendor's −50% new recruit discount and are published doubled. Both are list, so a box here and a rifle there compare directly.

Base damage is the calibre's floor, not what a shot takes off a player. It is where the round starts, before the load, armour, range and where you hit it come off — the same figure our time-to-kill study works from.

10 of the 14 calibres carry a box price. The rest never came up priced in the alpha, so they show a dash. A dash is not a low price or a free one — it means nobody has seen the number.

How ammunition works in WARDOGS

You buy rounds by calibre, not by weapon. That sounds like bookkeeping and is not: it is the reason a cheap rifle is not necessarily a cheap loadout. The weapon is bought once and kept until you lose it, while the ammunition is bought again every time you reload a habit — so the running cost of a gun is set by the box it feeds on, and a $250 box is a different proposition from a $10 one no matter what the rifle cost. Across the catalogue that spread is 25×, wider than the gap between most of the rifles that fire them.

The three loads, and what they cost

Every calibre but the shotgun shells comes in three loads — standard, hollow point and armour piercing — and you choose at the vendor rather than at the gunsmith. The alpha vendor only ever displayed the standard tab, but all three are priced for 7 calibres, and the ladder does not run the way the names suggest.

Hollow point is the expensive one, not armour piercing. HP runs two to four and a half times standard, steepest on .50 AE and .308 Winchester at 4.5×. AP sits between the two, rarely more than 1.75× standard. So the round that punches through a plate is consistently cheaper than the round that does not.

.50 Cal inverts it entirely, and is the only calibre that does: there, standard is the dearest load on the shelf and armour piercing the cheapest.

Tracers are a variant of each load, and they are free

Every load has a tracer version and it costs nothing extra — the same price as the round without the trace. So watching your own fire is a preference rather than a purchase. The one exception is 7.62×54mmR hollow point, at $28 a round against $18: one figure against forty-one that agree, which makes it an oddity rather than a rule.

What the three loads do

What the game says about each, in its own words:

Load	What its card says
Standard (FMJ)	Standard ammunition. Deals even damage to all target types.
Flesh Damage (HP)	Increased damage against flesh. Decreased damage against armored targets.
Armor Piercing (AP)	Its card is the one we never got in front of us. Armour piercing is a real load with prices of its own, and more damage to armour and less to flesh is what the name implies — but that is the name talking, not a figure anyone has published.

None of them carries a number. How much more hollow point takes off an unarmoured target, and how much armour piercing gets through a plate, has never been published — so the loads are a real choice with a price attached and no published maths behind them.

Shells split two ways, not three

Shells do not split the three ways rifle rounds do. 12 Gauge is loaded as buckshot or slug — a choice about how many projectiles leave the barrel rather than what happens when one arrives. Neither has ever carried a price.

One calibre is waiting for its rifle

.338 Norma Magnum is a full calibre — three loads, its own box — and nothing in the alpha armoury chambers it. It is a heavy magnum round, the class of cartridge a long-range rifle takes. Bulkhead has confirmed 37 weapons at Early Access against the 33 here, and only one faction was playable, so the gun that fires it is a fair thing to expect.

The kill log tells everyone what you loaded

Ammunition is named per shot in the kill feed. A line reads "insurgentz's AK74 (FMJ 5.45x39mm) ricocheted and dealt 14.04 damage" — so the type you bought is visible to the player you shot, along with the weapon, the calibre, the damage to two decimal places and whether the round ricocheted. There is no hiding an AP loadout from the people it is aimed at.

Six tabs, three of them unopened

The vendor's tab bar reads STANDARD (FMJ), FLESH DAMAGE (HP), ARMOR PIERCING (AP), CARTRIDGE, ROCKETS and MISC. The last three were never stocked with anything we could see. ROCKETS is the interesting one, given that helicopters, tanks and artillery are all purchasable and something has to answer them.

What is still unknown

Bulkhead has never published anything about ammunition. These are still open:

How much difference each load actually makes — the choice is real, the numbers are not published
What sits under the CARTRIDGE, ROCKETS and MISC tabs
What is on the second page of the FMJ tab, behind the next-page arrow
How many rounds are in a box. Dividing the box price by the per-round price lands on exactly 5 or 10 every time, which says boxes hold a fixed count without saying which
What .45 Colt, 5.45×39mm and 7.62×39mm cost per round
What 12 Gauge costs in any form

Recorded during the Closed Alpha and held until Bulkhead lifted its content embargo on 11 August 2026 — the terms are here, and our methodology page sets out what we held and what we still withhold.