What can you afford to lose?

The rules BULKHEAD has published

Every player starts their journey with $10,000. Each life you purchase a custom loadout from a selection of weapons, gear, utility and vehicles. Cash persists from match to match — so, in the studio’s framing, spending big on better equipment at the right moment can turn a battle and yield a return, and losing that equipment is a real loss rather than a reset at the next round.

What the developer says pays

BULKHEAD names the rewarded actions directly rather than leaving them to be discovered: reviving squadmates, transporting friendlies to the zone, and controlling the objective. Its wider description of the sandbox names the roles those actions belong to — close-quarters combat, sniping and spotting, medic, building, demolitions, transport, logistics and artillery. The point being made is that the reward system does not privilege the person who shoots.

• Reviving squadmates
• Transporting friendlies to the Control Zone
• Controlling the objective
• “Every teamplay action you perform rewards cash” — the studio’s own summary

The Hot Zone pays double

The store copy describes chasing the “Hot Zone” to earn double the cash. That is the only multiplier BULKHEAD has named, and it has not said what triggers a Hot Zone, how long one lasts, or whether the multiplier applies to anything other than cash.

Nobody has published a single number

This is the part every other WARDOGS site fills in and we will not. BULKHEAD has published no price for any weapon, attachment, vehicle or piece of gear, and no published payout for a revive, a transport run or a capture. What exists instead is a community record: a pre-release beta vendor screen puts prices on 31 of the 34 weapons it lists, and a Mi-28 Havoc helicopter at $500,000, graded observed in our database rather than official — and the outlet that recorded it calls its own figures unreliable for the shipped game. Loadout costs quoted online with no source at all — a rifle at some figure, a helicopter at another — are a worse version of the same problem: estimates repeated between sites until they read like facts. If you are budgeting, budget in proportions, not in numbers you cannot check.

Spend against a purpose

Editorial preparation, not a tested build. Decide what job you intend to do before you spend, because the expensive option is only expensive if it does not do the job. Keep a reserve you are comfortable rebuying from: the failure mode this economy sets up is a good loadout you cannot afford twice, and a player who cannot rebuy is a player who stops taking useful risks.

The planner below

It does arithmetic on figures you type in — your cash, your kit cost, your reserve. It is not backed by an official price list, because BULKHEAD still has not published one. What happened instead: a beta vendor screen recorded prices for 31 of the 34 weapons it lists, and our database now carries them, graded observed rather than official, with the outlet's own warning that they are not a reliable price list for the shipped game. The Loadout Planner runs on those same figures automatically; this note stays manual because a beta number is not one you should be able to forget is a beta number.

Common questions