How do you use the mortar in WARDOGS?

What it takes to build one

The L81 is an emplacement, not an item you carry: it is built in place, and only inside a friendly FOB’s zone. The guides agree on four requirements. Miss one and the mortar either never appears on the build wheel or sits half-built.

How to buy, place and supply the FOB it has to sit in →

Building the L81, step by step

The sequence as the 11, 14 and 19 September guides describe it. The one irreversible mistake is placement: dismantling returns none of the supplies.

1. 01

   Stand inside the FOB zone with the Large Hammer

   Outside the zone the mortar is simply not offered.

2. 02

   Right-click and find L81 MORTAR

   Guides place it on the third page of the build wheel, left tile; F cycles the categories.

3. 03

   Place it with a clear arc in front

   A ring of planks marks the pit. Keep walls, razor wire and tall structures out of the barrel’s path — a shell that clips your own build detonates on top of you.

4. 04

   Hammer the marked planks

   An ordinary hit adds one or two per cent; a plank marked with a cross adds ten. Chase the marks.

5. 05

   Mount it and reload

   Reload converts the FOB’s Ammo Supplies into rounds. If it does nothing, the FOB is out.

Aiming: bearing first, then range

Mounting the mortar puts you in a zoomed sight with three readouts: a compass across the top, range in metres (RNG) on the left and elevation in mils (MIL) on the right. W, A, S and D traverse and elevate; the mouse makes finer corrections. On the L81 a higher mil figure means a steeper barrel and a shorter shot. The guides’ method solves direction and distance separately, and each has a trick that removes most of the work.

• Bearing: open the map, middle-click the target to ping it, close the map, and turn until the ping’s diamond sits on the centre of the mortar’s compass.
• Range from a spotter: a target a teammate has already spotted shows its distance when you hover it on the map — use that number directly.
• Range from coordinates: right-click your mortar on the map and choose Mark Coordinates, do the same on the target, then use the widget above. One map unit is 100 m.
• Range by eye: the small map grid squares are 100 m each. Count them, allow for the diagonal (three across and four up is five, not four), and treat the result as a first ranging shot only.

The range arithmetic, worked

Three guides print the same method and the same worked example, which is why the widget on this page defaults to it. Subtract X from X and Y from Y, multiply each difference by 100 for metres, square both, add, and take the square root. Signs do not matter because both differences are squared.

Why there is no elevation table here

Most of what is searched as a “mortar calculator” wants the mil setting for a given distance. BULKHEAD has not published one, and the guides explicitly say the sight uses the gun’s own mil scale rather than NATO mils, steps in whole mils, and is not interchangeable with the self-propelled gun’s. The same guides recommend matching the RNG figure and letting the sight set the elevation — which is exactly what the widget supports. This page will not print mil values it would have to invent.

How far it reaches, as reported

Every guide gives a slightly different envelope and one says outright that BULKHEAD has published no official mortar range. The disagreement is at the edges, and it matters most at the near one: inside the dead zone around the tube, shells always land short and the only fix is moving the mortar.

Firing for effect

The first shell is information, not an attempt. Stay with the shell camera, see where it lands, correct one value at a time — short means more range, long means less, left or right means traverse — and only then fire for effect. The map also keeps the impact marker, so you can compare the crater with your target and measure the offset instead of guessing.

• R loads up to three rounds; C skips the shell camera, and three shells can leave the tube in about three seconds.
• Reported per shell: 120 damage across a 10 m blast radius, with a 6.5-second reload.
• Reported spread: about 50 MOA, which one guide translates as rounds scattering across roughly ten metres at the far end of the range. Aim at the middle of a group, not at one player.
• The sight reads flat-ground range. A target well above or below you will take a correction whatever the arithmetic says.

What a shell costs

This is where the guides disagree most, and none of them is BULKHEAD. The 14 September build guide says each shell consumes 30 Ammo Supplies, so a three-round barrage burns 90. The 15 September artillery guide gives 81mm ammunition as $600 a shell. The 10 September solo-FOB guide says the mortar needs no separate ammunition purchase because it draws on the FOB’s stock. What all three agree on is the mechanism: shells come out of the FOB you are attached to, the same pool one guide says feeds the C-RAM and Strela launchers, so an empty FOB means a silent mortar.

Ammo Supplies, and how they reach the FOB →

Staying alive behind the tube

Every launch gives your position away — the sound and the visible arc of the shell lead straight back to you, and enemy scouts, rocket-armed helicopters and counter-battery mortars all hunt firing positions. The guides’ advice for a mortar pit is consistent: site it about 600 m from the target, behind a ridge, treeline or buildings; ring it with HESCO four blocks high but keep the walls a block back from the tube so shells clear them; and move after a productive fire mission rather than staying for the whole match. The same logic answers “how to counter mortars”: they are fixed, expensive and cannot move under fire, so the solo-mortar guide lists enemy mortars among the highest-value targets for counter-battery fire.

Destroying an enemy FOB takes its mortar’s ammunition with it →

What is not established

None of the sources checked for this page — BULKHEAD’s included — publishes the following, and this site does not fill them in:

The Artillery Tank, the other indirect-fire option →

• An official mortar range, damage value, blast radius or spread.
• A mil setting for any distance.
• An official cost per shell, in Ammo Supplies or in cash. Three guides give three different answers.
• Which way the map’s Y axis runs. One guide states it; this page does not compute a bearing from it, and uses the map ping for direction instead.

Pick the two points on the map instead

The same arithmetic now runs on the three maps' contour sheets: tap where the mortar stands and where the target is, and the range comes out in metres with the reported reach drawn around the tube. The map positions come from a community calculator checked against two datamines, so they are graded unverified; for a real shot, type the Mark Coordinates numbers instead.

Open the WARDOGS mortar calculator →

Common questions