Are the WARDOGS servers up?
We judge it by the live Steam player count: people on the servers and fresh data — everything works.
Last 24 hours
Known outages
First day of the playtest: roughly two-hour queues for the servers, with the developers running a live infrastructure ticker.
How we work it out
BULKHEAD has no official status page — not on the game site, not on Steam. So we measure it indirectly: we poll the public Steam API every 10 minutes and record how many people are in the game.
| Up | sample newer than 40 minutes, players in the game |
| Empty | sample is fresh but the count is zero — the usual picture when servers are off between tests |
| No data | the last sample is stale: our collector fell over, or the Steam API is not answering |
The method catches global outages and shutdowns. It will not see a single-region failure, broken matchmaking on live servers, or a problem with one ISP.
Why our number may not match the others
The samples are our own, so our chart is almost always slightly different from SteamDB or any other tracker: they poll at their own moments and average in their own way. A few percent is normal: both sides measure honestly, just not in the same second.
The second difference matters more: we show the gaps. If the collector was down, the chart has a break labelled “no samples”, not a straight line drawn across the night.
Since 25 August the sampling runs around the clock on our own cloud service, not a home computer.
What changed on 10 September
Before launch every number on the site came from the playtest — a separate Steam app. Since 10 September the main game's counter works, and that is what you see in the live figure and on the charts; the sampling runs at the same interval, independently of SteamDB.
The test history is still here: the beta record — 244,671 players (6 September 2026) — stays for comparison, and the playtest series keeps going for as long as Steam serves it.
Frequently asked
The count is high but I cannot get in — what should I do?
Then the servers are alive and the problem is on your side or your ISP's. In order: restart Steam, verify the game files, turn off your VPN, reboot the router.
If none of that helps, write in the chat (it is in Ukrainian): if several people see the same thing at once, it is no longer a local problem and we raise the alarm on the channel.
Why does the data update every 10 minutes rather than instantly?
Because Steam hands out the player count in slices, not as a stream. Polling more often gains nothing — the number does not get more accurate — while the risk of being rate-limited grows. Ten minutes is the compromise that keeps the chart alive and the data honest.
Do you show the same thing as SteamDB?
Same source — the public Steam API — but the samples are ours, and we have kept the history since 24 August 2026, before launch. A discrepancy of a hundred or two players between services is normal: it all depends on which second the slice was taken.