Wanderburg Beginner Tips: I Drove a Castle Into a Mortar Tower So You Don't Have To

Howl’s Moving Castle spent most of its runtime lurching across the countryside on chicken legs, and I have wanted to drive that thing since I was a teenager. Wanderburg is the closest anyone has come to letting me.

It’s a roguelite from Randwerk where you pilot a castle on wheels through medieval countryside, swallowing sheep and houses to grow, then picking fights with rival fortresses that are doing the same thing. Picture Vampire Survivors crossed with Katamari Damacy, except everyone involved is medieval and extremely annoyed.

It landed on Steam in Early Access on September 8, 2026, and your first handful of runs are going to end badly. Here’s what I wish someone had told me before mine did.

Gold and silver do completely different jobs

Gold is your in-run currency. You get it from eating things, you spend it on upgrades during the run, and it vanishes the second the run ends.

Silver is the one that sticks around. It buys captains, crew, modules and artifacts that stay unlocked forever, which means a run you lose badly still pays you something on the way out.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Once you stop treating a death as wasted time, the early hours get a lot less frustrating.

Your castle is a vehicle, so drive like one

This is the thing that separates Wanderburg from every other bullet heaven on the store page. Your castle has real momentum and a real turning radius, and it does not stop on a coin.

Modules sit in fixed slots on the front, sides, top and back, and they fire in the direction they’re bolted to. A cannon mounted on your left flank does absolutely nothing while you’re charging straight ahead at a mill.

So stop reading fights as “where is the enemy” and start reading them as “what angle am I presenting.” Circling a cluster of troops with side cannons is a real strategy, and it feels great when it clicks.

Learn the size rule before you go looking for a snack

You can only swallow something if it’s marked edible and its size rank is equal to or below your castle’s current rank. Your castle starts at rank 0 and gains a rank every time you kill a boss, up to rank 3.

At rank 0 you’re limited to the small stuff, mostly sheep and villagers. Houses open up after the first boss, mills and small carts after the second, and treasure carts and walking carriers after the third.

Some things are never on the menu. Bosses, cities, harvesters and mortar towers all have to be destroyed the old fashioned way, so don’t drive into one expecting a free meal.

Eating does not heal you

This one cost me an embarrassing number of runs. Swallowing a village restores exactly zero health, no matter how satisfying the crunch is.

Healing comes from health crates, repair fixtures, the Carpenters crew and a few specific captains and artifacts. If you’re already at full health, your castle politely shoves crates aside instead of eating them, which means you can leave one parked on the map and swing back for it later.

Get in the habit of noting where the crates are. Banking one before a boss timer expires is the difference between a clear and a restart.

Nitro is an escape hatch, not a gas pedal

It is very tempting to hold boost constantly because the castle handles like a shopping cart full of bricks. Resist that.

Boss fights regularly include pulls, slows and ground fire, and the fourth Grassland boss, The Dark Tower, drags you inward while a fire tornado chews through your health bar. Arriving at that fight with an empty Nitro meter is how the run ends.

Start with Norbert the Normal

The captain roster is genuinely funny and includes Dieter the Drunk, Racer Ruth, Patchy the Pirate and a Time Witch. Almost all of them come with a drawback attached.

Norbert the Normal has no gimmick at all, which makes him the right pick while you’re still learning how the castle moves. Once the basics feel automatic, Tankbert trades Nitro regeneration for max HP gained from wrecking vehicles, and The Count heals off units he consumes but stops health boxes from spawning entirely.

Read that Count drawback twice before you buy him. Losing your primary healing source is a much bigger deal than it looks on the unlock screen.

Pick one weapon and feed it everything

You get four active ability slots, so a build with five good ideas in it is really a build with four mediocre ones. The most common beginner mistake is spreading upgrades evenly across every module you happen to own.

Dump your levels into whatever is already carrying the run. A fully invested Ram will flatten things that a half-invested Ram just bounces off.

Leveling modules is also how you unlock new ones. Archer Crew at level 5 unlocks the Archer Tower, Ram at level 10 unlocks Side Arms, Side Cannons at level 10 unlocks the Front Cannon, and Mine Layer at 10 gives you the Turret Layer.

Spend your first silver on crew

Crew are passive bonuses that work in the background while you concentrate on not driving into a mortar tower. Carpenters cost 800 silver and slowly restore health over time, which fixes the exact problem the swallowing mechanic creates.

After that, Merchants at 1,200 silver generate gold passively and quietly upgrade every run you take them on. Archers, cannoneers, fire crew and wizards are all available too, with the Wizard Crew sitting at the top of the price list at 5,000 silver.

Treat the boss timer as a cleanup countdown

Every map runs on a clock, and the boss shows up somewhere in the three to four minute range depending on the stage. The temptation is to farm right up to the last second.

Don’t. Use the final stretch to clear the area around you, grab any healing you left lying around, and make sure you have open ground to work with when the fight starts.

Each map is a four boss gauntlet, and your castle gets bigger after each one. Bigger sounds great until you realize a wider castle has fewer places to squeeze through.

New lands mean new rides

There are three biomes at the moment, each with three maps. Grassland covers Green Plains, Meadows and Waving Fields, Desert covers Golden Dunes, Savannah and Wasteland, and Dark Forest covers Dusky Pines, Somber Marsh and Sinister Swamp.

Clearing all four bosses of a map in a single run is what opens the next region, and partial progress does not carry over between attempts. That single run requirement is the wall most new players hit.

It’s worth pushing through, because the vehicles are the real reward. Beating all four Golden Dunes bosses unlocks the Spiderburg, which walks over terrain and turns beautifully but is made of tissue paper, and clearing Dusky Pines unlocks the Tankenburg, a 500 HP brick with two front slots that exists purely to ram things.

Quests are the fastest silver in the game

There are 27 stage quests split across easy, medium and hard tiers, plus nine daily quests that rotate and a batch of unlock quests tied to modules and vehicles. Most of them ask for things you were already doing, like consuming a hundred units in a run or destroying a set number of rams.

Check the quest list before you launch, not after you die. Steering a run toward two or three active objectives is far more efficient than hoping you stumble into them.

Know what you’re buying right now

Wanderburg is sitting at 78% positive on Steam, which is solid, and the complaints are consistent enough to be worth naming. Players are reporting sharp difficulty spikes between stages, uneven progression, and frame drops once the screen fills up with fire.

Randwerk has been shipping hotfixes almost daily since launch, and they’re estimating six to twelve months in Early Access with a desert expansion and price increases on the way. It’s rough in the places you’d expect a three person studio’s launch week to be rough.

If you want a polished game with a settled meta and a tidy tier list, give it a few months. If the phrase “medieval castle physics” made you sit up a little, it’s an easy ten dollars, and I have not been able to stop thinking about the Spiderburg since I unlocked it.

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Images in this article are from the Wanderberg page on Steam and used under Fair Use.