Game Modes

Mordhau's modes fall into four rough groups: objective modes where teams fight over ground, team modes where the only objective is the other team, modes where everyone is on their own, and one where the enemy is the game itself.

Which ones you see in the server browser depends on what people are hosting at the time. The large objective modes carry most of the population, and the smaller ones live mostly on community servers.

WARNING

The lineup shifts with patches, and community servers frequently run modified rules. Treat this page as what each mode is for, not as a promise about what is in the browser tonight.

Objective modes

Frontline

The mode most people mean when they talk about Mordhau. Two teams push a line of capture points across a map, and taking one moves the front and the spawns with it. Deaths are cheap because respawns come in waves, so the shape of a Frontline match is a shifting mass of bodies rather than a series of duels.

It is also the loudest, most chaotic thing in the game and the worst place to learn the combat. You will die to people you never saw. That is not you playing badly, that is the mode.

Invasion

Asymmetric. One team attacks a sequence of objectives in order and the other holds them, with a timer running. Attackers have to finish the whole chain to win; defenders only have to stall.

Longer and more structured than Frontline, and objectives tend to funnel the fighting into places where the map itself matters.

Team modes

Team deathmatch

Two teams, a score limit, and no objective beyond the other team. Respawns are quick. TDM_ on a server map list.

Skirmish

Round based, and there are no respawns. Die and you sit the round out, which changes how people play immediately — nobody trades a life for a kill when it is their only one. Rounds are short and the pace is closer to a series of small engagements than to Frontline's scrum. SKM_ on a server map list.

Everyone for themselves

Free for all

No teams, no objectives. The best place in the game to actually practise fighting, because you get a high number of engagements per minute and nobody is relying on you. FFA_ on a server map list.

Expect to be attacked while already fighting someone else. Learning to bail out of a fight you are winning is a real skill here.

Battle Royale

Last player standing, on a shrinking play area, starting with whatever you find rather than a loadout you built.

Against the game

Horde

Co-operative. A team holds out against waves of AI that get harder as the match goes on, with gold between waves to spend on better equipment. Forgiving, and a reasonable way to get familiar with a weapon without a real opponent punishing every mistake.

Duels

Not a mode in the menu so much as a convention. Duel servers are ordinary servers set up for one-on-one fights, with etiquette enforced by the people on them: you wait your turn, you bow, and you do not interrupt a fight in progress. See the glossary if that convention is new to you.

This is where people go to actually get better at the combat system, and it is where the mechanics on the combat mechanics page are worth studying properly.

Where to start

If you have just installed the game, the order that wastes the least of your time is roughly:

1. Horde or a bot match, to get used to the swing and the parry with nothing at stake.
2. Free for all, for volume of fights.
3. Frontline, once dying constantly no longer tells you anything.
4. Duel servers, when you want to fix something specific.

Skipping straight to Frontline is what most people do, and it is why most people spend their first ten hours convinced the combat is random.

Running these on your own server

Server map names are the mode prefix plus the map name, so FFA_Grad is Grad in free for all. The dedicated server guide has the map rotation setup and the full prefix list.