Hound

Hounds are the entity most new explorers meet and the entity most new explorers survive, because everything dangerous about them has a straightforward counter — as long as you know it before the encounter rather than during.

How they hunt

A Hound has almost no useful vision. It hunts by sound, and it is very good at it: reports consistently describe Hounds locating a stationary, silent explorer only by accident, while tracking a running one across an entire level.

They are fast — considerably faster than a person over open ground — and they have stamina. In a straight sprint on a warehouse floor, a Hound wins.

Where they fail

They corner badly. Hound anatomy is built for speed in a line, and it does not handle direction changes at pace. Every documented escape from a Hound involves either breaking line of sight around tight geometry, or not being heard in the first place.

This makes Level 1’s open concrete floors the worst possible terrain and Level 2’s narrow tunnels, counter-intuitively, among the better ones.

What actually works

• Stop moving. The first instinct is to run and it is the wrong one. A Hound that has not localised you will pass within metres of a person standing still.
• Break line, then break sound. Get around a corner and then get quiet; doing only the first accomplishes nothing.
• Use water deliberately. Standing water makes you loud, but it also masks direction. Crossing slowly is fine; splashing is fatal.
• Throw, do not shout. A thrown object relocates their attention. Your voice relocates them onto you.

A note on the game

Hounds are lore, not gameplay. The game on this site has one creature and it is called a Friend — it is not a Hound, and none of the named entities in this guide appear in it.

The lore principle does carry over, though, and it is the whole game: you hear the thing before you see it, and playing with the sound off means playing with no warning at all.