Transcript for:
Dead by Daylight Beginner Guide

Hello everybody and happy Friday the 13th. What better way to celebrate than watching a YouTube video explaining the mechanics of a nearly 10-year-old video game. I'm Keslius, but you can call me Kess. And this is the ultimate guide for beginners in Dead by Daylight 2025. I was inspired to make this video because of the collaboration with Five Nights at Freddy's to provide crucial information to any new players joining us in the fog. In this video, I will explain everything you need to know from the very first time you open the game to start winning and understanding how to improve. Since this is aimed at new players, I will start by giving advice for survivor as that's the easiest role to learn. This will take a while, so grab a snack and get cozy, and I will do my best to explain each concept as quickly as I can. Now, let's get on with it. Before you even play your first game, I recommend you go into settings, find accessibility, and turn on heartbeat visual support. This setting shows a visual heartbeat on your character to indicate how close the killer is. The faster the heartbeats, the closer they are. While not a requirement for playing the game well, many beginners run or hide the second they hear any heartbeat at all. This feature makes it clearer when the killer is walking towards you versus walking past you and can help while being chased. Now, on to actual gameplay. The number one biggest mistake newer players make is not working on generators as soon as the match begins. In most of my early games, I try to stealth around, avoid the killer noticing me, and in most of those games, I die early. Feel free to check my earlier videos if you want to watch stealth get me killed over and over again. Stealth can be a good strategy in certain scenarios, but until you know when best to use it, just focus on completing your actual objectives, the generators. When you spawn into a match, the first thing you should do is look around to find nearby generators. Every generator has a pole sticking out of it with lights on top. From far away, you should be able to see these poles and their flashing lights, even over small walls and obstacles. As you work on a generator, you will have to hit skill checks periodically. You will also have to hit skill checks while healing yourself or teammates. How easy it is to hit these skill checks depends on whether you're playing on console or PC and how much lag you have. The only advice I have is to try and hit the skill check in the dead center instead of hitting the tiny white sliver at the start. While hitting that sliver and achieving a great skill check is technically better, missing a skill check is much worse. So, focus on hitting good skill checks until you feel more comfortable with timing. Additionally, missing a skill check creates a loud noise notification for the killer, alerting them to your location. So, really try to focus while healing and repairing. Once you finish repairing a generator, it also makes a loud noise for every player, not just the killer. When a generator is completed, the lights turn on and stay on for the duration of the match. It took me an embarrassing number of matches to learn how to tell if a generator has been completed or not. By keeping an eye out for these light poles from far away and noticing which are flashing and which are fully on, you'll be able to develop a mental map of where each generator is and which have or have not been completed. As soon as you complete a generator, you need to find your next objective as soon as you can. Whether that's another generator, a teammate on the hook, or an injured teammate nearby. Completing generators is generally more important than healing teammates. So, if your generator is 90% done and there's an injured or hook survivor nearby, do the generator first and then go help them. However, if your generator isn't very progressed, your teammates take priority. So, go help them first and then work on a generator together. Objectives like completing generators or healing teammates go faster when working on them together. So, trying to work on an objective with your teammate is almost always a good idea. If at any point the killer finds you while you're working on a generator, healing a teammate, you should try to run as far away as you can so that your teammates can keep working on objectives while you are being chased. If the killer stops chasing you, simply find your nearest objective and get to work. Every match has seven generators around the map, and once five have been completed, the exit gates are powered and the endame has begun. Once the exit gates are powered, you can no longer complete generators, and the auras of the two exit gates are briefly revealed. So pay attention to where they are while you can. If you can't find an exit, remember that the exit gates are always on the edge of the map and normally don't spawn in corners. So look along the outer wall of outdoor maps. In indoor maps, exit gate spawns are often static, so you just have to learn where they are by playing. Once you find an exit gate, you should open it immediately. Some players will intentionally not open a gate all the way, commonly called 99 the exit gate because they open it 99% of the way, leaving that last 1% to prevent the endgame collapse. This is a dumb idea, and most of the time it will get you or your teammates killed. The single scenario where this could potentially help you is if the killer is about to hook a teammate and the three remaining survivors are together and want to heal themselves before going in for the save. Excluding that, just leave. As soon as any exit gate has been opened, the endgame collapse has begun and a large orange progress bar will appear at the top of your screen. When this progress bar reaches zero, all remaining survivors will die, no matter where they are in the map. If this does not happen, it's a bug and you should report it to developers immediately. Once there is only one survivor remaining, either because the killer killed the rest or they escaped through an exit gate, a hatch will spawn randomly in the map. If the final survivor finds this hatch before the killer does, they can just jump in and escape as though they had found an exit gate. By escaping, the game awards the survivors as though they won, and any items brought into the match or picked up during will be kept. There is no such thing as a real win or loss in Dead by Daylight, only kills and escapes. But since this is a team game, each player can determine for themselves whether they won or lost based on how they chose to play the game. This is a very, very basic explanation of how to play Survivor, mostly focused on the technical elements of how to repair generators, heal teammates, and escape the match. This will really only help you contextualize the rest of this video because everything about this game is far more complicated than it seems. If you're only here because you want to play the new update, but you want to know what you're getting yourself into, good luck. Have fun. But fair warning, the servers are often busier and the matches are often harder when a new killer is released. If you want to actually learn how to survive and thrive in this community, stick around because there's a lot you need to know. The very first thing I'm going to explain is not even in the game, but in the main menu. When you select play as survivor, you are brought to a lobby with just yourself where you can select a character, create a loadout, open the blood web, check your quests, and buy things from the store. All before you actually click ready and play a game. By completing quests, leveling up, and opening your weekly free gift in the store, you receive blood points and iridescent shards, the red and purple currencies, respectively. By spending blood points in the blood web, you can sense a theme here. You can level up your individual characters and unlock perks, items, add-ons, and offerings for that character. All progress is character specific. So, choosing a character is actually very important, as each character also has unique perks. I won't lie, my first dozen games, I just picked the character I thought looked cool and didn't realize the choice was more than cosmetic until I'd already spent all my blood points leveling them up. Most characters have at least one useful perk, so if you're in the same boat, don't worry too much and finish leveling that character before choosing a second. If you haven't spent any blood points, though, there is a correct order to level up characters. The first character is not so surprisingly the first character, Dwight Fairfield. Dwight is the stereotypical noob character, but for very good reason. His three unique perks are all useful, particularly for completing objectives quickly. But the star of the show is Bond. This perk allows you to see the auras of other teammates within 36 m when fully leveled up. Or in other words, when a teammate is nearby, you can see them through walls. This tells you where your teammates are, what they are currently doing, and allows you to heal each other easily and double up on generators to complete them faster. While Bond has a ton of other uses, I don't think I need to linger on the value of wall hacks, as most people understand how strong they can be. The second character you should unlock is unfortunately hardware specific. If you play on PlayStation, you should get Fun Min for free. If not, you'll have to buy her with iridescent shards, but make sure she's the first one you buy. Most players agree her perk, Ly is one of the strongest in the game and can help you easily escape killers. But her value for new players is in her other two perks, alert and technician. Alert is very simple. When a killer performs the break or damage actions, their aura is revealed to you for a few seconds from anywhere in the map. This means the killer can kick a generator on the opposite side of the map and you can see them and learn which killer it is and which direction they're going. Now again, wall hacks are super useful, but the real star of the show for new players is technician. This perk is only for new players. Whenever you miss a skill check on a generator, technician activates, where normally the generator would explode and create a notification for the killer, it simply does not. However, in exchange, the generator loses significantly more progress than it normally would for missed skill check. This perk should only be run if you are brand new and still getting used to hitting skill checks. Once you have a couple dozen hours in the game, never run it ever again, as the downside far outweighs the benefit. The third character you should unlock, or second if you can't get fun, is Meg Thomas. All three of Meg's perks are great, but the reason every new player should unlock her is adrenaline. When the exigates are powered or when the hatch is shut if you're the last living survivor, adrenaline activates, healing you one health state and giving a brief 50% speed boost. If you're bleeding out on the ground, now you're standing up and injured. Or if you're running around injured, now you're fully healthy. And if you're already healthy, but near the killer, now you're very far distance from the killer and probably close to an exit gate. The silent benefit of this perk is not only in its obvious uses, but this healing effect activates even if you're in the middle of doing something else. How I commonly use it is that I intentionally do not heal myself when there is only one generator remaining. So that when I complete that generator, I am fully healed and able to beat my teammates to the exit gate. This is a common strategy amongst intermediate or advanced players. So if you try and heal a teammate, but they want to work on a generator instead, let them. While each survivor has their benefits, these three provide the most consistent value each game to new players. If you want a full tier list, there are many online and I might make one in the future. But for now, the other strong survivors you should get early are Claudet Morell, Adam Francis, Kate Densen, and William Bill Overbeck. By combining these characters perks, you can create some of the strongest builds in the game or simply gain additional options for survival. Now, for a more in-depth explanation on unlocking these perks and leveling your characters. As I am writing this video, the devs are working on an overhaul of the leveling system. Likely when this video goes live, you'll be able to spend blood points in bulk by choosing how many levels you want to increase a certain character. If I can get footage of this before this video goes live, you're watching that right now. But if not, expect a video coming in the next few days. In this explanation, I will only be explaining how to level up from the survivors perspective, but the blood web operates the same for killers and survivors. The footage you're watching is me leveling up my Michaela Reed to prestige level three to give you a sense of how long it takes. When you select a character and open their blood web, you are able to spend blood points to unlock individual perks and items. When you first play, don't worry about what you're unlocking as much as trying to level up quickly. It takes somewhere around 10 real world minutes of clicking on things in the blood web to fully level up a character, and it costs roughly 1,100,000 blood points. The first 15 levels operate a little differently than the rest. At level five, you unlock a new perk slot. At level 10, you unlock another new perk slot, and the entity activates and will now start deleting items per level. And at level 15, you will have all four perk slots available. But because the entity is active at this point, you now have to choose which perks you want and which items are more important. As a general rule, the strongest item type is a medkit. So don't worry too much about maps, flashlights, or toolboxes if you miss a few of them. For item add-ons or offerings, don't prioritize anything specific. You'll end up with plenty eventually. I'm not going to describe each perk in depth or why they are good, but a strong loadout for new players is Bond, Dja Vu, and Kindred, leaving the fourth perk up to personal preference. and maybe bringing a medkit or a blood point offering if you have one. Do keep in mind if you die in a match, any items or add-ons you bring will be lost and if you select an offering, it will be consumed when the match begins. In the old system, once you reach level 15, you would start playing matches and leveling up as you played each match because there was no real way to speed up the leveling process. In this new system, hopefully that won't be an issue anymore. As you level up in the blood web, you will both be able to unlock new perks and increase the rarity of each perk you have unlocked. The highest rarity of each perk is purple, so once your perks are all purple, your build is at full strength. Certain perks are rather useless at lower levels, so be sure to read the description when creating your first build. To fully level up a character, you must reach level 51. The higher you get in the blood web, the longer it takes to complete each level. Upon completing level 50, you will reach a screen prompting you to prestige at the cost of 20,000 blood points. In the new system, you can just choose to prestige your character immediately if you have enough blood points to level them up. Prestiging grants two benefits. The first of all, your character's perks have now been unlocked across all survivors at the lowest rarity. Second, you can now automatically level up in the blood web by clicking the auto purchase button in the middle. Again, I am writing all of this before the new update comes out, but I suspect you'll need to prestige a character once before you can actually use these new features. I have no idea why you need to prestige a character before unlocking this ability, but hopefully the devs will change this soon. To unlock a character's perks at their highest rarity for all your other survivors, you must reach prestige level three. There is no gameplay benefit for anything beyond prestige 3, but you can level up a character all the way to prestige 100. Now that the developers have released a way to spend blood points in bulk, the old horrors of this leveling system will be no more. And if you're a new player watching this, you don't have to worry about it. But for those of us who've been playing the game for a while, to level up, you had to manually click a button in the middle of your screen every single time you wanted to increase a level in the blood web. This meant that it would take around 15 minutes to get to prestige 3. And if you wanted to go all the way to prestige 100, it would take more than 8 hours of clicking. That's assuming, of course, you could afford more than 100 million blood points. But luckily for you, this is no longer an issue. Now that you know the basics and how to level up, I need to explain how to actually play well. When you notice a killer coming for you, it's generally a good idea to start running immediately. Some killers have range attacks or movement abilities to watch out for. So, putting obstacles between you and them is the key to survival. Around the map, there should be a variety of structures with pallets that you can drop, windows you can vault, and lockers you can hide in. These structures are called tiles, and in most outdoor maps, they spawn randomly around the map. Where the structures spawn is not random, but which one you get and where the pallets or windows are is. So, luck is a big factor in being chased. Once you have found a tile that seems safe, it's time to start looping. Looping the killer is when a survivor is being chased by the killer and they spend a long time going in circles around one tile. The loose idea is to run along the outside wall of a tile until the killer gets close to you. Then either drop a pallet or vault a window to avoid being hit. While the killer breaks the pallet or slowly vaults the window themselves, the survivor runs to the next tile and repeats the process. Now, even though I have more than 300 hours, I'm still a relative beginner in this game, so I'm not great at looping. Higher skilled players know the correct way to run around every tile and waste as much of the killer's time as possible. I just kind of wing it. There are certain perks and builds to make looping much easier, but if you want to practice, the only important one to know is Kate Densson's Windows of Opportunity. Despite multiple strong perks released recently, this remains one of the most popular survivor perks in the entire game. Windows of Opportunity reveals the auras of nearby pallets and vaulting locations in yellow. This leads to a common strategy I've heard called do red, go yellow. By running deja vu and windows of opportunity, a survivor can do the generator highlight in red until the killer comes. Then run to the nearest yellow until the killer leaves or catches you. And then you go back to the generator in red and start all over again. This is as advanced as my looping advice is going to get, but I am going to explain some important mechanics of chase. First, as a survivor, you can walk or sprint. Walking is slow but quiet, and running is fast but loud. When sprinting, survivors leave red scratch marks on the ground behind them for a short distance. Survivors can't see them without using a specific perk, but killers can and even from across the map if they have a clean line of sight. Therefore, if you're trying to be stealthy, walk or crouch when the killer is looking your way, and then sprint when they go away. By walking and vaultting a window, the survivor slow vaults. By running and vaultting a window, the survivor quick vaults. Quick vaulting creates a loud noise and a visual notification if the killer is far enough away. But if the killer is right next to you, they only hear the noise and they don't see the notification. If a killer is right next to you when you vault, they can tap the attack button to grab the survivor midvault, instantly picking you up, regardless of your current health state. All of the information about quick versus slow actions and killer grabs is also true for lockers. But as a general rule, just don't get in lockers. Another important thing to understand about chase is the survivor is smaller than the killer and can turn corners slightly faster than the killer, but the killer has a slightly faster movement speed. So survivors should run between obstacles and try and hug walls really tightly, and killers should try and force survivors away from tiles and towards dead ends. This smaller size and faster turning radius allows a survivor to run in a circle around a killer to avoid taking a hit. This is commonly called 360ing a killer and requires spinning around the killer just as they're about to swing. So, you move out of the hitbox their weapon before they can turn and hit you. Another important thing to understand about this size difference is with pallets. If a survivor drops a pallet on a killer's hitbox, the killer is stunned for a few seconds. The survivor can do this from within the pallet's hitbox, but the direction the survivor ends up on when they drop the pallet is dependent on their position and the direction they're facing. So, try to drop the pallet with your camera facing the killer to end up opposite them. The final thing you must understand about chase is that it's also an in-game mechanic. When a survivor has two little claws wiggling next to their player icon, they are in chase. If a survivor vaults an object in chase three times, it becomes blocked by the entity preventing the survivor from vaulting, but not the killer. The entity only blocks window or wall vaults and not drop pallets. So, if you can vault a drop pallet, the killer has to kick it and break it to stop you. Some survivor perks and some killer perks require chase to activate. To activate chase, the killer must be looking in the direction of the survivor and the survivor must be sprinting or the killer needs to injure the survivor. To cancel chase, the survivor needs to break line of sight with the killer and stop sprinting or the killer needs to stop looking at the survivor and start walking the opposite direction. This only really matters if you're trying to run certain perks. But as a survivor, if you see a killer entering chase and exiting chase with one survivor multiple times, they're probably using that survivor to farm a perk before turning it on and using it on all of you. This is especially true if that survivor is the obsession, which neatly transitions into me talking about the in-game HUD. The in-game HUD on the left of the screen shows the current status of every survivor in the game and any objectives they're working on. One survivor each game will be marked as the obsession by the large claws around their player image. The obsession can transfer between different survivors if certain perks are used, but this is rare, so don't worry about it too much. When a survivor is injured by any means, their player image turns red and a slash appears in front of their face. When a survivor is hit again, their image is replaced with an icon of a man lying on the ground, and they are now in the dying state. A red bar will appear beneath their name, indicating how long before they bleed to death. And a recovery meter will appear above their name, indicating how long it would take to heal them from the dying state. Unless using a few specific perks, a survivor can only recover 95% the dying state, and a teammate must heal them the remaining 5%. If a survivor's recovery meter is above 95%, it means they can heal themselves and are choosing not to at this moment. In all other scenarios, if you see a teammate bleeding out, go heal them because they're going to die if you don't. The main purpose of the HUD is to show what each survivor is currently working on. But there is some additional information as well. Each objective icon has a yellow circle that slowly surrounds it to show how much progress each survivor has on a given objective. Some, like generators, progress slowly, while others, like chests, progress quickly. The first icon is, of course, generators marked with a little picture of a generator. The second is healing, marked with a plus sign. The third is chests, marked with a picture of a chest. The fourth is totem, marked with a tiny bundle of sticks. And the final icon is simply killer power, marked with a skull. Killer power is the most complicated of these because there are so many killer powers a survivor could be interacting with. If the progress bar goes quickly and the survivor is injured right before, right after interacting with the killer power, it likely means the killer can use their power during a chase to slow down survivors. If the progress is slower and the killer is not chasing the survivor, it likely means the killer power is affected the map in some way by leaving some sort of trap or something else you need to look out for. There's no simple guide for understanding killer powers. It's just something that comes with time, but this framework should help you understand what each survivor is doing and why. The final piece of information on your screen are status effects. These are temporary effects marked by icons that appear on the right side of your screen and indicate in what ways you are currently being buffed or debuffed. The first thing to understand, if an icon is red, you are debuffed, but if an icon is yellow, you are being buffed. Pretty simple. Red bad, yellow good. There are dozens of status effects that even I don't fully understand. So, I'm just going to focus on the most important ones here that will affect new players and the game significantly. The individual icons to look out for are as follows. The skull icon means you are exposed and the killer can put you into the dying state instantly. If you see this icon, run and then hide because the killer is probably looking for you. The second is an eyeball and it indicates blindness, preventing you from seeing any auras. This is far less dangerous, but it can be confusing or disorienting. So, my general advice is to finish whatever you're working on and then wait for it to end before moving on finding your next objective. The third icon is a plus sign with a slash over it and it indicates the broken status effect. Unlike the previous effects, this one will appear on the left in the HUD and it is visible to all players. This is because broken prevents that survivor from being healed for its duration. If you are unable to heal yourself or a teammate, check the HUD because this is probably why. The final status effect is also visible in the HUD, but instead of an icon, it's marked with a yellow bar under the player's name. This status effect is more like a secret fourth health state called the mending state. When a survivor is in the mending state, they can sprint around the map without suffering any ill effect. But as soon as they stop running, the yellow bar decreases until the bar runs out and the survivor falls to the ground, entering the dying state. This is a very dangerous state to be in. So as soon as you stop running, you should hold the mend button prompted at the bottom of the screen before you bleed out. Multiple things can cause them ending state, but the two most common are the Legion's killer power and when a killer hits a survivor who has just been unhooked. Either way, the best strategy is to run as far as you can before finding a quiet corn to mend in and maybe a teammate to heal you. As long as you do not stop sprinting, you will not start bleeding out. So, going further is generally better than mending right next to the killer. Since I'm on the topic of healing and health stages, I figure it's a good time to describe how to help your fellow survivors. When healing or unhooking a survivor, it's important to understand how hook stages work and a concept called priority. Each survivor can have up to two vertical lines above their name. Each line indicates a time that the survivor has been placed on a meat hook. You start the match with zero and if a survivor is placed on a meat hook for a third time, they instantly die. Even if a survivor has only been hooked once, they can still die from hook stages. This is because of the red progress bar under the survivor's name while hooked. This bar counts down to the survivor's death. When the bra reaches 50%, the survivor moves on to the second hook stage, same as if they've been hooked two times, and now must hit continuous skill checks to stay alive. It is very important to unhook a survivor before their progress bar reaches 50%. Even if it means trading places with them. When a survivor reaches their second hook stage, they are now on death hook and should prioritize their survival for the rest of the match. This brings us to priority. To win a game as survivor, you must constantly be working on objectives. Each survivor at any given moment must therefore be working on a generator, healing, or being chased by the killer. If one survivor is being chased while their three teammates work on generators, by the time the killer catches the first survivor, a generator will have been completed. Survivors win by completing five generators, but killers win by hooking 12 times. So, one generator completed for one survivor on a hook is a great trade from the survivor's perspective. However, now that the survivor is on a hook, one of the survivors will need to save them. Priority is the concept that for each hook stage, injury, or generator being worked on, a survivor loses priority for the save. For example, if one survivor is doing a generator, one survivor is injured, and a third survivor is opening a chest, that third survivor has priority for the save as they're not currently in any danger and are not currently working on an objective. However, if that third survivor is healing their injured teammate, it falls in the person working on a generator to go for the save. This concept applies to hook stages as well. If all three survivors are working on generators when their teammate is hooked, but two of them have one hook stage and the third does not, that survivor must go save their teammate. This concept can be applied to any and all actions in Dead by Daylight. As a survivor, you must be thinking about the overall game state. How many generators have been completed? How many survivors have been hooked? And what should you do given that information? If you've yet to be hooked at all, but one of your teammates is on death hook and being chased by the killer, the correct thing to do is to get the killer's attention, allowing your teammate to escape and potentially survive. As a survivor, you can see what your teammates are doing and how many hook stages they have on the left of the screen, but the killer cannot. So, you must make smart decisions based on that information, which is effectively the only advantage a survivor has. In general, I consider a win to be if two or more survivors escape the match. So, keeping your teammates alive is essential to winning the game. The in-game scoring understands this by awarding points in the altruism category. Altruistic plays are when you do something for the benefit of your teammates. Pretty simple. This can be basic things like unhooking a teammate or healing them, or more complex strategies like taking a protection hit, which is when you move in between the killer and a survivor, taking a hit that was not meant for you. This is an in-game mechanic as well, and while slightly buggy, if you pull it off, you will see a blood point reward in the phrase protection hit in the top right. Before I move on from explaining how to play Survivor, I'm going to explain a couple courtesy rules, let's call them. This is a team game, so don't screw your teammates over. You kind of have to rely on everyone generally being a good person and doing what they're supposed to do, otherwise you're probably going to die. You can point and beckon as your only two actions in the game. You can use the beckon action to try and get a survivor to follow you and go to a nearby generator or work on something together. And you can use the point action to be like, "Hey, the killer's over there or our buddy's bleeding out right next to you. Can you go do something about that?" Because communication is so limited in Dead by Daylight, you don't really know what the other survivors are thinking. And so certain things are considered to be rude and certain things are considered to be polite by the community sort of arbitrarily, but also there's a little bit of logic behind it all. Let me explain. As a general rule, you should always be helping your teammates. If you see an opportunity to go and help your teammates and you do not take it, your teammates will get mad at you and they might intentionally throw the game to get back at you. One key example of this is unhooking. If a teammate has not been hooked yet and you do not unhook them, they will see it as rude. But also, if there's only two survivors left in a game, if you see an opportunity for your teammate to get a hatch, and you are the reason why the hatch is not spawning, and you are no longer going to survive this game, dying as quickly as possible means they are more likely to survive. If you take forever to die, then the killer has plenty of time to go around the map and find them. Things like this are considered rude because in a situation where three could die and one could escape, you're almost guaranteeing that all four die. Again, these are people you're playing with. So, the killer is a person, too, who can take pity on you, be kind to you. I've seen plenty of killers offer an escape to someone who played really well. Stuff like this is just sort of sportsmanship in the game. Like as a killer, it doesn't matter if you kill all three or all four. You're still gaining blood points and having fun playing your role. So if you have someone who you really liked playing against and you see an opportunity to give them the hatch, might as well, right? Doesn't hurt you. But again, people. So some people will see that scenario and go, "Oh, hey, this is an opportunity to help someone. [ __ ] that guy. I'm gonna make sure he dies." There are a lot of [ __ ] who play this game. I mean, it's a game about killing your friends. Of course, it's going to attract [ __ ] right? Like, be nice to the other players in this game. Oftentimes, it will reward you. Making friends is a good thing. Like, being kind and generous, and using the terms of this own game, being altruistic is a good thing. I tend to play the game in a way where I sacrifice my own life for my teammates. If I die and all of my teammates escape, that's a win. I don't care what the game says. I am happy with that outcome. And vice versa, if I am playing against [ __ ] teammates who are constantly throwing the game trying to get me killed and a killer who's just being a dick, if I see an opportunity to survive and get all of my teammates killed, [ __ ] them. They were mean to me. It's a game at the end of the day. Don't take it too seriously. Try to have some fun. Be nice to your fellow players. And if you see an opportunity to help someone out, do it. Frankly, I could talk for another couple hours on the intricacies of this game, but there's a couple like general things that don't neatly fit into any other topic that I need to explain. The first, every single map is different and you should learn every single map in the game. If you know what map you're in and you know that on that map there is always a generator in this one spot or a chest in this one spot or there's always this one pallet like learning those things can be life or death scenarios sometimes. So it's important to learn them. Um again though I it would be hours to go through every single map and all the details. So I'll just focus on the most important one. Every map regardless of the way the map looks or the layout has a basement. The basement is very important because as a killer, putting someone in the basement means you can trap the entrance to the basement or camp the entrance to the basement to guarantee that no one can get a free safe unhook in the basement. So, it's very very dangerous if you get hooked in the basement as a survivor. However, as a survivor, if you're looking for a chest, the basement is the only guaranteed spot in every single map that a chest will spawn. 100% of the time, it's guaranteed. It can spawn in two places. On like the back wall, kind of near the hooks or around the little corner straight from the stairs when you go into the basement. As a killer, you're largely expected to kill the survivors. However, there's two things that the survivors consider to be like bad sportsmanship or bad gameplay. Tunneling and slugging. Tunneling, I think, is a rather simple concept to understand. It's tunnel vision. If a killer is choosing to hook one survivor over and over again to kill that survivor first and get them out of the game, reducing the amount of survivors they have to deal with from four to three as early as possible. If a killer is tunneling as the other survivors in that game, you know that that's what they're going to be doing. As soon as you start to see that behavior, you know that's what they're going to be doing. So, the only counter to it is to just focus on generators and hope that you complete all of the generators before the killer successfully tunnels that one person out of the game. If you're working on multiple generators at the same time and your entire team is working on generators, this will likely happen. If your team is focused on trying to save that survivor, you're all probably going to die. Uh, as soon as the survivors are down a person, uh, and they haven't completed multiple generators, it's basically game over. The math I do in my head is if you're playing as survivor and there's one survivor fully dead, so there's only three players left on your team, but you have completed like two generators, you're fine. You can absolutely still win the game. If you lose an additional survivor at that same point, you can't. So, as a general rule, if there's only two survivors left in the game, they're playing for hatch and they're not really trying to complete the generator anymore. Um, this brings us to the other thing that killers can do to try and mess up the survivors, which is slugging. Uh, slugging is when a killer puts someone into the dying state where they're crawling around on the ground, uh, and they don't pick them up. That's slugging. It can be one person, it can be two people, it can be four people. It's all called slugging. So, uh, generally slugging is frowned upon. But in the game, there is actually like a mechanic for when all players are slugged in the game is over. It used to be that a killer could slug all four players and the players just had to wait until the killer bled them all out, hooked every player, uh, completed their mory. A my way, I don't think I've explained that. At this point, Amorei is when there's only one survivor remaining or a survivor has reached a reach a certain number of hook stages or a certain perk has been activated. There's a lot of ways to activate Amorei. It's essentially when the survivor is on the ground bleeding out and the killer is standing there, they are prompted with the kill option instead of the pick up option. That means they can mory the survivor which just plays a special little animation and then that survivor is fully dead. It's a thing that can happen early in the game or late in the game depending on what offerings, perks, or killer powers are being used, but just be aware of it. It's a thing that can happen. So, if there's only one survivor remaining, uh, or another survivor is very quickly going to die on hook, the killer will often wait so that they can mor my. Um, it used to be that if the killer is waiting for all of you to die and they want to get their mory or they just want to watch all of you die very slowly, the survivors just had to stay there. Now, if all four survivors become downed or hooked at any point in the game, doesn't matter how long technically the game would go on for, the survivors are prompted with the abandon option and then the killer can stay there with bots in their place and it counts more as a draw, at least in the current system. This might get rebalanced cuz it's a pretty new feature. In the current system, it counts more as a draw for survivors than as a full loss. Um, the killers still get their win, but they lose some of the satisfaction because whatever is happening now is happening to robots and not players. It's a way for the devs to try and stop this generally frowned on behavior. But it's also possible if there's only two survivors left in the game that the killer will intentionally slug one so that they can go try and find the other and prevent that survivor from getting Hatch. Because if they don't slug that person, but they hook them and then that person dies on hook, now Hatch spawns and it's a race to find Hatch first. If you're in the opposite scenario, there's more than two survivors remaining. So, this is the scenario of you've actually completed all of the objectives. You've completed all the generators. Someone is opening an exit gate as we speak, or maybe you are opening an exit gate as we speak, and there's like three survivors left in the game. At that point, if there's more than two survivors left and one is on hook, it's generally considered rude to leave without trying to unhook that survivor first. How hard people try is kind of dependent on how much they want to survive versus how much they want to help the team. Uh if you're in a situation where the exit gates are powered and all four survivors are still alive, regardless of hook stages or injuries, it is normally 100% possible, regardless of what killer you're up against or what situation you're up against, to guarantee that all of those people escape. The only scenario I found where that is not the case, like a perfect example, the classic hook camping character is uh a Bubba, a Leatherface, whatever you want to call him. Any character that can instantly down a survivor if you're in the endame, there's if they have someone on hook, there is basically no way for all four people to escape. Three will escape and one will die on hook. Technically, technically, you can get very lucky and you can play perfectly and everyone can escape, but if you try, a lot of the times two people will die instead and it would have been better just to leave. Um, so excluding those scenarios where you're essentially risking all of your lives to go in for the save, if it's a normal killer or a killer who doesn't have a particularly strong power, you as the survivors should go unhook that person. the endgame timer, like the endgame collapse is pretty long. It's a lot longer than you sort of think it is at first. Um, so you don't really have to worry about the timer too much, you have time to go and at least save one person. Um, and if all you accomplish is that you trade which player is on the hook, sometimes that's all you accomplish and you got to take the three man out when you can't. You should, if you want other survivors to like you, if you want to get like I don't know, it's not endorsed. Um, there's the little like thumbs up icon uh under the report screen that you can get for when a player is being a very good player, you enjoyed playing with them or against them. If you want to get a lot of thumbs up in the game, it's generally a good idea as a survivor to help your teammates as much as possible. Like if you go down and you get killed in exchange for a survivor escaping, that survivor is going to be very thankful to you. And I would almost guarantee that they're going to give you a thumbs up. And as a killer, if you want to be someone who's fun to play against, try not to tunnel. Try not to slug. Like a killer should generally like the whole point of this game is to have fun. And you're playing against other people, right? And the whole point of playing killer or playing survivor is having interactions with the other side. It's not fun for a survivor to just sit in the corner of a game and like not do anything and then repair a couple generators and leave. If they never see the killer the entire game, what's the point in playing a horror game, right? And as a killer, if you don't chase every single survivor in a match, you're not really playing with all of the survivors on the other team. Like, you're only playing with part of the team. So either way, it's it's just not really I don't think it's really fun. I think most people don't consider it to be how the game should be played. And with that, I've explained every aspect of how to play Survivor. Now, as I said earlier, this game is very complex, and when you combine all the killer powers, killer perks, survivor items, offerings, and map mechanics, and weird strategies, this turns into a much, much longer video. However, for a new player, this is everything you need to know to survive your first few matches and start escaping more frequently. But I also know that all the information I just told you is super overwhelming. So, I'm now going to play some footage of me playing as survivor and explaining how I use all that information in a real game. Okay. Uh, now I'm going to show off some of my good gameplay. This is a 2v8 game where I think I did everything pretty much perfect. As you can see, I'm running to a generator immediately and just working on it. As I said before, this is the number one thing that players don't do. You can see on the left, only a few members of my team are actually being productive. These idiots are just teaagging next to me. But whatever, it's 2v8. No one takes it that seriously. This is another moment where the killer's close. My heartbeat is going off, but I'm not running around like a headless chicken. I can hear and see on the heartbeat that they're not as close as they could be. Meaning, they're nearby, but not actually running straight towards me. So, I'm safe to complete this generator. That visual heartbeat is really how I'm telling this. Otherwise, I would have just been running around cuz I wouldn't know. And here we go. And now the killers are off doing something else. We pop this generator. We're doing a great job. Now, we're jumping ahead a little bit in the footage. Uh, I saw the killer back where we were before. Made some distance, found a new generator to work on, but I wanted the killer to follow me over here. Now, the killer's following me. And now I'm actually chasing or I suppose running in chase. It's a legion. Uh, the tip for legion gameplay is just make distance. If the Legion doesn't hit you within a certain period of time, they lose their power. So, you kind of just got to make distance. And they can see me here. They're kicking that generator. They know which way I'm going. I make the window, albeit barely. Now, what I did there, I went one direction, so they started going that direction, and then I doubled back as soon as they couldn't see me. These double backs that I'm doing are my core looping strategy. Uh, it doesn't work against every killer. It definitely worked against this legion. They were pretty lost against me. Made some distance over here. Now, if memory serves, this is when they activate their power. Yeah, there they go. Now, a Legion in power, you're not going to avoid for that long. So, take the hit and move on. As far as I'm concerned anyways, I know not everyone plays against Legion that way, but now I've taken the hit. I'm in the men's state. I make a lot of distance opposite side of the map and then I start mending. If you mend when you're too close to the legion, they'll be able to see you again once you've mended because they can see any person who is not currently in the mending state when they're in their power or they get like the little indicator. They can't see you through walls. It's not aura, it's just location. So, my teammates have healed me up now. Uh I got killed when I was over there. Not the not the legion. I think it was the ghost face. But that chase I went on with Legion. My team completed like two generators. I wasted a lot of time. The hook stages aren't too bad on the team. I mean, that one person, the Kate, I suppose this is the the Kate that I'm healing up right now. She's on death hook, which is not ideal. Um, but I'm just going around. I'm healing people up. If you aren't working on a generator, this is what you should be doing in a game. find teammates, unhook them, heal them up. Now, it's 2v8, so it's a little bit easier to do all of that. Uh, but still, soon as I've healed everyone up, I find a generator. Again, you got to constantly be putting pressure on. Skipping ahead again, we complete this last generator. Easy peasy. The killers successfully killed one survivor. Good for them. Now, again, 2v8 here. So, in a normal game, there would only be two exit gates. But still, soon as you complete an exit gate, [ __ ] run or as soon as you complete a generator, run to the exit gate immediately. Don't waste any time cuz now the Legion's going on another uh another little rampage over there. But we're far away. We're pretty safe here. Don't really know the status of my team, but I'm here. Here, I'm opening an exit gate. Someone's on another exit gate. We got two exit gates going. That's all you really need. Oh, sorry. We got three exit gates going. I didn't notice the third one there. Boom. Exit gate open. Now the team just needs to come over here. We can unhook people safely. We got three teammates on this side. Like look, everyone gathers up. Takes a little while. Uh but everyone is gathering up at our exit gate. The killers have made no progress. I'm just waiting for this uh was that a Felix to finally make his way over. And we're all here. We are all here. We lost one person, but a seven person escape is pretty damn good. Okay, now this is a different game. This is uh me looping against uh an unknown. We start here. Started working on the generator. Got interrupted cuz he was coming by. Now, this is not my smartest move. I didn't realize that I was blocking him there and he would collide with me, but whatever. I take the hit and now I'm in chase and my teammate can work on that generator. Perfect. The unknown's power. Uh, he shoots that little thing. If he hits me with a second one, I go down. So, now I'm trying to avoid those projectiles. You see, I knew he was going to go for the window. He was going to try and shoot it in there cuz he thought I was going to vault the window. I didn't vault the window. I fall out the little hole. But now I'm back up here. He expects me to go for that side. So I got to like loop him around a little bit. Honestly, he probably could have got me there. This isn't the best unknown I've ever faced, but he's okay. Like he's not bad. But I've looped long enough. Timer ran out. Now he's got to hit me with his uh little purple ball again. I mean, he does here. I don't I don't really have any safety, but I've made a lot of distance. One generator down. Second generator about to pop. He breaks that. I work my way back over here. He gets me here, I think. Yeah, there two generator chase though. That's pretty damn good for the early game. Teammates heal each other up. Like, we have so much progress already in this game. He waits around for the unhook. Not surprising. I'm doing an okay job, though. I make this and I go to the side so his uh projectile doesn't hit me. It takes a little while for him to wind up that projectile. I assume there's an add-on to make it quicker. He's not running that. All right. Now, this is an example of how to stealth properly. I know what side he's going to kick on, so I crouch. That's it. Easy peasy. Now, there's some perks that would have let him see me there. More observant killers might have noticed a bald rainbow colored man. He did not. We get this generator and we make so much progress. I stealth again here. Uh cuz I've already taken the hook and Ada hasn't. So, I want him to chase Ada here so I can go unhook a teammate. Soon as I see him committing to the chase, I run. A different teammate unhooked though, so I went for a generator. And now that right there, he teleported, but I don't know where he teleported to, but I can see that he's close to me. I'm just sort of waiting for him to get closer cuz I want this chase again. I take the chase. Make a little distance. This isn't as good as my previous chase. He's already hit me. I think I go down here pretty soon. But again, my team is working on generators. They're healing each other up. Good things are happening. Uh yeah, I went down there. My teammates saved me. We've jumped ahead a little bit in the footage. So now we're on last generator. They're over there healing up. I'm waiting. Soon as I see an opening, I work my way up here. Trying to like get close to generators that have already been progressed is normally a good idea. Saves you just a little bit of time. And he's still patrolling around here. He He's trying to puppy guard this generator, but I'm hiding behind a rock, so he doesn't notice me. Again, a more observant killer would have noticed me by now. Um, but he has not. For whatever reason, he just doesn't notice me. And I keep working on this generator. I think here. Yeah, he finds teammate, finds the ADA, but I'm the only one on death hook, so I can just keep working on this generator. If he comes for me, I run. I've made so much progress. We get it either [Music] way. I remember this bit now. Yeah. Teammate goes in for the distraction. Successfully distracts. So, I can get this generator. Yeah, he's he's definitely a bit of a newer unknown. You can tell he's kind of new to the game, or at least not that strong. I make it over here, get healed up, and I'm on my way back trying to go in for the unhook. I'm a little worried that like this is again I'm on death hook, my teammate isn't, so it's safer for my teammate to go for that unhook. He does and uh me and the Michaela make it out. Easy peasy. Okay, now I said earlier, don't stealth unless you know how. This is the start of a game against a Billy. I'm hiding this little shadow waiting around. The whole concept for stealth is you don't want to just be stealthing around the map. You want to be actually moving quickly around the map and progressing objectives. But you can if a killer is close to you stealth near the objective you're working on to try and waste their time so that they try and find you. Billy wasted some time. Now he's off for someone else. I go back to working on the generator. Easy peasy. Now this time I knew he was coming back cuz he gave up on the chase with the other person. Seriously, no clue how he didn't see me there. Like honestly, I'm right there. But he doesn't. The uh Adam Francis with the dark suits pretty good for hiding. We got one generator completed. He's hooking near me. He's going to check this generator again cuz he keeps checking it. I know that. I pick a different hiding spot. [Music] again just like wasting his time. He's looking for me and he's not putting pressure on the rest of my team. Oh no, this is great. This is a chase. So he whiffs there. I get the pallet and I just find a hold. I do this in chase a lot against killers. It doesn't often work very well. It worked amazingly here. Uh but just wasting the killer's time as much as possible. back on that generator. I finally finished it. It takes me forever to finish his generator, as you see, cuz he keeps checking up on me. Um, but in all this time, he hasn't hooked me. He's only hooked one teammate. We're down to one generator left. He's really done nothing this game cuz he keeps trying to find me and he keeps failing. Now, this I think the Sable was like AFK. I'm not 100% sure, but I pick my little uh hidey-hole again. He's missed me here so many times he misses me again. I'm sacrificing the sable or the gate here. Like playing like this stealthily, it's not the best way to play from a team perspective, but he's failing. Uh I managed to get this final generator and he's only hooked one person all game. He gets that lady again. Now again here, exates are more important than unhooking. We got three teammates left. We're all pretty healthy. I wait for him to leave and I work on the exitate. It's more important. She's got like 30 seconds or so, maybe a bit more. Teammate goes for her anyways. Could have waited. Would have been smarter to wait cuz now he's coming [Applause] back, but whatever. We make it to the exit gate. Now I can heal up teammate. Notice my position though. I'm further behind than the teammate is. I'm here to take a hit if need be, but I don't need to. And we get out. Perfect game. Okay. Now, in this game, nothing perfect happens. My whole team dies. When you're playing stealthy, you can play the way I played before and still try and complete generators, still try and help your team, or you can play like this, hiding in lockers, just avoiding the killer. It keeps you alive, but it guarantees your team will die in your place. Not exactly proud of how I played this game, but I was a newer player and I was very scared to be frank. Uh, Pyramid Head is a killer. I still don't know how to burst. Like, I just kind of get lucky here. I don't think he's that good. This is during the uh Christmas event, by the way. That's why there's all these snowmen I can hide in. Really great for um moving around undetected. But the killer can just whack a snowman and injure you all the same. So I just sort of stealth around here. When you get out of the snowman though, it makes noise. So the killer heard that, but he's already chasing someone else. I'm on generator. I'm starting out the team. being a little bit productive. I have a flashlight here. I debate the flashlight save, but at this point, I'm not really good enough to go for a flashlight save now. He hooks down there. I don't quite know where the hook is yet cuz I'm in the locker, but you could hear him hooking over there. A note on this map, killers always check this little room. They always check the generator. I always check the chest in the room I'm hiding in. There's not a lot of safety up here. I go to stop the regression of that generator. He's back, though. This is a much better corner to hide in. They rarely check here. He kicks the generator. That's why alert goes off there. So, I know he's kicked it. I can hear him walking around trying to find me. He is failing to find me. Now, this is 100% my save to go for, but a teammate beats me to it. And now I'm back on the generator. This is an instance where if the team had left her on the hook, I would have gone to the save and I would have actually been in a situation where, you know, I would have taken some meat from the killer. Didn't happen. My teammates's on hook again. Not an ideal scenario. Two generators left, though. One person on death hook. This is a salvageable game. Now, this this is a great example of like good use of stealth. If the killer had noticed me there, it would have been fine. He didn't. I make it through. Now, that lady hexquent simp. She's out. Just at this point, he's chasing her. She's on death hook. She's injured. She's out of the game. There's nothing I can really do to save her. I have a flashlight, so I could go for a flashlight save, but I don't really know how to do a flashlight save still. Um, I'm still like I'm I'm playing sort of stealthily and I'm not being a great team player, but I'm still helping where I can, healing up teammates. Yep. Hexquent and simp is out. What is that? Nicholas Cage, the other guy also going to die here. It's me. Is that a Rebecca? I think. Yeah, we're in this final situation now. I'm playing for exit gate or hatch. Fully one of the two. I find a corner to hide in. He kicks. He kicks generator. As a killer, you should always check these little corners. He doesn't. Big mistake on his part because then I can move around over here to a much better hiding spot. I Killers have caught on to this hiding spot though. I get found here a lot more. Um, but he's not privy to it. He knows to look in this direction, but he doesn't see me, so he moves on. Now, I don't really remember what I do from here. I think I go back to working on generators. Like, at this point, it's just whichever one of us he finds is probably dead. The other one might live. But this is like a hatch game, right? We can't complete two generators in this time. Okay, he's injured her. He knows where she is. I don't know what the plan with the snowman was here. I think I was thinking maybe I could get closer to her. Go in for like a save. I don't know. Doesn't pan out. I just sort of hide in the snowman in this Christmas mode. Like if you're the last survivor left, hiding in a snowman is a great strategy. Killers don't expect it, but it's, you know, a seasonal game mode. Uh not exactly something you can do all the time. All right. here. She stopped working on that generator. He kicks that generator, I think. No, he kicked a different generator. But he's he's going to find her soon. This is me 100% waiting for her to die. That's what I'm doing. Not the nicest strategy. I wouldn't do this against a good team nowadays. And there she goes. She's dead. But now we're in the end game. He's closed a hatch. I have to open an exit gate. This is how you play exit gates. wait for a killer to check an exit gate and then get in there as soon as possible. It takes them a little while to walk, particularly on this map, to walk from one side to the other. So, if you can time it that you getting the exit gate the second they're leaving, you can escape. Like, this is guaranteed basically, unless he was a movement character like a nurse or something. But he's not. I takes a hit and I'm out. Little disrespectful there on my part, but you know, I'm a newer player. I was excited to get the escape. Hooray! You've made it to the end of the video. Thank you so so much for watching. I appreciate every single one of you who's here. This video has taken a lot longer than I was expecting. Uh, I don't think I really appreciated how much time editing a YouTube video takes, particularly when you're trying to add a lot of footage and a lot of audio files together. It becomes a hassle rather quickly. Uh, and forgive any awkward edits or weird audio glitches. This is essentially my first long- form YouTube video ever. Uh, I am actively learning as we speak. I'm trying to trying to improve. uh real time. If you have any comments, questions, if you like the video, if you hated the video, if you disagree with everything I said, or all the information I gave you helped you win a bunch of games, whatever the case is, uh I would appreciate if you left a comment letting me know. I will be reading all the comments on this video, and I'll take in and appreciate every bit of feedback I get. This is the first video where I'm actually speaking on my channel. So, if you like this commentary style more than my silent full unedited games, let me know and I will try and upload more videos like this in the future. If you prefer just watching me play games and less yapping, then I'll do more of that in the future. I have some other projects down the line, videos that I'm working on. Uh, I have some more commentary videos that will be posted. I think I'm going to take a little bit of time off and relax before making another video that's this long, this in-depth, or requires this much editing. But I have a lot more to say about this game. If you're interested in a killer guide, uh, similar to the survivor guide, if you're interested in more specific information about specific characters, uh, specific maps, whatever you would like to see, please let me know in the comments and I will try to make that video. But do be mindful it might take me a couple weeks or a couple months to get around to any ideas posted in this comment section. As a final note, I just wanted to say how much I really love Dead by Daylight, the game, the community. I didn't ever really like horror before this. I know that playing Dead by Daylight and not really liking the horror genre is probably pretty surprising, but it's true. I always got scared very easily. I don't like jump scares as a general rule. Like, most horror games just aren't for me. And Dead by Daylight has not only been one of my favorite games of the past year, if not, who am I kidding? It's my favorite game of the past year. In less than a calendar year, I've put almost 500 hours into the game. But Dead by Daylight has also opened the door to horror for me, and I've gone back and started watching horror movies and appreciating them in a way that I couldn't until now. So, I want to thank the developers of this game, the community that has largely welcomed me, and anyone who stuck around to watch this video. I really, really hope that going forwards, the community will only grow, the game will only get more and more love, and more people will see how truly special a game this is. Thank you and I'll see you in my next