Identity V Strategy Guide · Cosmo Strategy Guides

Figure 1. Section 08 of this page is "Four Seats At The Table". These are the four entries it lists.

01 · The First Forty Seconds

The opening is not filler. Almost every loss you can name was set up here.

Seven machines spawn, five matter The map seeds seven Cipher Machines and you only need five. That surplus is your whole opening plan: the two you never touch should be the two closest together, because a Hunter who can patrol two machines from one spot is getting free map pressure for nothing.
Walk out, do not sprint out You have three movement settings and only the fastest one, sprinting, leaves a visible trail behind you. Walking and crouching leave nothing. In the opening that trail is a map of where your whole team went. Pick your machine on the way, not from the spawn animation, and if two of you land on the same machine, one should leave immediately rather than double up for a marginal speed gain.
The first chase is a donation Somebody gets found in the first 40 seconds. That player's job changes instantly: they are no longer a decoder, they are a clock. Every 10 seconds they survive is roughly 10 seconds of three-person decoding, and three people decoding in parallel finish the first machine before the Hunter has landed a hit.
Spread, but not to the corners Perfect spread looks great until someone is chaired in a corner and the nearest teammate is 40 metres away. Aim for a loose triangle around the middle of the map with one player deliberately out wide, not four players hugging four separate edges.
Learn the Hunter from the first ability You often see what you are up against before you see the Hunter: a puppet placed near a machine, a web across a doorway, fog where fog should not be. That first tell tells you which of the counterplay rows in section 09 you are playing today. Call it, even in solo queue, with the in-game markers.
The Dungeon does not exist yet The Dungeon only spawns once two machines are finished, and its hatch stays shut until one Survivor is left. In the opening there is no bailout: no hatch, no gates, nothing but machines. Play the opening like the only currency is decoding progress, because it is.

02 · Cipher Math

Eighty seconds per machine, five machines, and a Hunter trying to make it more.

The 81-second baseline One Survivor at base decoding speed, uninterrupted, finishes a machine in about 81 seconds. That is the number every other decoding claim in the game is measured against. Five machines is therefore roughly 400 Survivor-seconds of raw work that four people have to find inside a match where one of them is usually being chased. The machine count is not a flat seven either: the map seeds one machine per starting Survivor plus three, which is why somebody dropping at the loading screen costs you more than a body.
Calibration is worth more than it looks The prompt is not decoration. Landing it in the wide white band is a Complete Calibration and costs you nothing. Landing it in the narrow yellow band is a Perfect Calibration and pays about 1 percent of the machine, worth roughly 0.81 seconds. A miss short-circuits the machine, throws away progress, gives you zero progress for the next 2 seconds, and hands the Hunter an audio and a visual cue pointing straight at you. There is a trap attached: if you let go of the machine while a calibration is already on screen, it counts as failed anyway. Finish the prompt, then leave.
Two on one machine is not double speed Stacking Survivors on one machine gives diminishing returns per body while concentrating all of that progress where a single Hunter visit can interrupt it. Double up deliberately (to finish a machine that is about to be defended, or to burn the last one under pressure), never out of habit.
Leave the paired machines alone If two machines sit close enough that a Hunter can stand between them and hear both, treat them as one bad machine. Your five should be the five that force the longest walk between defensive positions.
Three minutes in, every machine speeds up About three minutes into a trial a global event called decoding acceleration fires: every Cipher Machine on the map crackles with electricity and decodes 30 percent faster for the rest of the match. It is the biggest single tempo swing in the game and most players never notice it happen. If you are behind on machines at the three-minute mark you are less behind than the bar suggests, so stop panicking and stay on the machine. If you are the Hunter, that is the minute your comfortable patrol loop stops being enough.
The antenna tells on you at 30 percent A machine's extension starts to wiggle once it passes 30 percent decoded, and the Hunter can see that wiggle from a distance. A machine you primed to 40 percent and walked away from is a flag you planted for the other team. Either finish what you start, or accept that you have just told the Hunter which corner of the map to patrol.
Abnormal reverses your work Abnormal is one of the seven skills a Hunter picks in the lobby, and it deducts Cipher progress at range. Understand that it is a declared choice, not a late surprise: the only in-match change any Hunter gets is Trump Card, and that window shuts 120 seconds after the whistle. So if progress is sliding backwards, it has been sliding all match and you simply were not reading the bars. Against Abnormal, consolidate two Survivors onto one machine instead of leaving three machines part-done for it to eat. It has a second use most Survivors forget: it also lets the Hunter repair a Rocket Chair you dismantled.
Do not finish the fourth early The moment the fifth machine pops, the siren goes off, the gates power up and every remaining machine becomes inert. Popping four fast and then stalling on a defended fifth is the classic losing shape, because the Hunter now has exactly one place to be. Prefer four machines at 90 percent to three machines finished and a fourth being camped.
Read the machine, not the map Cipher progress is visible information for both sides. Before you commit to a rescue or a new machine, look at what is nearly done. Abandoning a machine at 85 percent to run a rescue you will not reach in time is how teams end up with five half-finished machines and three chairs used.
Decoders exist, and you are probably not one Characters like the Prisoner (Luca Balsa), who can link two machines so progress transfers between them, and the Mechanic (Tracy Reznik), who can keep a doll decoding while her body is being chased, are doing a different job from a generalist tapping the same button. If your team has no dedicated decoder, someone has to volunteer to be boring.

03 · The Chair Clock

Two stages, 30 seconds each, and an orange line most players never look at.

30 plus 30, then the rocket A chaired Survivor has two stages of roughly 30 seconds each before elimination. That is your entire rescue budget, and it is shorter than it feels, because the first 10 seconds are usually spent deciding who goes.
The orange half-line is the real rule If a Survivor crosses the glowing orange midpoint on their first chair, a second chairing eliminates them outright. This is the single most misunderstood mechanic in the game: a "safe" second rescue is only safe if the first rescue happened before that line. Check the portrait, not your feelings.
Three chairs is always the end Regardless of timing, a third chairing removes that Survivor. A player who has been rescued twice should be decoding in the furthest corner of the map, not pushing for a rescue of their own.
Rescue late on purpose An immediate rescue hands the Hunter two bodies next to a chair. Unless a teammate is about to cross the half-line or the Hunter has clearly left, arriving around the 20 to 25 second mark of a stage is stronger: you spend the Hunter's patience, and your team banks decoding time. If you are the designated rescuer, the Bravery talent Risky Move raises rescue speed by 40 percent, which is often the whole difference between a clean save and being caught inside the animation.
Tide Turner is twenty seconds of invincibility Tide Turner, the final talent of the Friendliness wing, makes both the rescuer and the rescued invincible for 20 seconds after the save. Inside that window neither of you can be knocked down and neither of you can be healed, and any knock-down damage you absorbed is applied instantly the moment it expires. It fires once per match, full stop. That is the real answer to a camping Hunter: you are not out-fighting them at the chair, you are walking two people out of the zone and getting a heal started somewhere else before the bill arrives.
Body blocking is a trade, not a sacrifice Absorbing a hit for a freshly rescued teammate is correct when you are healthy and they are not, and wrong when it puts a second body into chair range. Ask one question before you step in front: if this goes badly, does the Hunter get two chairs out of it?
The last Survivor never gets a chair stage The two-stage clock has one exception and it ends matches. When only one living Survivor is left, being chaired at all sends them straight to stage three, regardless of whether it is their first chair or their second. So the moment your team is down to a single player, the chair stops being a rescue problem and becomes a hard loss condition: that player should be playing for the Dungeon, not for a save the rules will not permit. It also means a Hunter who camps a chair early, while three of you are still alive, is a Hunter who is not defending Ciphers. Let them.
Chairs have fixed spawns, and most of them break Rocket Chair positions never change from match to match, so learning them on your three best maps is a permanent upgrade rather than per-match guesswork. A Survivor carrying a toolkit can dismantle a chair outright, which forces the Hunter to carry a body elsewhere or bring Abnormal to repair it, and pays 250 points in the Bravery category. The four chairs in the Basement are the exception: they cannot be dismantled at all, which is precisely why a good Hunter is steering your chase toward them.

04 · Presence & Terror Shock

The Hunter's power bar is fed by your mistakes, and one mistake feeds it double.

2,500 points, two payouts The Presence bar holds 2,500 points and never goes down. At 1,000 a sound cue fires and the Hunter's kit steps up a tier; at the 2,500 cap it steps up again. What that buys is character-specific and worth knowing for the Hunters you meet most. Gamekeeper's hook cooldown refreshes the instant he crosses into a new tier, so a chain that just missed you can be available again immediately. Ripper turns invisible inside his own Freezing Fog in 3 seconds at maximum Presence instead of the usual slow fade. Night Watch gains extra Windforce charges. Those two audio cues are free information: when you hear the first one, the chase you are in is about to change.
A normal hit pays 500 An attack that connects is worth 500 Presence, so two clean hits put the Hunter at the first threshold. That is how fast a bad opening chase arms them, and it is the real cost hidden in the third tile of section 01: the player who gets found first is not only spending their own health states, they are funding the Hunter's kit for the whole rest of the match.
Terror Shock pays 1,000 Terror Shock is double damage. It puts a healthy Survivor straight into the downed state, skipping the injured state entirely, and it hands the Hunter double Presence. Learn the exact trigger list, because it is shorter and stranger than most players assume: decoding a Cipher Machine, fast-vaulting a window or a pallet, healing a teammate, opening a chest, and using a wand. Nothing else on that list, and the Lawyer is the one character it cannot touch. A single Terror Shock costs you an entire health state and is worth two clean hits to them.
This is why you vault early or not at all The whole reason experienced players look hesitant at windows is Terror Shock avoidance, and note exactly what is on that trigger list: the fast vault. Walk up to a window and climb through it slowly and you are not fast-vaulting, so that particular shock cannot land and you make no noise either. The cost is the time it takes. So there are three correct answers at a window and hesitating is not one of them: commit to the fast vault with a clear gap, slow-vault deliberately once you have already broken line of sight, or hold the pallet and make them break it.
Starving the bar is a real strategy A team that takes zero hits for the first two machines is playing against a Hunter with no abilities. This is the strongest argument for boring, safe kiting in the early game: you are not just buying time, you are keeping their power bar empty.
As the Hunter, bank Presence deliberately From the other chair, early Presence is worth more than an early chair. Taking a guaranteed Terror Shock on a careless Survivor at a window beats chasing a good kiter for 60 seconds for the same 500 points. Hunt the mistakes, not the players.

05 · Kiting Geometry

You cannot out-run a Hunter. You can out-corner one.

Straight lines always lose Every Hunter in this game outruns every Survivor in a straight line, with no item and no exception. So every metre you spend running across open ground is a metre donated. Worse, sprinting is the only movement setting that leaves a visible trail, so an open-ground sprint hands them the distance and the direction at once. If you are crossing open ground, cross it to reach structure, never to escape.
There are two vault speeds and only one is loud Run at a window with momentum and you get the fast vault: quick, and it fires a noise notification straight to the Hunter. Walk or crawl up to the same window and you get the slow vault: quiet, and it sends nothing at all. Most players only ever use the loud one. The quiet one is how you actually leave a loop the Hunter is still circling. Meanwhile the Hunter has only the slow vault at windows, and cannot vault a dropped pallet at any speed: they have to stop and break it. That asymmetry is the entire reason loops work, and it is why you should be counting their break animations rather than your own distance.
Tight kiting beats pretty kiting Pick one structure and orbit it until you have either landed a pallet stun, made the Hunter commit to breaking a pallet, or found a genuinely safe moment to rotate. Sprinting between three different loops with nothing dropped is how you lose a chase in 20 seconds and blame the map.
Bait the pallet, then drop it A pallet stun only lands if the Hunter is standing inside the pallet's area as it comes down, which is a smaller box than it feels like from your side. The standard setup is to sell the idea that you are running past it, then turn back and drop it into them. Good Hunters counter-bait by stepping toward the pallet and stepping off again, so stop reading their approach as a commitment. If you stun often, the Bravery talent Great Power extends how long they are stuck by up to 20 percent; from their side, the Tough talent Destructiveness shortens every break.
Do not burn a pallet you can still use Dropping a pallet early converts a reusable loop into a one-time obstacle and permanently weakens that area of the map for the rest of the match, including for the teammate who gets chased there in four minutes. Hold the pallet as a threat for as long as the loop is still working. When you do force a break, spend it: the breaking animation tilts the Hunter's camera down at the floor, so those seconds are your free window to break line of sight, or to blind them with a flashlight they physically cannot turn away from.
Kite toward unfinished work Where you kite is as important as how long. Dragging a Hunter into the corner where two teammates are decoding undoes the time you just bought. Drag them toward the dead half of the map, the half with the two machines you deliberately ignored.
Injured does not slow you down An injured Survivor limps in the animation and moves at exactly the same speed as a healthy one. Identity V charges you nothing for the first hit except the fact that the next one puts you down. A healthy Survivor hiding from a chase they could safely take is therefore hoarding a health state that has no running cost attached to it, and a pair who stop to heal in the open instead of decoding are trading real Cipher time for a state that was not slowing anybody down.

06 · The Persona Web: Four Wings, 120 Points

Four personas, four talents at the rim, and a naming convention borrowed from a clock face.

Both sides spend talent points on a circular web. Survivors earn those points by levelling four personas: Tranquility, Persistence, Friendliness and Bravery. Hunters have their own four: Tough, Vigilance, Dread and Deceit. Each persona occupies one wing of the circle and each wing ends in a single Final Talent at the rim, which is why the community names builds by clock positions rather than by talent names. "39" is not a version number. It is the talent at 3 o'clock plus the talent at 9 o'clock. The ceiling is 120 points, which is not enough to reach two rims casually: every build is a decision about which wing you abandon.

The four wings and what sits at each rim Tranquility ends in Spectator. Persistence ends in Borrowed Time. Friendliness ends in Tide Turner. Bravery ends in Broken Windows. Those four are the only Survivor Final Talents in the game, so when someone tells you they are "going deep on the left side", they are telling you which one of those four they are paying for. Points are refundable and you can save ten separate distributions, so there is no excuse for taking a rescue web into a match where you intend to decode.
39: the default Survivor web Borrowed Time out of Persistence, plus the Bravery wing. Borrowed Time is the endgame insurance policy and Bravery is the chase wing, which is the pairing that fits the largest number of characters: a decoder who expects to be chased near the gates, a generalist, anyone who cannot rely on a kit to escape. If you cannot explain why you are off this web, you should probably be on it.
36: the rescue web Borrowed Time plus Tide Turner. You trade the chase talents for 20 seconds of invincibility on every save. Run it when you expect to be the primary rescuer and when you expect the Hunter to sit on the chair rather than leave it: Mercenary, Coordinator, Forward. Against a Hunter who patrols machines and never camps, those 20 seconds do very little and you would rather be on 39.
Borrowed Time, exactly When the Exit Gate activates, your health fully recovers and your dash speed goes up 50 percent for 5 seconds. Read that carefully: the trigger is the gates powering on, not being hit. It fires once, at a moment you can see coming, which is why teams hold the last machine at 99 percent and pop it deliberately at the instant a chased teammate is about to take a hit. That coordination is the single highest-value thing a four-stack does that a solo queue does not.
Broken Windows and Knee Jerk Reflex are not the same talent Both live in the Bravery wing and both give a dash burst, but they read different actions. Broken Windows fires after you vault a window: 50 percent dash speed for 3 seconds, on a 40-second cooldown. Knee Jerk Reflex fires after you vault a pallet: 30, 40 or 50 percent depending on mastery, also for 3 seconds, on a 60, 50 or 40-second cooldown. Pick by the terrain you actually loop on. A player who loops window structures and runs Knee Jerk Reflex is carrying a talent that never triggers.
Cold and Exit Path are the two quiet picks Cold notifies you of the Hunter's direction when they are looking at you from behind within 36 metres, which is exactly the situation you cannot see for yourself. Exit Path lets you ignore the self-heal limit once per match and pick yourself up from downed into the wounded state without a teammate. In solo queue, where nobody is coming for you, Exit Path is worth more than most players think and Cold is worth more than most players admit.
Spectator is the wing nobody values correctly The Tranquility rim gives 10 percent movement speed when you run toward an injured or downed Survivor within 30 metres, 20 percent faster healing of other people, and permanent sight of wounded teammates except those tied to balloons. That last clause is the real product. Half of solo-queue chaos is four players who cannot see each other's health states, and this talent simply removes that problem.
The Hunter web is built out of small percentages Hunter talents rarely do anything dramatic; they stack. Panic cuts decoding, healing and destroying speed by 3 percent for every Survivor who is injured, downed or chaired, and it stacks, so a Hunter with two bodies down is quietly taxing the other two. Control Freak speeds the chair countdown 3, 6 or 9 percent. Mock adds 3 to 5 percent movement speed whenever somebody is on a chair. Wanted Order outlines a random Survivor and adds 10 percent speed until that Survivor is rescued. Claustrophobia halves gate-opening speed for 20 seconds. None of those change a chase. Together they change a match.
Two Hunter talents that change Survivor behaviour Confined Space blocks a window for 20 seconds after it is vaulted, for everyone including the Hunter, which turns a two-exit loop into a one-exit trap on a delay. Street Sweeper shows the Hunter the location of anybody healing, and Deer Hunt shows them the aura of anybody downed. Between those three, the habit of healing up in a quiet corner after a chase is a habit that gets you found. Heal while moving toward work, or heal behind a structure you have already checked.

07 · The Seven Skills And The Trump Card

A Hunter brings exactly one of seven skills, and there is only one window in which they can change it.

Identity V uses three words that new players collapse into one, and the collapse costs you matches. A Skill, sometimes called an Active Trait, is the single secondary power a Hunter selects in the lobby: there are seven of them and every Hunter in the game chooses from the same list. A Talent is a node on the Persona Web from section 06. An External Trait is a passive that belongs to a specific character, like the Mechanic's Mech Master or the Mercenary's Iron Dash, and it is not chosen at all. When somebody says "he ran Teleport", they mean a Skill. When somebody says "he had Detention", they mean a Talent. The two behave completely differently and you counter them differently.

Listen Ambient detection. It is the beginner's pick and it never stops being reasonable, because the hardest part of hunting is not catching people, it is finding them. It is strongest against characters who move constantly across the map, Explorer being the textbook example. As a Survivor the counter is the movement menu, not the map: walk and crouch rather than sprint, and pay the seconds.
Teleport A long-range reposition that turns a Hunter's weakest resource, walking, into a non-issue. It is the most generally useful skill in the list and the one that punishes a specific mistake with no mercy: a failed calibration. You short-circuit a machine, the cue fires, and a Teleport Hunter is simply standing next to you. If you are going to panic on a calibration, do it on a machine you were about to abandon anyway.
Blink Phases through walls and obstacles to land a hit that the geometry should have denied. The cooldown makes it one decisive moment per chase rather than a movement option, and it is the skill that most rewards a good player rather than a good matchup. Against Blink, a dropped pallet is cover, not a wall, and the right answer to a wall you cannot see through is to keep moving rather than to hold your breath behind it.
Excitement Protects the Hunter from stuns long enough to finish the action they are already in, so the chairing or the hit goes through anyway. It exists specifically to answer stun-heavy Survivors: Forward, Coordinator and Enchantress are the three names that make a Hunter bring it. If your pallet stun landed and the chairing happened regardless, you did not lag and you did not mistime it. You met Excitement, and your team needs to stop opening rescues with a stun.
Patroller Summons a temporary pursuer that pins a target down, slowing them on a repeating interval. It is the standard answer to the fast Survivors, Forward and Mercenary above all, because those two win chases by generating distance and Patroller deletes distance without the Hunter spending anything. If you play a mobility character and the Hunter opens with this, your usual first loop is no longer safe.
Peeper Lets the Hunter see a Survivor through obstacles inside its radius. It is pure information rather than damage, and it punishes exactly one habit: standing still behind cover waiting for the chase music to fade. If you suspect Peeper, keep moving between structures at walking speed instead of freezing, because freezing is the only thing it actually beats.
Abnormal Deducts Cipher progress at range and lets the Hunter repair a dismantled Rocket Chair. It is the objective-control pick, strongest against dedicated decoders, and weakest against a team that never lets a machine sit half-finished. It costs the Hunter everything the other six skills do for chases, which is why you will meet it on patient players and almost never on aggressive ones.
Trump Card: one change, inside the first 120 seconds Trump Card is a Vigilance talent, not a skill, and it is the only way a Hunter changes their skill after the match has started. The window is the first 120 seconds and the change can be made once. That makes it an opening tool, not an endgame trick: you load in on Listen, spend two minutes learning that the lineup has a Forward and a Coordinator, and swap to Excitement before the first chair. As a Survivor, the practical consequence is that whatever skill you identified in the first minute may not be the one you are playing against at minute three, so re-read the Hunter after the two-minute mark and stop assuming.
Detention is a talent, and it only exists at the gates Detention sits in the Dread wing of the Hunter web and it does one thing: once the Exit Gate is powered on, the Hunter's normal attacks deal double damage for 120 seconds. That is a one-hit down on a healthy Survivor for the entire endgame. It is why a Hunter who looked oddly passive all match can convert three people in ninety seconds once the siren fires, and why "we just need to walk out" is the most expensive sentence in the game. If the fifth machine is about to pop and nobody has taken a hit yet, assume Detention and approach the gates as though every Survivor is one hit from the floor.

08 · Four Seats At The Table

Identity V tags characters by function. A team missing a seat usually loses on time, not on skill.

Decoder Turns time into Cipher progress

Mechanic (Tracy Reznik), doll decodes while she is chased or chaired
Prisoner (Luca Balsa), links two machines so progress transfers
Prospector (Norton Campbell), magnets that pull and push, so he decodes and escapes
Doctor (Emily Dyer), self-heal keeps her on the machine instead of hunting a teammate
Lawyer (Freddy Riley), map information from the opening seconds

Bring: The 39 web, the discipline to stay on a machine while a teammate screams, and the sense to leave at 85 percent rather than 40.
Give: Roughly two of the five machines. Without two committed decoders, four good kiters still run out of clock.

Decoding is the win condition, not the chore between chases. A team of kiters loses to a patient Hunter every time.

Rescuer Beats the 30-second chair stages

Forward (William Ellis), rugby charge, body blocks and the hardest stun in the game
Mercenary (Naib Subedar), arm shield absorbs a hit and extends the follow-up chase
Coordinator (Martha Behamfil), flare gun interrupts the Hunter mid-action

Bring: The 36 web against campers, 39 against Hunters who leave the chair. Know the orange half-line rule cold, and know that Excitement exists before you plan a rescue around a stun.
Give: Two successful rescues per match, and the discipline not to attempt the third one that loses two players at once.

The most common rank-losing play in the game is a rescuer arriving instantly, getting hit, and handing the Hunter a second body beside the chair.

Kiter Converts Hunter attention into decoding time

Perfumer (Vera Nair), records a health state and teleports back to it after a hit
Acrobat (Mike Morton), wall traversal for routes a Hunter cannot copy
Entomologist (Melly Plinius), insect control and area denial
Batter (Ganji Gupta), ranged control that punishes a straight approach

Bring: The 39 web, with Broken Windows if you loop windows and Knee Jerk Reflex if you loop pallets. Memorised pallet and window positions on at least three maps.
Give: 60 to 90 seconds of Hunter attention per chase, spent in the half of the map nobody is decoding.

A kiter who survives 90 seconds but drags the Hunter past two working machines has done less for the team than one who survives 50 seconds in a dead corner.

Assist and Contain Makes the other three seats better

Priestess (Fiona Gilman), the Holy Key opens portals that shorten every rescue route
Seer (Eli Clark), his owl takes a hit for a teammate at range
Gardener (Emma Woods), dismantles chairs so the Hunter has to walk further to use one
Postman (Victor Grantz), letters carry effects to teammates, including sight of the Dungeon
Enchantress (Patricia Dorval), curses that win a teammate an entire chase

Bring: A willingness to finish a match with no highlight clips and a scoreboard that undersells you.
Give: Route compression. One Priestess portal turns a 25-second rescue walk into a 10-second one for the rest of the match, for everybody, every time.

None of these characters wins a 1v1 against a competent Hunter, and none of them needs to. They are bought with the chase time the kiter is already spending, and they are the first seat a solo-queue team drops and the last seat a coordinated one gives up.

09 · Hunter Pressure & Counterplay

Twelve pressure patterns, the mistake each one is built to punish, and what to do instead.

Pressure pattern	Who plays it	The mistake it punishes	What you do instead
Placed area denial	Hell Ember (Leo Beck), the one Hunter everybody owns from the start	Walking the same route back to the same machine	Scout the machine before you touch it, and approach a defended machine from a different side each time
Ranged pull	Soul Weaver (Violetta), Naiad (Grace)	Kiting in open ground or standing in a doorway	Stay inside broken sightlines; break the line before the projectile lands rather than trying to dodge it
Fast reposition	Geisha (Michiko), Wu Chang (Xie Bi'an and Fan Wujiu)	Treating distance from the Hunter as safety	Assume they can be on you in a second; never start a rescue or a gate lever on the assumption they are far away
Vision denial	Ripper (Jack) and other stealth kits	Relying on sight instead of sound and machine states	Use headphones, watch which machines stop progressing, and pre-drop nothing you cannot see the Hunter approach
Remote wall control	Mad Eyes (Burke Lapadula)	Committing to a loop with one exit	Loop structures with two or more exits, and never let a fence corner you into a dead end you cannot vault out of
Delayed damage traps	Guard 26 (Bonbon), Gamekeeper (Bane Perez)	Healing or decoding in the obvious spot after a chase	Move one structure away before you heal, and check the ground around chairs and machines
Clones and decoys	Bloody Queen (Mary), Dream Witch (Yidhra), Sculptor (Galatea Claude)	Running on reflex from the first thing that looks like a Hunter	Slow down and identify before you commit; a wasted panic sprint is worth more to them than the clone is
Zone slow and debuff	Violinist (Antonio), whose stacked notes cut decoding, healing and gate speed hard	Standing in the debuff to finish the interaction anyway	Leave the zone, let the stacks fall off, come back; a half-speed decode is worse than a short walk
Mobility state change	Night Watch (Ithaqua), who charges wind and then vaults windows and downed pallets	Believing a dropped pallet ends the chase	Keep moving after the pallet drops, and treat downed pallets as speed bumps rather than walls
Chair camping	Any Hunter holding position with Excitement	Rushing the rescue and feeding a second body	Run Tide Turner, arrive late in the stage, and let the crows and the machine count do the arguing
Cipher suppression	Any Hunter running Abnormal	Splitting onto two half-done machines in the endgame	Consolidate: finish one machine with two people rather than watching two machines regress
Gate hold	Any Hunter holding Teleport, or Detention	Opening the nearest gate with the whole team stacked on it	Start both gates, keep one Survivor uncommitted, and remember a gate holds its progress if you walk away from it

10 · Map Notes

Ten maps in the public rotation. Route knowledge beats reaction speed on every one of them.

The Red Church The oldest map and the one every guide teaches on. The graveyard behind the crematorium is a long rectangle with straight terrain, long walls, windows and a single pallet: excellent for learning window timing, dangerous once that pallet is gone. Learn this map first, then stop kiting in the graveyard when the pallet is spent.
Lakeside Village A ruined fishing village where the waves bring up wreckage, and one of the largest maps in the rotation. It is generous with pallets and chests, which sounds good until you notice that the distances between them are exactly what gets you caught: a loop is only a loop if you can reach the next structure. Chases here start a long way from the gates, so Borrowed Time pays out later than usual and the Bravery wing matters more than it does anywhere else. It is also one of the three Duo Hunters maps.
Sacred Heart Hospital Tight interior rooms with surgical equipment and beds, wrapped in outdoor ground. Indoor corridors reward Survivors who can break line of sight in two steps and punish anyone who commits to a room with one door. Hunters with ranged pulls struggle here; Hunters with wall or phase tools do not.
Moonlit River Park A park that became a taboo place to visit after the incident, built around fairground attractions. The central structures are strong orbits, so it plays as a kiter's map, but the open ground between them is a gift to anything with reach: Soul Weaver and Naiad both love the gaps you have to cross here. It is the second of the three Duo Hunters maps.
Leo's Memory Named for Hell Ember's own identity as Leo Beck, and described in-game with a single line about his last snow. Heavy interior mazing and verticality, which rewards Survivors who can read a room quickly and punishes anyone who loses their bearings mid-chase. It also has an alternate version, Leo's Memory - Dawn, which is a different lighting and layout problem rather than a reskin.
Eversleeping Town Large, foggy and information-poor for both sides. The visibility loss cuts both ways, but the size does not: a decoder caught out of position here is simply gone, because nobody is arriving in time. It is the third Duo Hunters map, and the full-size version of it is exclusive to that mode, so the Eversleeping Town you know from Rank Match is the cut-down one.
White Sand Street Asylum Street layouts around the asylum building, with long linear stretches. Linear terrain favours Hunters with directional pressure, so route planning matters more here than raw loop skill: pick which street you are prepared to be caught on before you are on it.
Arms Factory The Minerva military factory, scattered tires, machinery and warning lights. Dense obstacle furniture makes it one of the more forgiving kiting maps, which also means you will out-survive your team's decoding and lose on time anyway if nobody is on machines.
Chinatown and Golden Cave The two later additions to the public rotation. Both reward players who have actually walked the map outside a match: if you cannot name three loops on each of them, those are the maps costing you stars right now. Golden Cave in particular punishes the habit of learning a map only through chases, because the ground you need is the ground you never see when you are running.
What is fixed and what is random This is the most useful thing on the page for a player trying to improve. Cipher Machines, Chests and Lockers are placed randomly every match, so you cannot memorise them. Everything else is fixed: the two Exit Gates are always in the same position on a given map, Rocket Chairs have static spawns, and the Dungeon picks from three fixed candidate locations per map, decided at the start of the trial. So map study has a correct scope. Do not try to learn where machines go. Learn the gates, the chairs, the three Dungeon spots and the loops between them.
The event variants are different maps Alongside the ten in rotation there are alternate versions, notably an event build of The Red Church and Leo's Memory - Dawn. They share a name and a silhouette with the originals and then move the furniture. Treat a variant as a map you have not learned, because the loop you are confidently running toward may not be there.

11 · Gates, Dungeon, Endgame

The siren changes the game. Most teams lose in the two minutes after it.

The fifth machine is a commitment When the fifth machine pops, a cue fires, both Exit Gates activate and every remaining Cipher Machine goes inert. You have traded a flexible objective for two fixed ones. Worse, the cue is not symmetric: Survivors get a brief flash of both gate positions, while the Hunter gets them permanently marked for the rest of the match. You are not sneaking up on a gate. Decide who goes to which one before the fifth machine, not after.
Ten seconds on the lever Opening a gate takes about 10 seconds of uninterrupted work, and the Hunter talent Claustrophobia cuts that speed in half for 20 seconds while all four of you are still on your feet. Ten seconds is far more than a Hunter with Teleport needs to arrive, which is why starting a gate with the Hunter's position unknown is a coin flip rather than a plan.
Gate progress is saved If you are interrupted, the progress you put into a gate stays there permanently. That makes the correct play against a patrolling Hunter obvious: chip both gates, force them to choose which one to defend, then come back to the one with the head start. There is a second clause worth memorising: a Survivor can escape through an Exit Gate while incapacitated. If you are crawling and the gate is already open, crawl for it rather than for a corner.
Open both, not one The two gates sit apart on purpose. A team stacked on one gate is a team that can be wiped by one good arrival. Split the pressure even if it feels slower, because a Hunter who is guessing is a Hunter who is losing.
Borrowed Time is a gate talent Borrowed Time pays out on the gates powering on, not on being hit: full health recovery plus 50 percent dash speed for 5 seconds, once. That is the exact window in which a hit at the gate stops being fatal, and it is also why the last machine should be primed to 99 percent and held until your chased teammate needs it. If you are running 39 or 36, this is the moment the web was bought for.
The Dungeon is the last-Survivor exit The Dungeon becomes visible once two machines are decoded and opens automatically only when one living Survivor is left. It is not a bailout for a losing team of four, it is the reward for the last player standing. Its location is chosen at the start of the match from three fixed candidates per map, and the game hints that you should follow the sound of the wind to find it. The Postman's letters can reveal it outright. Learn those three spots on your main maps, because you will be looking for the hatch while injured and being chased, which is the worst possible time to be exploring.
Three out of four is the actual win line The scoring is blunt: three or more Survivors out is a Survivor win, three or more sent back to the Manor is a Hunter win, and two-for-two is an actual recorded draw rather than a moral one. So the third escape is the whole match, and the fourth is worth nothing extra. If two of you are already out and a third is downed near an open gate, that crawl is the entire game. Everything else is a highlight you do not get paid for.
Detention lives here Detention, the Dread talent from section 07, turns every normal attack into double damage for 120 seconds from the instant the gates power on. If a Hunter who has been oddly passive all match suddenly downs a healthy Survivor in one swing at a gate, that was not a sudden skill increase and it was not lag. Plan the last 30 seconds of the match on the assumption that everybody is one hit from the floor, which mostly means: do not stack four bodies on one lever.

12 · Modes & The Ladder

Six tiers, two sets of animal icons, and a ranked queue that is shut most of the day.

Rank Match is only open in windows This is the fact that reorganises how you play. Rank Match is not available all day: it runs in fixed blocks on server time, roughly 04:00 to 06:00, 12:00 to 14:00 and 18:00 to 22:00. That is about eight hours out of twenty-four. If you are serious about climbing, you do not "play some ranked tonight", you plan around a window and you do your experimenting outside it. Everything else in the game is available whenever you are.
Six tiers, and the divisions get deeper as you climb Rank Match has six major tiers, Tier I through Tier VI. Tiers I and II have three divisions each, Tier III has four, Tiers IV and V have five, and Tier VI has none at all: you are ranked on raw star count there, with every 50 stars treated as a notional major tier. Promotion is gated by a promotion match triggered when you fill your stars, and demotion by a demotion match at zero stars. Tier I players never lose stars on a loss, which is the game's beginner protection and the reason early climbing feels deceptively smooth.
The animal icons, in order Survivors climb Worker Bee, Hound, Elk, Mammoth, Griffin and Champion. Hunters climb Tarantula, Cobra, Crocodile, Saber-toothed Tiger, Manticore and Dragon. It is one ladder wearing two costumes, so a Griffin Survivor and a Manticore Hunter are the same rung. Useful when someone quotes a rank at you and you play the other side.
Tier VI has an attendance rule At Tier VI the system checks you every seven days and deducts a star if you have not played a Rank Match in that period. Combine that with the limited daily windows and the top of the ladder quietly demands a schedule rather than a skill level. Two things follow: do not push into Tier VI right before a holiday, and do not treat a star lost on a Tuesday as evidence that your play has fallen apart.
Group queue is tier-bounded Teammates in a group Rank Match must sit within two adjacent major tiers of each other, so the classic plan of being carried by a much stronger friend does not survive contact with the matchmaker. If your regular duo is two tiers away, one of you is playing off-rank or you are both playing Quick Match. Decide which, rather than discovering it in the lobby.
Quick Match The unranked 1v4 queue and the only one open all day. Use it to learn a character's kit and to walk maps, not to practise closing out matches, because the pressure that makes endgames hard is precisely what Quick Match does not have. The one thing it does perfectly: letting you be bad at a new character somewhere the stars cannot follow you.
Duo Hunters is a different game with the same buttons Two Hunters against eight Survivors, on a three-map pool of Lakeside Village, Moonlit River Park and Eversleeping Town. There are 11 Cipher Machines and you need 7, each taking longer than usual to decode. The first chairing triggers a confinement stage in which the chaired Survivor cannot be rescued at all, followed by a short rescue stage. Five telephone booths on the map trade match points for items: a pill that raises decoding 50 percent, a pill that makes you immune to Terror Shock, smoke bottles, black mud to blind a Hunter for 8 seconds, a flare gun that stuns for 4.5 seconds. Survivors carry two items here and Hunters one, one-hit downs from Detention and Terror Shock are disabled, and Abnormal's Cipher deduction is fixed at 30 percent. It runs in its own windows, roughly 06:00 to 08:00, 16:00 to 18:00 and 21:00 to 23:00.
The crowbar is the Duo Hunters skill nobody practises Once the gates are powered, or once only four Survivors remain, a crowbar appears at one of the five booths. It opens the Dungeon early and every remaining Survivor can leave through it, which is a mass-escape button that does not exist in 1v4 at all. Teams that lose 2v8 late almost always lost it by saving points for pills they never used instead of banking for the crowbar.
Blackjack is five players and a card draw Five players each pick a Hunter and a Survivor before the round. Everyone is dealt a card and may draw a second; highest total without going past 21 becomes the Hunter for that round and the other four play Survivor. Everyone runs a standard Persona Web that you cannot edit, so this is the one mode that measures your decisions rather than your talent distribution. Points come in at 100 for decoding a machine and 50 per hit landed as the Hunter, spent in an in-match menu, and Survivors go down in a single hit. Placing in your server's top 1,000 pays Memory Spheres and Rank Essences.
Custom matches are the practice range There is no dedicated training mode, so custom matches with friends are the only way to rehearse one specific thing: holding a single loop, baiting a pallet drop against someone who knows it is coming, timing a rescue against the orange half-line, or finding all three Dungeon spots on a map with nobody chasing you. Twenty minutes of that beats five ranked losses, and unlike ranked it is available at three in the afternoon.

13 · Clues, Echoes & The Logic Path

Five currencies. Exactly one of them unlocks the characters you actually need.

Five currencies, one that touches gameplay Clues, Inspirations, Fragments, Spyglasses and Echoes. Clues are the one that unlocks playable characters. Everything else in that list moves cosmetics around. Sort your priorities accordingly: a costume changes nothing about the 81-second machine, and a second decoder in your pocket changes every match you queue.
Characters are a time cost, not a money cost Every Survivor and Hunter in the roster can be unlocked with Clues, and Clues cannot be bought directly. That is the most important structural fact about this game's economy and it is the reason the competitive ceiling is not paywalled: the player who has been grinding for a year has more characters than the player who topped up yesterday. Two to three new characters arrive per season, so the roster is a moving target, but it is a target you reach by playing.
The Logic Path is the engine, and it is a board game Playing matches earns Logic Points. Every 1,000 Logic Points gives you one four-sided die, and the dice move you along a board of 4,269 spaces that pay out Clues, Music Notes, Inspirations, Memory Spheres, limited graffiti and costumes, and current-season Essences. You can hold the die button to roll up to ten at once, and you can bank up to 100 dice per season and carry them forward. That last rule is the one to exploit: dice you save during a season you do not care about are dice you spend on a season you do.
Clues come from more places than the board The Logic Path is the main source, but Clues also arrive from the tutorial, event quests, daily logins, maintenance compensation, sharing on social media, and from not losing morality points for a week. That last one is worth reading twice. Being a reliable teammate who does not rage-quit is, literally, a currency income. The fastest way to slow your own roster growth is to be the player everybody reports.
Two fixed exchange rates worth memorising A Memory Sphere can be redeemed for 488 Clues, and a current-season Essence for 96 Inspirations. Those two numbers let you price any offer the game puts in front of you. If a bundle is asking for more than the equivalent of 488 Clues of your time for a Memory Sphere you could simply redeem, it is not a bargain, it is a convenience charge.
Memory Spheres are the patient route At the end of a season, that season's Essences roll into a Memory Sphere that can be redeemed later with Clues or Inspirations. If you missed a costume you wanted, waiting is a real strategy rather than a consolation prize. The whole system is built so that impatience is the thing you pay for, which is also the reason the pity mechanics on live Essences are so deep: they are priced for people who will not wait.
Echoes are the top-up currency Echoes are bought with real money in the Illusion Hall or the top-up site, and the rate varies by region and platform. They pay for costumes, pets, music, dice and Inspirations. There is also a daily promotion that rolls a twenty-sided die on the Logic Path for 10 Echoes, and a thirty-day pass for 60 Echoes that turns your one daily four-sided die into four. If you spend at all, that pass is the least glamorous and most efficient thing on the list, because it compounds into Clues rather than into a costume.
Fragments and Spyglasses are the leftovers Fragments come from dismantling duplicates and from season rewards; Spyglasses come from event grinds. Neither unlocks a character and both are priced so that a no-spend player can reach roughly one good cosmetic a year through Fragments if they are disciplined about dismantling. Spyglasses expire in relevance with the event that paid them, so the correct policy is to spend them on whatever is in front of you rather than to hoard for an event that will not come back.

14 · Habits That Move Rank

Seven things to change this week, in order of how much rank they are costing you.

Learn the half-line before anything else More matches are lost to a rescue that eliminates a teammate past the orange midpoint than to any mechanical failure in this game. It costs nothing to learn, it is visible on the portrait, and it fixes a whole category of losses in one afternoon. Do this one before you touch anything else on this list.
Count machines out loud Say the number out loud when a machine pops. Almost every bad endgame decision starts with a player who thought there were two machines left when there was one, and committed to a rescue that the fifth machine made irrelevant. The same habit catches the three-minute decoding acceleration, which is otherwise invisible unless you are watching a bar move.
Wear headphones, not earbuds in one ear Chase music, the Presence tier cue, the calibration failure noise, the fast-vault notification and the gate cue are all load-bearing. Identity V leans on audio harder than most mobile games, and half the mechanics on this page are things you hear before you see. A Hunter who can hear your machine short-circuit already has a bearing on you; a Survivor who cannot hear the Presence cue does not know the chase just changed.
Set your control layout once, then leave it On phone, the interact, vault and pallet buttons are the ones worth physically moving, because three of the five Terror Shock triggers live on those buttons: the fast vault, the heal and the decode. A misfire there does not cost you a metre, it costs you a health state. Move them to where your thumbs already rest, then stop redesigning your layout every time you lose.
Lower graphics, protect the framerate Chases are decided in tenths of a second at vault prompts. A steady framerate on medium settings beats a prettier match that stutters when the Hunter's ability fires. Turn the detail down and leave it down.
Learn two characters per seat, not ten Group queues are bounded to two adjacent tiers and your teammates will not always leave you the seat you wanted, so a one-character player is one lobby away from being useless. Two decoders, two rescuers and one kiter you genuinely know beats a roster of twenty you have played three times each. Learn the second character in Quick Match, never in a ranked window you waited four hours for.
Review the season notes on day one New characters arrive two or three per season and balance passes move talent numbers without announcing which builds they broke. A cooldown moving from 60 to 40 seconds, or a percentage moving by five points, is the difference between a talent that fires twice a chase and one that fires once. Five minutes with the notes on day one beats an hour of wondering why a web that used to feel good now feels slow.