Enemy Behavior



 describes various actions or tactics enemies employ while spawned in the game. While based mostly on when enemies are alerted to the player's presence, this can include behavioral traits observed while the enemy is unaware of the player as well.

Basic Pathing
When enemies attempt to engage the player, they will attempt to avoid obstacles (including other enemies) in order to reach them. When hidden by various means such as by the use of Shade, Loki's Invisibility, or Ash's Smoke Screen, enemies will still know the exact location of the player, aiming their guns toward your general location and/or walking up to the player when they move out of range. When new enemies are spawned, or enemies that were previously unalerted are alerted, will go to the location of the player or another ally (such as a Decoy.

Abilities such as Hydroid's Undertow suffer from the inability of enemies to continue to fall into his pool, since enemies that have sunken into the pool at the edge are objects that other enemies can detect, thus will stand directly at the edge of the pool, unable to go in until the enemies at the edge are dead. This kind of pathing issues can be exploited in some ways, however, such as standing on some kinds of boxes or objects in small rooms with doors on either side, as enemies will stop at a certain point and wait until the player comes down, often grouping up in massive numbers in some cases, allowing AoE weapons to make quick work of them.

When Unalerted
When an enemy is alerted, they will walk around, chatter, or stay stationary while looking around casually. While their paths can be noted and remembered, enemies do not execute the same pathing routine every time, and may switch it up on occasion. It can be noted that while enemies are unalerted, problems with pathing become apparent, such as groups of grineer attempting to go into opposing rooms but neither side will move out of the way to allow this, causing them to get stuck in doorways you may need to cross without alerted them, which becomes almost impossible.

In the case of Grineer enemies with helmets, their helmets will sometimes oddly move independently of the facial mesh underneath when unalerted, with the mask "looking" in a certain direction while the grineer walks forward and keeps their head centered.

When Alerted
An enemy becomes alerted when the following conditions are met:
 * The alarm in the area has been triggered, making all currently spawned enemies aware of your location
 * They see a dead body
 * They see a bullet or arrow being shot in their site (such as an arrow or bullet shot by their feet)
 * There is a Fire Hazard currently active on the mission
 * Note that this makes stealth kills impossible as enemies will always spawn alerted and slightly more aggressive into finding you
 * There is a very minor exception, with that being Latchers spawned from seekers, which spawn unalerted regardless of the alert status in the area or the alert status of the seeker, but only immediately after being spawned.

When alerted, as stated above, enemies always know the exact area of where you are, regardless if you make noise or not, although making noise will encourage enemies to go specifically to that spot. Moving far enough away from enemies while stealthed will eventually cause them to slowly path toward your location. And when you are unstealthed by any reason or means, enemies will immediately know where you are and go to your location even if you are hidden out of site, which shows one of the flaws in the AI.

To become unalerted from an alerted state, several conditions must be met:


 * The alarms in the area have been reset by hacking a console that appears white on the map
 * Several minutes have passed since alerting the enemies
 * Enemies who were crouching behind cover will still continue their animation as if still alerted, but if the conditions above are met, they will be considered unalerted and can be killed stealthily.