Looping, explained: why some survivors never get caught

Looping is running a killer around a pallet or piece of map geometry instead of away from them in a straight line, because the killer's base movement speed is faster than yours — the only things that even the odds are the detours a loop forces them into: vaulting a window slower than you can, or breaking a pallet you just threw down. Do it well and a single loop eats a minute of the killer's time; do it badly and it's the same thirty seconds you'd have lost running in a straight line, just with extra steps.

Why it works at all

A killer chasing you directly wins, because their walking speed is higher than yours — a straight sprint just delays the hit. A loop breaks that math by putting an obstacle between you and them that costs the killer time to get around and doesn't cost you nearly as much:

• A window lets you vault through in a fraction of a second while the killer, without a vault-speed power, takes noticeably longer to climb over the same spot — that gap is the entire loop.
• A pallet you drop in the killer's path either stuns them for a couple of seconds if they walk into it, or forces them to walk around, or forces them to stop and break it — all three cost them time you spend gaining distance or reaching the next window.

Neither trick works forever. A window vaulted three times by the same survivor in one chase gets blocked by the Entity for the rest of that chase (and stays blocked if you vault it again within the first 30 seconds after it reopens), and a broken pallet is gone from the trial for good. Looping isn't about finding one loop and staying there — it's about knowing which loop to run to next once the one you're on is spent.

The anatomy of a loop

Every strong loop is a piece of map geometry — a jungle gym, a T-wall, the killer shack — with a window on one side and often a pallet on another, arranged so a killer chasing you around it has to commit to one side while you can bail to the other. The two shapes play very differently:

• Tall-wall loops (the kind you find at Coldwind or MacMillan's Realm-style maps) keep you in the killer's line of sight the whole way around, but the wall is long enough that a killer who commits to one direction can't cut across and catch you — you can see them coming and adjust.
• Short-wall loops, sometimes called pseudo-safe pallets, block sightlines instead: you can't see the killer over the wall, which cuts both ways. It's a much shorter loop with almost no room for error, and it's exactly where mind games happen.

The rule that applies to both: stay close to the object you're circling. The tighter your path hugs the wall or the pallet, the less ground the killer gains on the inside of your turn — drifting wide is how a "safe" loop turns into a hit.

The mind game at short walls

At a short wall you can't see the killer, so the killer can't be sure where you are either — which is what makes these loops swing on guesswork instead of pure speed. A killer who runs the wall a couple of times will often reverse direction mid-loop, betting that you're committed to running the way you were going; a survivor who's looped a wall enough times can bait the same thing back, holding position or faking a direction change instead of vaulting on reflex. Winning a mind game is reading which way the killer actually walked last, not just reacting to where they were a second ago — which is also why survivors who stare at the ground instead of watching the killer lose these loops for free.

When to drop a pallet, and when to hold it

A pallet only works once — drop it and it's either stunning the killer or gone. Drop it when the killer is close enough that they can't route around it in time, not the moment they come into view: dropping early just tells them to walk around, and you've spent the pallet for nothing. Holding a pallet a beat too long, on the other hand, gets you hit before you reach it.

The bigger mistake is spending pallets you didn't need to. Every pallet dropped early in a match is one less pallet standing in the mid- and end-game, when generators are finishing and the map is opening up into dead zones — areas with no pallet or window left standing at all. A survivor who burns every pallet near their own chase in the first five minutes is handing the killer an easy final chase later, against someone else.

Bloodlust: the killer's clock against you

If a chase runs long enough without a hit, a pallet break, or the killer using their power, the killer starts gaining a stacking speed bonus called Bloodlust — it builds in stages roughly every ten seconds of unbroken chase, specifically so a killer with no ranged power isn't stuck running the same loop forever against a survivor who never makes a mistake. Landing a hit, breaking a pallet, using a power, or the survivor breaking the chase resets it to zero. In practice, this is the timer that turns a loop you can hold cleanly for a while into one you can't: the longer a single loop drags on, the more speed the killer is quietly building up, which is one more reason to break off toward the next loop instead of trying to out-loop the same tile forever. Our tunneling, slugging and the rest guide covers Bloodlust and the rest of the match vocabulary in more depth.

Common mistakes that end a loop early

• Watching your own feet instead of the killer. You can't time a vault or a drop off a killer you're not looking at — glance back often enough to know where they actually are, not where you assume they are.
• Running in a straight line across open ground. The open middle of a map has no obstacle to force a detour, so a killer chasing you there is just closing the distance at their faster base speed. Get to a loop, don't run past one.
• Burning every pallet in one zone. Dropping every pallet you pass in a single chase turns that whole area into a dead zone for the rest of the match — for you and for your team.
• Standing right next to the pallet instead of at a distance. Hovering next to a pallet gives the killer room to swing before you can drop it; stay at the range where you can reliably beat them to the drop.
• Vaulting the same window past the point where the Entity blocks it. Once a window locks against you mid-chase, trying it again just wastes the time you needed to reach the next loop.

None of this replaces knowing the map. Learning which maps have strong loops near the middle and which have dead zones near the edges is most of what separates a survivor who loops on instinct from one who's guessing, and pairing that knowledge with perks that reveal nearby pallets and windows turns guessing into a plan. From there it's mostly about which character you're up against and whether their power changes how fast they close a loop down.