None of this is in a tutorial — here's what tunneling, slugging, camping, the Obsession, Bloodlust and the rest actually mean, and which ones the game now pushes back against.
Open a post-game chat and half the words in it assume you've already played two hundred hours. None of them get a tooltip in-game. Here's what each one means, who does it and why, and whether Behaviour Interactive has actually built anything into the game to push back on it.
| Term | What it means | Who does it |
|---|---|---|
| Tunneling | Going after the same survivor repeatedly, usually right after they're unhooked, instead of spreading pressure | Killer |
| Slugging | Leaving a downed survivor on the ground instead of hooking them right away | Killer |
| Camping / proxy camping | Staying at, or lingering just outside, a hooked survivor's hook | Killer |
| The Obsession | One survivor singled out by the Entity at the start of the trial | Set by the game |
| Bloodlust | A stacking speed bonus for the killer during a long, unbroken chase | Killer, automatic |
| Looping | Using pallets, windows and map layout to waste the killer's time in a chase | Survivor |
| Gen rush | Survivors ignoring everything else to finish generators as fast as possible | Survivors |
| The hatch | A last-survivor escape route that opens once only one survivor is left alive | Survivor, endgame |
| Borrowed time / Endurance | Temporary hit immunity right after an unhook | Survivor |
| DC penalty | A matchmaking lockout for leaving a match before it ends | Either role |
Tunneling is a killer focusing one survivor, usually the one just taken off a hook, while everyone else walks around unbothered. It works because a survivor already hooked once dies in fewer hits than a fresh one — killing four people is easiest done in order, not spread evenly.
The game doesn't ban it — Dead by Daylight's support documentation lists tunneling as an invalid report reason — but it's costlier than it used to be, via the base-kit Endurance change covered below, and survivor perks like Decisive Strike and Off the Record exist specifically to punish going straight back to the same target.
Slugging is choosing not to pick up a downed survivor, leaving them crawling on the ground while the killer goes after someone else. It buys map control: whoever they left down still needs a teammate to walk over and pick them up, which is time that teammate isn't spending on a generator.
Behaviour tested a dedicated countermeasure — a "Slugging Reduction" system that sped up crawling and made recovery harder the longer someone stayed down — but it went through the public test build twice and was reverted both times, most recently with the 9.3.0 update in November 2025, after killers said it was too punishing. There's currently no basekit system aimed at slugging; the only real check on it is that a survivor left down too long simply bleeds out.
Camping is staying at a hook after hooking someone, to either force a bad trade on a rescuer or just wait out the death. Proxy camping is the fuzzier version — hovering close enough to sprint back the moment someone approaches, without standing on top of the hook. There's no official line between "patrolling nearby" and "camping," which is why arguments about it never end.
What does exist is the Anti-Face-Camping System, added in the 2023 anniversary update and still live: a meter builds on a hooked survivor's screen based on how close the killer stays and for how long — under 5 meters fills it fastest, beyond 16 meters it doesn't fill at all — and filling it lets that survivor unhook themselves with Endurance and a speed boost. It's built to stop face-camping specifically, and by design does nothing about proxy camping or camping from a short distance away.
At the start of most trials, the Entity marks one random survivor as the Obsession — claw marks around their icon on the killer's HUD, plus a sound cue everyone hears at the start of the match. It only matters when a perk or add-on is built around it: some killer perks get stronger effects against the Obsession specifically, some survivor perks only work if you are the Obsession. Without those equipped, being the Obsession changes nothing about how the match plays out.
Bloodlust is an automatic speed bonus that builds during an unbroken chase, meant to stop a fast survivor from just running circles around a killer forever. It climbs in three stages roughly every ten seconds of continuous chase, adding movement speed each time. Landing a hit, breaking a pallet, using the killer's power, or losing the survivor resets it to zero. It exists so low-mobility killers without a ranged attack still have a way to end a chase that's gone on too long.
Looping is a survivor running a killer around a pallet, window, or piece of map geometry that resets faster than the killer can path around it, stretching a chase out for free. Gen rush is the team-wide version: everyone splitting off to repair generators instead of doing anything else, which can end a trial in a few minutes flat. Neither has an in-game counter — they're survivors doing their stated objective efficiently, which is why the term irritates killers more than the tactic itself is unusual.
The hatch is a trapdoor that spawns somewhere on the map but stays invisible until only one survivor is left alive, at which point it opens on its own and lets that survivor leave without touching the exit gates. A killer can close it, which starts the endgame collapse and pushes the last survivor toward the gates instead — from there, only a Skeleton Key or a Dull Key with charges left, both items worth carrying if you're planning to solo-queue a lot, can reopen it. Building around that scenario is most of why hatch-specific add-ons exist at all.
For years, surviving an unhook without immediately being downed again depended entirely on someone running the Borrowed Time perk. That changed with patch 6.1.0: every unhooked survivor now gets a few seconds of Endurance and a small speed bump for free, no perk required — lost the moment they do anything "conspicuous," like repairing, healing, or opening a gate. The perk itself was reworked around that base, extending the same effect for whoever did the unhooking. It's the clearest example of an anti-tunneling tool built directly into the base game, rather than left to individual characters' perk loadouts.
Disconnecting before a match ends — on purpose or by a crash — locks you out of new matches for a stretch of time. The first offense is short, a few minutes at most, but repeating it within the same day escalates fast, climbing well past an hour. Behaviour's stated reasoning is blunt: a mid-match disconnect ruins the game for the other four people in the lobby, whichever side they're on, so the penalty exists for them, not for whoever left.