Hello, and thanks for taking a moment to read. There will be some spoilers in here, so read on at your own peril.

In this guide are the methods I used to clear Nightmare/No One Can Hear Them Scream mode.

Surviving in nightmare comes down to two things: stress damage mitigation and physical damage mitigation. If you can keep both damage sources under control, you will allow your squad to clear missions in a single deployment (except for Dead Hills and Atmo Processor, but those are scripted for multiple)

Clearing missions in one go, plus being able to effectively mitigate your stress and physical damage means that you minimize your recovery times, as well as how many deployments it takes to progress to the next stage.

This means that you can use one squad for the whole game, which means each class is going to be able to use their most powerful abilities much sooner into the game.

While I'll expand on these abilities shortly, the sergeant should be able to use reprimand as of Atmo Processor 1 or 2. Your Tecker should be able to hack doors and repair synths for free by Pharos Spire. Your gunner should have High Impact Rounds by Berkeley Docks, and your sniper should be equipped with a silenced sniper rifle by then also.

This is a persistent cycle. Taking the highest level marines possible into a mission means better chances of one-shotting the mission, better chances of mitigating both damage sources, and maximizing experience for the next mission. Which of course means you have a better chance of one-shotting the next mission, and you get the idea.

The first and most important tip for this game is that the game is trying to get you to hurry up.

From a "number of deployments to clear a mission" standpoint, it's helpful... ish. The Doomsday timer will begin counting down after you complete Pioneer Station. So from Atmo Processor on, single deploy clears are crucial. Prior to nuclear protocol, take as many deployments as you like.

From an "amount of time you take during a deployment" standpoint, it's deadly. When Harper asks you if you're looking for a good spot for a picnic? You have zero time limit. Relax. Sit back. Watch enemy movement from a concealed location. Wait for your opening and sneak from point A to point B. Wait for that roaming enemy to leave earshot range (your squad lead's motion tracker) before blowing up that wall.

The fastest way to end up dead is to run in guns blazing.

The second most important tip is that motion trackers can be placed wherever you want. They cost one command point, and command points regenerate. Place motion trackers. A lot of them.

If you stick a motion tracker in a relatively out of the way place, they'll do two things.

1) They will allow you to overload them, and draw enemies in (useful in a pinch, especially when placed by ARC/APC locations -- just be aware that the ARC/APC can run them over and destroy them).
2) They will let you see anything that moves in a 60m radius of them.

Since the map is persistent, if you place motion trackers so that their vision ranges cover the map, you can see where every single enemy is at all times.

It's important to keep a few things in mind.

1) You cannot pause/slow while the map is open.
2) Opening the map cancels the pause/slow state.
3) You can select which marine is going to perform any given interaction. Click the object to interact with (if there is one), then hover over the interaction and press Tab to dictate which marine is going to perform it. You can use this to make sure that your lowest accuracy marine will be the one controlling the power loader. You can use this to make sure that your sergeant isn’t the one laying down suppressive fire so they’re free to use other abilities.

Your first line of defense should be to pause. Even if you need to escape, you can plot your escape while the command menu is open and you have all the time in the world. Open the map and your marines will stand their ground and do their best.

Explore every nook and cranny. The goal is to never have to come back to a map. Clean out supplies and ammo. Take as many tools, sentry guns, and med-packs back to the Otago as you can.

The map is your friend. If you've been in a room, you can zoom in slightly and see if there are any pickups remaining.

Extract survivors as a priority. Engineers passively give you supplies every day. Medics mean you can get your squad back on its feet faster.

Complete every secondary objective that you can. Experience is not gained by killing xenos, but by surviving onslaughts, and completing objectives.

(A quick tip thanks to Apostle of Ebola: If you have the supplies and available hive aggression levels to do it, you can farm a bit of extra XP at the end of a mission by intentionally triggering onslaughts before you extract your squad)

Any map changes you make will stay that way.*

If you blow up a wall or makeshift barricade, or if you unlock/bypass a door, that path you've created will remain open and can be used by enemies as well as your squad. Think very carefully about opening pathways. Very commonly, it is faster in the short term, but puts your squad in far more danger in the long term.

For example, in Pharos Spire, you can walk through a building with a spawn point and some sleeping drones to get down to fight the queen. Or you can blow up a makeshift barricade. But when you trigger the queen fight, reinforcements will be incoming. If you've opened up the barricade, that's an extra angle your squad now has to cover. It's faster to blow, yes. But it's far less deadly to leave it up. If you take the long way around, you can put your squad's backs against it, set up some turrets, throw down a wall of fire, and let the xenos come to you.

*The notable exception is turrets. If you place a turret and leave that floor/map, when you come back that turret will be broken. Any turrets outside of your safe room during a rest will also break.

You have 2 sources of damage to deal with. Each carries their own dangers.

Stress damage ticks up during hunts, any time you're being actively seen by an alien (not while the yellow line is turning to red, but once you've been noticed and the alien is moving to attack), any time you're fighting any human enemy (again, not the yellow line phase), during onslaughts, and defense phases.

Any time a marine's stress hits 100, they gain a trauma point which gives them a debuff to accuracy, as well as some other detrimental effect. Get 3 trauma points, and that marine gets a full blown negative trait.

Until you get a level 6 sergeant, when any marine starts pushing north of 50% stress, start making a plan to get to a safe room and rest. Mitigating stress damage is going to be the name of the game. So for the first few missions, rest often, and try to avoid gaining trauma.

Once your Sarge hits level 6, they get Reprimand. And your deployments get much, much easier.
Reprimand stops your squad from taking any stress damage for 30 seconds. Hunted? No stress. Onslaught? No stress. Xeno trying to bite your Tecker's face off? No stress. The hardest thing in any mission is when stress/trauma start accruing. Your squad loses accuracy, starts to get negative traits, and the downward spiral begins. Reprimand stops that before it can even start.

Physical damage is any time a xeno, synth, or human hits one of your marines.

Your marines will have armor to prevent actual health dropping, but even taking a single point of armor damage means that marine will be spending some time in the Medbay to recover.

Medbay time is not dictated by remaining health at the end of a deployment, but by how much cumulative health that marine has lost.

Marines whose health bars get down to 2 points (or 1 with the tough feat) will get a wound. Wounds range from hemorrhage, concussions, minor or major limb damage, a painful wound, or even being knocked unconscious. Wounds need to be treated ASAP. Certain wounds can only be healed by a medic, but you'll notice I don't recommend using one. You should be able to avoid enough damage to never need a medic if you're playing carefully.

The best way to mitigate physical damage is to up your squad's accuracy. Accuracy makes it easier to kill whatever is trying to kill you before it can hurt you, and you can't do damage when you miss.

The sergeant gets the best ability in the game at level 6: Reprimand. Even though that's summarized above, I'm going to underline this again:

Sergeants = longer in-mission time because stress gains far more slowly, and less downtime between missions because you don't need to wait for your main squad to reduce trauma in psychotherapy. My entire playthrough of nightmare ended with exactly one marine having exactly one stress pip.

Sergeants are also amazing because they increase available command points by 1, and increase the rate at which they regenerate.

Recon has three important abilities - Silencer, Infrared Goggles, and Passive Fast

Silencer is all over other guides. Your sniper shot makes zero noise. Careful movement lets you take out entire patrols of human enemies, roaming xenos, even eggs without making a single sound. Remember how many times I've harped on mitigating stress damage? There's no easier way to mitigate stress damage than to silently kill an enemy before it ever knows you're there.

Infrared goggles let you see any enemy within 10m of your squad when using the flashlight. Through walls and doors. Even enemies that don't show up on the motion tracker, like sleeping drones. If you hear one of your marines whisper that a drone didn't see them, but you're not seeing the drone, you can sweep using your flashlight and any nearby enemies will glow green.

Passive fast applies fast to your squad, but doesn't stack with other fast perks. Functionally, you get fast without having to actually pick it as a perk.

The Tecker, I will admit, was a class I slept on my first playthrough. Don't make my mistake. The Tecker can bypass doors for free at level 10, as well as repair synthetics for free.

But more importantly, the Tecker gets a drone.

The drone can be upgraded to weld/unweld doors. The drone can be moved independently of the squad. And the drone can be used to make noise.

Xenos do not react to seeing the drone. While humans do, it's still the line that slowly turns red, so you can maneuver away/out of sight.

Using the drone, you can scout most maps in full. And much more fun, you can use the noise from the drone to lure enemies where you want them to go. For instance, away from a crucial point where you need to sneak. Or maybe into a dead-end corridor where you have cleverly placed a small army of sentry turrets.

Note that this won't work always, as some enemies are scripted to be in certain rooms. Especially in the Montero this is something of a coin flip.

The gunner has one important ability - High Impact Rounds. Your squad's suppressive fire ability slows down enemies even more. This does not require the smart gun to perform.

Give your squad more time to kill the things before the things reach them. Simple as that.

The medic has some useful abilities. It's nice to passively regain health when you rest. But I don't use medics anymore. Your squad will likely take damage, but every other class gives your squad a much more beneficial ability than healing faster.

For your squad, I recommend two sergeants (one initially, until you get the APC), a recon, a tecker, and a gunner.

For the sergeant, take the upgrade that gives you an extra command point and the upgrade that regenerates command points faster.

For the recon, take silencer, and IR goggles.

For the gunner, take high-impact rounds.

For the tecker, take the drone.

Side note regarding the drone upgrades: The weld ability is up to you, I don't generally use it, but it can come in handy sometimes. I don't recommend giving it a submachine gun. It gives you another weapon but it requires manually reloading and takes an ammo clip to do so. It runs out of ammo too quickly to make much of a dent in an onslaught, and ammo clips can be in short supply early on.

Lastly, give everyone the 5% accuracy boost.

Once your core abilities are in place, I recommend giving at least three marines an extra starting clip, and three marines extra storage pouches. Give everyone wider clips. The less frequently you have to reload during a gunfight the happier you will be.

When giving your squad the individual level perks, prioritize them accordingly:

Accuracy, Crit/Dismember, Unbreakable Will, Hardened, Team Spirit (only for 4 marines, as every two gives one additional command point), Quick Hands, Resourceful (try for at least 3) Tough, Avenger, Enduring

Redemption is a judgment call. It's generally easier to not use a marine with a truly negative trait (like Gloomy, where everyone takes stress damage even when undetected). But the game also forces the initial four squad members on you, so rather than climb the level ladder with a different marine, it might be easier to just get rid of a negative trait.

Don't bother with Fast, as your Recon marine will automatically get it at level 6 and any Fast you've taken won't stack with it. Looter is also not super useful, nor is the passive trauma reduction as using Reprimand means you won't accrue enough stress to have any trauma in the first place. Lastly, Smart-Ass is redundant, as if you’re following my advice then you’ll already have a Tecker with you.

I'm putting this here because it's the best weapon you have. It does not draw aggro from enemies, and is invulnerable. And it can move to certain set points. If you're taking my advice to put motion trackers so that you can see what's happening on the map then you can see where large patrols are heading. And send your death truck to meet them.

If you know an onslaught is coming, you can return to the AR/PC, let a xeno see you, and set up your defenses to have a huge cannon helping your marines and your sentry guns deal with the wave.

Strong weapon. The reload time is relatively short. The real star here is the grenade launcher. Grenades are excellent for clearing eggs before you get the Incinerator, and great for dealing AOE damage to enemies.

The clip size is nice. The reload time and unimpressive damage are not. Yeah, it's deployable as a sentry gun, but that means that you're willingly limiting the angle at which you can fire it, and you're relegating your gunner to their secondary weapon.

Not worth the investment.

More impressive damage. Good clip size. Takes a full calendar year to reload. Removes the grenade launcher. Net negative.

Not worth the investment.

Fantastic damage output. Decent clip size. Good reload time. The secondary fire is a wide beam that pierces all enemies and deals strong damage. Just be aware that there is a cool-down on the secondary fire that makes the rifle unusable for 30 seconds or so. Your marine will swap to their sidearm.

Must buy.

If I'm honest, I never use this weapon unless someone is carrying a certain unconscious veterinarian out of a certain mine.

Something of a trap. It has a 6 round clip, so you're guaranteed to be reloading far more often. And It does 1-3 damage per bullet. That means one clip deals somewhere between 6-18 damage and on average 12. Sometimes, you'll get great damage rolls. Sometimes you'll get lousy damage rolls. A general axiom to follow is that damage over time (DoT) will almost always perform better than burst damage. The revolver is pure burst.

Not worth the investment.

Solid performer. 48 round clip, good rate of fire. Incredibly useful as a sidearm when you have recently microwaved a bunch of xenos with your secondary fire on the Plasma Rifle.

Must buy.

All of the below weapons and abilities do not have any cooldown. The only limit to their use is available command points. Also note that there is no friendly fire in the game. You just can't use an ability if a squad member is currently in the area of effect.

Absolute life-saver. Always keep one in your party, if not more. Any time a drone gets close enough to be in shotgun range, make it pay for its mistake.

With the silencer upgrade for your Recon, this is the best weapon in the game. Every category 1 xeno*, egg, and humanoid enemy dies in one shot, and no sound is generated. If you have a few inches of yellow line between you and an enemy, that enemy will die before they see you.

*Basically, not Crushers, Praetorians, or Queens.

Must buy.

Phenomenal in two roles. Area denial, and egg removal.

Enemies will not walk through fire. This puts fire down in a rather wide area if you click and drag. You get to set the path an enemy has to take to get to you. You can use this to wall off an entire hallway and fully stop enemies from being able to run to you. And because special weapons don't have cooldowns, you can reapply fire before your current fire burns out and maintain an impassable barrier where you can safely whittle down an enemy's health.

Also, eggs die quickly to this.

Must buy.

Useful against category 2 xenos and queens. Deals significant damage.

Just be aware that it takes a moment to fire, and the RPG has travel time. If an enemy is moving toward you, they're an easy target. But at any kind of angle, it takes some practice to reliably hit them. Dead useful for ranged humanoids though.

I don't buy this until/unless I'm running 5 level 10 marines with Plasma Rifles. Then, and only then, it's useful as a replacement to the Pulse Rifle grenade launcher.

Mines (With more thanks to Apostle of Ebola) will generally not kill enemies in one hit on Nightmare.

As they can only do damage once, they're something of a waste of a command point.

I would rather use command points on Reprimand, Motion Trackers, or Sniper Shots. Sentry guns are a better option if you want to lure enemies into harms way.

Not worth the investment.

In my opinion, there are two xeno-techs that are life-savers, one that is very nice to have, and one that is kind of nice if you've got extra samples (and you're sure you do).

Essential. Y'know how xenos are walking, biting, grumpy acid balloons? If you have even one pip of armor remaining, you take zero damage when they pop on you now.

I cannot overstate how useful this is to have. Your armor will last MUCH longer into missions (I was able to regularly extract marines with armor remaining having 100%-ed the map). Combine this with Hardened. As soon as you can.

You get this a bit later in the game, but it's worth keeping some extra samples around for. 10 samples per application and it reduces the infestation level on the planet by 1 pip. As near as I can tell, the number level of the infestation matter, the pips do not. So if you're at max infestation (5), and you apply this once, it takes it back down a full level to 4, even though the next day the level will go back to 5.

This makes later missions much more manageable.

Aliens take longer to notice you. It's helpful, but not necessarily essential. However, if one of your core squad has the Clumsy trait, this offsets that debuff and becomes MUCH more impactful.

The Hive aggressiveness builds more slowly. This is far from the worst thing in the world, but taking your time, and understanding how to stop hunts quickly can kind of make this redundant. On the last mission, this is VERY useful however.

Drones - will try to get in close and do damage. The shotgun is your friend when lots of drones are around.

Runners - fast little suckers. Ideally, you can find a long hallway/open area and let your Recon snipe them.

Warriors - they jump. And knock down everyone in the area they land in. If you see a small cone appear on the ground, move your squad out of it. Fast.

Praetorians - screamers. They're irritating because they'll run away when they're injured and then scream to summon reinforcements. The best way to deal with them is to trap them with sentry guns and lure them in. They'll take damage all the way to the guns and then all the way as they run away, and hopefully die before they escape the kill zone.

Crushers - big, beefy, lots of health. Sentry guns are incredibly useful to give you some extra damage. If they charge, move perpendicular to get away from them. Suppressive fire is helpful to give your squad extra time to kill it before it gets to you.

Queens - usually surrounded by eggs. Again, set up some sentry guns and lure them into your kill zone. Have a command point or two ready to launch grenades/lay down some fire to kill the Facehuggers.


Cultists - melee or ranged. If ranged, get behind half-cover IMMEDIATELY or they will chew through your armor/health. If melee, keep your distance and take them down quickly.

Guardians - same tactics for ranged cultists, just more health, and faster to chew through your health and armor.

Synths - same as cultists/guardians. They take a bit more punishment is all.

For all ranged humanoids, suppressive fire isn't helpful, because they'll just duck behind cover and you waste a bunch of ammo.

Turrets - the only level you'll face them on is Pharos Spire. DO NOT send your squad in range of a sentry turret. They will absolutely smoke any squad member who wanders into their line of sight.


Eggs get their own category because they have an odd peculiarity in their behavior.

Eggs don't trigger hunts. The eggs have a yellow line that turns red before they notice you. Then they open. Then the Facehugger that comes out has its own yellow line that has to turn red.

So you can walk into a room full of eggs, lay down some fire to kill them, and leave as they notice you and open. You still have a bit of wiggle room before the Huggers can trigger a hunt. If you're back out of sight as the Huggers leave the eggs and die in the fire, you'll remain undetected. Just have a backup plan in case things go sideways.

Hunts are bad. They increase the amount of xenos roaming around in the map, and start spawning onslaughts and category 2 xenos for you to deal with.

There are a few things to keep in mind about them.

1. Hunts are immediately interrupted if you take an elevator to a different floor
   
2. Hunts are immediately interrupted if you weld all the doors in a safe room shut
   
3. Onslaughts will reset hunt timers to maximum.
   
4. The spawn point that the onslaught will spawn from will be highlighted on the map once the onslaught is announced.

Let's say that you notice that your next hunt is guaranteed to trigger an onslaught. It might be a good idea to set up a trap and lure a xeno into it so that it triggers the hunt and therefore the onslaught. That way you can handle the onslaught on your terms rather than have to scramble to find a defensive position on the fly.

Also plan for the fact that onslaughts reset the hunt timer. If you're getting toward the end of an aggression level, it might be wiser to prioritize interrupting the hunt rather than let the onslaught trigger and reset the timer.

On the flip-side. If you're already in a hunt, you can't trigger a second one. So you have some more ability to make noise, or clear out an egg room. Just keep in mind where your nearby spawn points are so that you don't have a xeno show up at a bad angle or bad time.

I advocate having one squad and bringing them on every mission. You get the most experience the fastest this way.

The notable exception is the "Defend the Otago" mission. You don't really need your A-team on this one. You can get away with sending in some randos to take care of it.

Healing occurs passively as well as actively. Every passing day each marine's healing number will drop by one. So if you just came back from a deployment and you have two marines who need 1 day in the Medbay, and 3 who need far more, focus your available physicians on the ones who need more. When you progress to the next day, the marines who only needed one day will be fully healed.

If you have a marine who is tired, it takes 2 days for them to lose the debuff. Focus your active healing elsewhere until the tired effect is removed. Otherwise, even if you heal them, you still have to wait for them to not be tired anymore.

Do NOT send tired marines into the field. They take a debuff to accuracy, which is the crucial stat in nightmare, and they come back exhausted which renders them unusable for 3 full days.

At a certain point, you'll gain the ability to bring a 5th marine along. Once you get to the Atmospheric Processer, you'll get the APC and the aforementioned upgrade.

So plan for it.

When you get the ability to train marines, Put everyone in training. Then the day before you launch the Atmospheric Nightmare mission, pull the marine you're going to be adding into your primary squad so that they can rest. This way you minimize the gap in levels from the primary squad to the newbie.