Mother

The **Mother** is a special enemy that is first debuted in Rundown 3 and acts as a mini-boss for certain expeditions.

 Occurrence | Very Rare

## Appearance

Mothers are heavily deformed, the host body has a bisected head and rows of sharp teeth around its collar. It sports massive reinforced protrusions on its torso, and additional appendages, which protect it from gunfire. The monster's spinal cord also appears to be outside its body. A human face can be seen pressing against the tumor where its head is, which is also armored. It crawls on its limbs and moves around quickly once alerted. Its back has multiple fleshy tumors, which serve as the monster's weak point.

It appears to crawl on its back in a birthing position, with its rib cage split open to resemble that of a mouth.

## Spawning

Mothers are special enemies, they only spawn in certain expeditions and certain rooms, and might act as a small mini-boss for the level. They can spawn either sleeping or alerted.

A mother's spawn will be preceded by the appearance of many tumors on the walls and ceilings of the rooms leading up to her.

## Behavior

Mothers have no damaging attacks of their own and rely on their ability to birth Babies en-mass to deal damage, these Babies spawn underneath it in groups of 20, and will make a distinct noise when released. During this time, the Mother will raise her hips, making it easier to shoot the vulnerable tumors on her body. After releasing its spawn, it will attempt to hide from players and release a large amount of fog around itself. The fog is very dense; however, it will not cause infection.

**Mothers** will use the aforementioned thick fog and its incredible speed to avoid players. Unlike the Scout, it will continue to spawn unlimited waves of babies until it is killed.

## Strategies

The Mother's set spawns make it easy to prepare against her. Outside of meta-knowledge, her presence is typically hinted by the appearance of Baby Strikers or tumors on walls and ceilings. Players should also keep an ear out for her distinctive noises.

When a Mother is encountered in a stealth scenario, it is worth considering if it is possible to simply avoid the Mother entirely. If the players do wish to dispatch her, it is often advisable to stealthily clear as many other threats from her room as possible, and then the players should prepare to burst her as quickly as possible.

The Mother needs to have line of sight to a player within range to release her baby spawn wave, so when an alerted Mother is encountered, it is possible for the players to hide from her in order to prevent her from birthing. This can buy time for the players to deal with other threats or otherwise prepare, and then when ready the players can emerge to face her.

After birthing, the Mother will release fog and erratically run around, and while she is doing so it can be quite difficult to focus effective fire on her. As such, it is all the more important to focus her during the moments where she stands still.

* A C-Foam Grenade can be used to instantly freeze the mother, making it easier to shoot her tumors, and potentially stopping babies from spawning if thrown fast enough.
* A Bio Tracker can be used to locate her, especially when she emits her fog. In the absence of one, splitting up to quickly locate her after killing the baby spawn wave can serve as an alternative method.
* While the Mother's AI will generally cause her to keep a fair distance from the players, if her only path to the players is through a closed door she will rush to the door in order to start breaking it down. This can be used to bait the Mother closer to the players, allowing them to more effectively focus fire on her.
* Weapons with both high burst damage per second and a large amount of damage per clip are most effective at damaging the Mother during the short windows during which she is stationary. The Burst Cannon has enough damage per clip to reliably kill her all by itself, while shotguns such as the Shotgun or Combat Shotgun are also capable of outputting significant damage against her in close range. The Scattergun in particular is nearly able to dispatch her in a fraction of a second with its two devastating shots - requiring only minimal additional damage from other sources to finish her off.
	+ Despite its incredibly high precision damage, the Sniper is only moderately effective against the Mother, as its high damage is capped by the comparatively small health of the Mother's tumors.
* While only moderately effective against the Big Mother herself, weapons such as the HEL Shotgun or Veruta Machine Gun are extremely effective at dispatching the Baby Strikers she spawns.
* While players will generally prefer the use of firearms when dealing with a Mother, with multiple players working together it is possible to stagger-chain her with melee weapons in order to kill her silently. However, only the Sledgehammer and Bat have high enough Stagger Multipliers to do so.

## Trivia

* Killing the Mother only requires dealing 1000 damage to it, and does not technically require popping any tumors at all. However, the Mother's HP is only slightly less than the combined HP of her tumors (126HP for each 8 tumors, being 1008 combined HP), so in practice players will generally need to pop nearly all of her tumors in order to kill (although see below for how clients can avoid this limitation).
* The game's host cannot deal more damage to the Mother than the amount of remaining health in the tumor that they hit.
	+ This means that when wielding high damage weapons, such as the Sniper (which can break tumors in a single shot), the host should prioritize targeting undamaged tumors, in order to maximize the damage they deal.
* While the game's host will be strongly limited by only being able to deal a tumor's remaining HP in damage, clients are able to entirely bypass this limitation. Whenever a client damages a tumor, the damage of their hit is limited *only* by the tumor's max HP. The tumor's current HP is ignored entirely. (Clients will still deplete tumor's HP for the purpose of the host dealing damage.)
	+ This allows clients with high damage weapons (such as the Sniper) to target whichever tumor they wish - they will always deal the maximum damage of their weapon.
* Furthermore, clients are also often able to target the same tumor repeatedly before receiving an update from the host informing them that the tumor has popped - potentially allowing massive damage to be inflicted to the enemy while only popping a single tumor.
	+ This makes weapons such as the Burst Cannon or the Scattergun substantially more effective against Mothers as client rather than as host, as they are often able to deal their entire burst's/shot's worth of damage (~403 damage and ~470 respectively) to the Mother, while only breaking a single tumor.
* While the health of a Mother's tumor is only 126, and dealing this much damage will pop the tumor, *up to 1 extra point of damage* can be inflicted to the Mother if a hit deals excess damage to the tumor. That is, a single hit dealing 126.5 damage to a full health tumor will deal 126.5 damage to the Mother's HP, but a hit dealing 200 damage to a full health tumor will only deal 127 damage to the Mother's HP.
	+ This extra 1 overcap damage still has the weapon's stagger multiplier applied, meaning that more than 1 extra stagger damage can be applied. In the case of the Sledgehammer, with a charged stagger multiplier of 5, up to 5 extra stagger damage can be inflicted on a hit popping a tumor with excess damage.

## Gallery

* A closeup of the human face on the Mother's head.
* View of the back of a Mother.