Big Mother

The **Big Mother** is a special enemy that is first debuted in Rundown 003 and acts as a boss for certain Rundowns.

 Occurrence | Extremely Rare

## Appearance

Big Mothers are heavily deformed, the host body has a bisected head and rows of sharp teeth around its collar, and has a pair of large rib cages that hang from its head like horns. It sports massive reinforced protrusions on its torso, and additional appendages, which protect it from gunfire. Its 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 Big Mother's weak point exactly like the Mother or Tank.

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

Aside from the physical size difference, the Big Mother has a pair of large rib cages that hang from its head like horns.

## Spawning

Big Mothers are special enemies and generally appear as either the boss of an expedition or even the entire Rundown. Some instances spawn sleeping but will instantly alert once the door to their room has been opened. Big Mothers can rarely be found sleeping idly in very deep levels.

## Behavior

Much like normal Mothers, Big 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 around 30, 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.

Big 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 Big 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 Big Mother is encountered in a stealth scenario, it is worth considering if it is possible to simply avoid the Big 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 Big Mother needs to have line of sight to a player within range to release her baby spawn wave, so when an alerted Big 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 Big 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.

Due to the Big Mother's tremendously large health pool, it is often difficult for players to dispatch her within a single birthing cycle. It will require multiple players focusing fire on her with weapons specialized at boss killing in order to do so.

* The C-Foam Launcher is ineffective against the Big Mother, as it cannot shoot enough C-foam fast enough to freeze her in a reasonable amount of time.
* Properly C-Foaming the Big Mother can be done with three well thrown C-Foam Grenades, or the explosion of one C-Foam Tripmine.
* 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 Big 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 Big 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 Big Mother during the short windows during which she is stationary. The Burst Cannon as well as shotguns such as the Scattergun or Shotgun are capable of outputting significant damage against her. Additionally, the Sniper is able to pop tumors with a single shot, dealing solid damage even while at long range.
* 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.

## Trivia

* Killing the Big Mother only requires dealing 2500 damage to it, and does not technically require popping any tumors at all. However, the Big Mother's HP is only slightly less than the combined HP of her tumors (313HP for each 8 tumors, being 2504 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 Big 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 Big 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 Big Mother, while only breaking a single tumor.
* While the health of a Big Mother's tumor is only 313, and dealing this much damage will pop the tumor, *up to 1 extra point of damage* can be inflicted to the Big Mother if a hit deals excess damage to the tumor. That is, a single hit dealing 313.5 damage to a full health tumor will deal 313.5 damage to the Big Mother's HP, but a hit dealing 400 damage to a full health tumor will only deal 314 damage to the Big 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 afflicted on a hit popping a tumor with excess damage.

## Gallery

* A sleeping boss Mother.
* Another image of the boss Mother.
* Size of a normal Mother next to a big Mother
* Close up view of the flaps/antlers over the Big Mother