The first ten minutes: a setup routine that finds the ghost room fast
Contracts are won or lost in the opening. The crews that identify quickly are not luckier; they run the same disciplined opening on every map, so their sanity gets spent on testing instead of wandering. Here is that routine, start to finish, adaptable from a small bungalow to a full campus.
In the truck: sixty seconds that shape the whole contract
Before anyone touches the front door, three things happen in the vehicle.
Read the board. Note the ghost's name if shown for a response test later, check the objectives (some, like photographing the ghost, shape what you carry), and confirm the map so everyone loads a mental picture of the layout.
Assign trip one. The most common beginner mistake is five people carrying five random items. On trip one, the priorities are: something that detects activity at range (a video camera for orbs, or a motion or sound sensor on big maps), an EMF reader or thermometer for the walkthrough, and at least one light source per person. On larger maps, add the site map from the truck to whoever navigates.
Name the fallback. One sentence: "if a hunt starts before we know the building, everyone returns toward the entrance corridor." It sounds excessive on a bungalow. On a school or asylum-scale layout, it is the difference between a scare and a body.
Minutes one to four: the sweep
The opening sweep has one goal, and it is not evidence. It is locating the ghost's room, because everything else in the contract flows from that. Work systematically: pick a direction, clear rooms in order, and let your instruments do the talking.
- Temperature is your compass. Rooms trend cold near the ghost. You are not looking for freezing evidence yet; you are looking for the coldest area relative to the rest of the building.
- EMF is your tripwire. Passing readings above baseline mark recent ghost activity even when the room feels quiet.
- Ears beat instruments. Doors moving on their own, thrown objects, footsteps overhead, a flicker in one specific hallway: activity clusters near home. Call out everything; a quiet crew wastes half its sensor data.
On small maps this sweep takes two minutes. On big maps, split into pairs, sweep wings in parallel, and drop a sensor at each wing's junction so activity keeps reporting after you move on. The breaker matters here too: find it early, because powered lights preserve sanity and a known breaker location saves you a dark scramble later.
Sanity is a budget, not a health bar. Every minute spent inside in darkness spends it. The routine exists so that by the time your average sanity has meaningfully dropped, you are already testing a specific room rather than still searching for one.
Minutes four to seven: converting the room into evidence
Once activity points at a room, the contract changes character. Stop sweeping. Set up.
- Camera first. Place a video camera covering the room, angled to include likely orb space, and confirm the view from the truck or on a handheld screen. Ghost orbs are the laziest evidence in the game to collect once a camera is placed and the room lights are off, and the placement doubles as a safety monitor.
- Book and D.O.T.S. next. The writing book goes where activity happened, not just anywhere in the room. The D.O.T.S. projector wants a wall or corridor the ghost is likely to cross, and someone needs to actually watch it, in person or on camera.
- Then the active tests. Spirit box questions in the dark, UV checks on doors, light switches, and windows the ghost has touched, and an EMF reader parked near the activity center. Rotate who is inside so no one person's sanity carries the whole investigation.
The discipline here is patience with placement. A book on the wrong side of a wall or a camera angled at empty space quietly costs you five minutes each, and five minutes of average sanity is often the whole margin between a calm identification and doing evidence work between hunts.
Minutes seven to ten: the decision point
Around this point you have either two evidences or a suspicious silence, and both are information.
With two evidences, the third is usually determined or narrowed to a coin flip. Check what remains possible before hunting for everything: if only two candidates remain, test the single evidence or behavior that separates them, not the whole list. This is exactly the elimination our Smart Scanner walks through, and doing it deliberately is what makes the scanner unnecessary over time.
With nothing after solid setup, re-check your assumption about the room before assuming a shy ghost. Ghosts wander, some entities roam far from home by design, and on multi-floor maps the activity you chased may have been the edge of a territory centered one room over. Move the setup once, deliberately, before changing strategy.
Either way, minute ten is a fair moment to ask the question crews forget: "do we already know enough?" If the objective board is satisfied and the candidate list is down to one, the bravest move is often to lock in and leave. Sanity you do not spend is money and lives you keep.
The routine, on one card
| Phase | Minutes | Goal | Success looks like |
|---|---|---|---|
| Truck | 0 to 1 | Plan, gear, fallback | Everyone knows their trip-one job |
| Sweep | 1 to 4 | Find the ghost room | Activity clustered, breaker found |
| Setup | 4 to 7 | Convert room to evidence | Camera, book, D.O.T.S. placed well |
| Decide | 7 to 10 | Narrow and commit | Testing one separator, not everything |
Timings and sanity behavior are community estimates and vary with difficulty settings and patches. Reworked maps, including 13 Willow Street after July 21, 2026, deserve a slower, more cautious first sweep while you relearn the geometry.