Sight

A Helldiver must fall inside the enemy's visual field and pass the remaining visibility and obstruction checks before sight can contribute to detection.

Most enemies are strongest in front of themselves, while a smaller set use unusual front/rear or radial vision profiles. The exact shape determines whether moving to the side or rear actually helps.

Stance and stealth armour scale the effective field. Standing uses the full visibility value, crouching uses 0.8×, and going prone uses 0.5×. Scout and Reduced Signature then apply their own downstream range reductions.

Sandstorms use a 12.5 m weather sight-range setting, while blizzards use 25 m. Thick Fog, Acid Storms, and Rainstorms can have different settings between weather presets.

These values come from the game's weather settings. The weather system carries the selected sight-range field when changing between presets. This is a distance setting, not a percentage reduction from each enemy's usual sight range.

The confirmed enemy sight calculation uses sensor geometry and the target's visibility, followed by distance and obstruction checks.

Each enemy has an authored sight field. The game compares the target against the sensor's directional, angular, or radial geometry. In that geometry calculation, the available viewing distance is scaled by the target's visibility and other sensor and equipment factors. A valid distance alone does not guarantee detection; obstruction and sensor state matter too.

Nighttime changes target visibility separately from weather sight distances. The authored night visibility factor is 0.8×. The code blends it with ordinary visibility according to the current nighttime amount: night contribution = (1 − t) + t × 0.8, where t is the nighttime blend amount. The contribution is 1.0× when t is 0, 0.9× when t is 0.5, and 0.8× when t is 1, before other adjustments.

The Hidden status applies a separate 0.5× visibility factor when active. The code also enforces a lower bound on the resulting visibility. Consequently, multiplying 0.8× and 0.5× is not always enough to determine the target's final visibility. The current code does not establish that sandstorms, blizzards, or other weather conditions automatically grant Hidden.

Stance and stealth armour modify the vision calculation as described above, but their combination with the authored weather distance remains unverified. The vision field simulator shows mapped sensor geometry and those existing player modifiers; it does not model weather sight distances, nighttime, or the Hidden status.

The visualization is centered on the enemy and fades toward the edge of its mapped vision.

Drag the target marker or enter distance and horizontal angle directly. Directional profiles favor the front, front/rear angular profiles can cover matching sectors in front and behind, and radial profiles cover all directions. Standing uses 1.0× visibility, crouching 0.8×, and prone 0.5×. Scout applies 0.70× detection range and Reduced Signature applies 0.60×. The selected armour passive stacks with stance; the two armour passives do not stack with each other. For Type 2, the top-down view assumes no height difference. The fade only shows distance to the edge of the mapped vision field; it is not an in-game detection probability. Weather-related sight limits are not applied by the simulator.

Profiles that cannot yet be matched to a named defense stay unresolved. Their known range can still be shown, but the site does not guess the missing angle settings. Detector Tower is a special case: the simulator shows the mapped mirrored rear sector, but normal gameplay does not provide a practically useful rear detection cone.

Automated defenses first find eligible targets and check obstruction, then apply the same vision-shape rules used by hostile sensors.

Flame, Laser, Machine Gun, Gatling, Autocannon, Rocket, Mortar, EMS Mortar, and Gas Mortar Sentries use the directional model. Their side and rear vision values are disabled, so the sensor itself only sees forward. Their turrets can still rotate through a full circle; rotating to look behind is different from seeing every direction at once.

For a forward-only directional profile with side = −1, the usable viewing angle narrows as the target gets farther away. The exact shape follows R(θ) = (front + 1) × cos(θ) − 1 in front of the sentry. A Gatling or Machine Gun Sentry can therefore accept a target about 70° off-axis at 25 m, but only about 21° off-axis at 70 m.

Tesla Tower is the major deployable exception: it uses a 25 m radial field. Facing does not create a blind spot in this mapped vision model.

A failed visual check can stop current sight validation without erasing information that already exists elsewhere in the AI state.

Stored target information, hearing, group reactions, the current target, and alert state can remain relevant after visual contact is lost. Exactly when all remembered information expires and the enemy fully disengages is still unresolved.

A separate distance × facing calculation can affect which already-known target an enemy prefers. It happens after the enemy has information about possible targets, so it should not be treated as the formula for whether the enemy sees you in the first place.

Open the calculated visualization →

Front/rear angular vision uses horizontal and vertical angle limits. Because its check does not distinguish forward from backward, the top-down field can form matching front and rear sectors instead of one normal forward cone.

The Watcher confirms this behavior in normal gameplay: it can visually detect a Helldiver positioned behind it inside the rear sector, matching the code-confirmed front/rear angular geometry.

For front/rear angular profiles, angle limits above 90° no longer meaningfully restrict that direction. Gazer's 120° / 120° profile and the 100 m Illuminate Cannon Turret's 180° / 180° profile therefore behave more like all-direction sensors limited mainly by range than narrow cones.

Several 120 m turret profiles are confirmed as front/rear angular but cannot yet be matched to one exact angle pair. Their vision type and range are listed without guessing the missing angles.

Cannon Turret is the 900-HP dorsal turret assembly. It uses front/rear angular vision: 120 m range, 30° horizontal half-angle, and 60° vertical half-angle. The weapon mounted in that turret is the Fusion Repeater Cannon.

This is not the same entity as a stationary Automaton Cannon Turret. The stationary version has 2,100 HP and mounts a Fusion Battle Cannon. Both expose a 120 m primary range in the current sensor table, but the stationary turret has not yet been matched to one exact front/rear angular angle pair.