Beginner ยท the core run loop
How Extraction Actually Works
Understand the exit sequence on both raid maps, from the Returning Chime and Soul Trees to the partial escape a Smuggler Woodling offers you.
An exit is summoned, not walked to
The habit most new players bring from other extraction games is looking for a marked door on the edge of the map. That door does not exist here. You perform a sequence that makes an extraction point appear, and only then do you interact with it and leave. Both raid areas work that way, and they do it differently enough that a routine learned in Hallowgrove will get you killed in Brandrgarde.
Until that final interaction completes, nothing you picked up is yours. A chest opened in the first minute and a boss drop opened in the last are equally provisional. That is the entire tension of the mode, and it is why the decision to leave matters more than any single fight you win on the way there.
The extraction markers on the interactive map show where the sequence tends to happen: twenty-two on Hallowgrove, thirty-eight on Brandrgarde South and twenty-two on Brandrgarde North. Almost every marker is a possible position rather than a fixed one, and the map states that plainly. Read them as a shortlist of neighbourhoods to be near, not as pins you can navigate to blindly.
Hallowgrove: the Returning Chime, the Woodling and the Soul Tree
After a set amount of time in a Hallowgrove raid, the Returning Chime activates. The game announces it with visual and audio cues, so you do not have to be staring at the map to notice it happen. Interacting with the chime summons a Hallowgrove Woodling, which the developers call a boss, at a random location in the area.
Kill that Woodling and it becomes a tree. Ringing the chime near that tree summons the extraction point, and interacting with the point takes you out with everything you are carrying. That is three separate steps after the chime wakes up, each with travel attached, and the random spawn means the total distance is different every run.
Because the Woodling's position is random, the sequence cannot be pre-planned the way a fixed exit can. What you can pre-plan is where you intend to be standing when the chime wakes up: near enough to a chime to start the sequence promptly, with a reversible path behind you, and holding enough recovery to fight something you have not scouted. Players who treat the chime as the beginning of a three-stage errand rather than as a button that ends the raid lose far fewer loaded runs.
Ringing the chime the instant it activates is a commitment, not a convenience. You are announcing a boss fight, at a location you do not yet know, to everyone still in the area. If your health, your recovery items and your remaining escape options cannot survive that fight plus two more legs of travel, the better move is to reposition first and start the sequence from ground you can defend.
The Smuggler Woodling takes you out, not your bags
A Smuggler Woodling can also appear at random in Hallowgrove. Interacting with it gives you a fast exit with no boss fight attached, but it carries out only your equipped gear plus a few selected items. Everything else loose in your bags stays behind.
That makes it one specific tool rather than a general shortcut: it is the answer to a run that has already gone wrong. If you are low, hunted, and holding loot you will probably hand to whoever kills you, a smuggler exit converts a total loss into a partial one and keeps the kit you paid for. If your bags are full of the reason you came, walking to a smuggler throws that reason away.
Do not plan a route around finding one. It appears at random and is no substitute for knowing the chime sequence. Treating it as your default exit quietly teaches you to leave the valuable half of every run on the floor.
Brandrgarde runs two extraction routes at once
Brandrgarde does not use a chime. Two independent routes exist there simultaneously. Soul Trees holding Souls of Return appear at random positions, and standing at one lets you summon an extraction directly beside it, with no boss requirement attached. The catch is that those trees wither over time, so a tree you noted early in the run is not guaranteed to still work when you need it.
The second route is the Returner Woodling. These appear in mist-free zones, and defeating one gives you a Soul of Return to consume, which summons an extraction where you stand. Both Brandrgarde routes bring out everything you are carrying, so neither one is the compromised option.
Having two routes running at once changes how a squad should move. One player checking mist-free ground for Returner Woodlings while the others work a treasure line is time spent on the exit without spending the run on it, and it means the group is never in the position of needing an exit and only then starting to look for one. The two routes also fail independently, which is the whole reason to keep both live.
The strategic weight of that second route is easy to miss. A Soul of Return sitting in your bag is a portable exit, which is a completely different thing from knowing where an exit is. It turns the last stretch of a run from a race across open ground into a decision you can make from cover. The item database lists it among the quest and extraction items, and while you are holding one it is reasonably the most valuable thing you own.
The collapsing safe zone rewrites your plan mid-run
Brandrgarde closes down through a collapsing safe zone that advances in numbered phases, rather than the whole map turning lethal at once. The white circle on the map marks what is still safe. Neither the number of phases nor their timing has been confirmed, so keep checking the circle instead of trusting a schedule someone else quotes.
Put that together with withering Soul Trees and the reason Brandrgarde punishes passive play becomes clear. Your two extraction routes are perishable in different ways: the trees expire on their own, and the ground under them can leave the safe area entirely. A plan resting on one tree you saw early has a single point of failure.
The workable habit is to bias your looting direction toward wherever the circle is heading, and to treat any Returner Woodling you can safely kill as worth the detour even when leaving was not yet on your mind. As the phases advance, surviving squads compress into less space, so the safest extraction is usually the one you set up before the crowding starts.
No verified timer exists, and you should distrust anyone quoting one
This is where circulating advice about the game most often misleads people. Player estimates for how long a raid runs before the chime activates, and for how long the extraction interaction itself takes, range widely and contradict each other. There is no confirmed figure for either map. We are not going to print a number that would send you into a fight with false confidence.
What you can rely on are the cues the game gives: the chime's audio and visual signal, the state of the white circle, whether a Soul Tree is still alive, and how much of your own kit is left. All of those are readable in the moment and none of them need a stopwatch. A player who leaves when three of those readings turn bad will out-earn a player counting seconds against a number somebody guessed.
One related correction is worth making. The developers streamlined the extraction flow before release after beta feedback, so older complaints about a long chain of steps describe a version that is no longer live. The map legend also carries a Soul Ferry marker whose requirements have not been confirmed, and nothing above assumes it.
Where extraction runs fail
The most common failure is not a lost fight. It is the interact key colliding at the chime, where a nearby body, door or container steals the prompt at the moment you need it. Clear the ground around the chime before touching it, and step aside to reset the prompt if it offers you the wrong thing.
Players also report getting stuck inside the bell tree or pinned inside a spent Soul Tree, and items occasionally appearing missing after settlement, which staff describe as a display problem that a restart resolves. Less forgiving: a disconnect or a fatal error during a run counts as a failed extraction and costs the kit, which is a good argument against carrying your best set on a night when the game has already crashed once.
Summoning anything is loud, and both maps make the summoning player the most attractive target in the area. Approach the site by a route you can reverse, look before you commit, and accept that a run you can no longer defend is a run to leave with less rather than lose entirely. The arithmetic behind that trade is spelled out in what a death costs you.
Where to go next
Open the interactive map for the area you intend to run, switch on only the extraction and landmark layers, and pick two candidate exit neighbourhoods that do not share an approach. Doing that before you queue is the highest-value minute in the whole loop, and it takes less time than reading this section did.
The two articles that pair with this one are the beginner errors that quietly cost loot, which covers the decisions that strand you far from an exit, and what solo, duo and trio players can enter, which matters because the two areas described above are not open to every party size. The companion piece on route planning and when to leave turns all of this into a plan you can follow under pressure.