Fog DeathyardReport
English：Fog Deathyard · Locations
A Fogman camp. Mechanically it is a nest like any animal nest — it keeps producing Fogmen, it can be wiped out, and it grows back. The pole in the middle is where captured characters wake up.
A Fog Deathyard is a Fogman camp. It has no fixed coordinates. Like any animal nest it spawns at random, and its position differs from one save to the next.
It is easy to recognise: a few torch posts, a ring of stakes hung with bones, and a prisoner pole in the middle. Most Deathyards sit inside one of the large craters of the Fog Islands, and there is a cave version as well.
It counts as a nest
The game files the Deathyard under "nests", the same class as a crab nest, a river nest or a swamp raptor nest. That classification has consequences.
It keeps producing Fogman squads and sends patrols out along the roads that criss-cross the Fog Islands. Kill most of the Fogmen it spawned and a notification appears, the nest despawns after a while, and a new one grows somewhere else. Clearing a Deathyard is therefore a temporary result, not a permanent one.
Deathyards in the Fog Islands are often clustered. While you are dealing with one, the patrols from the two next to it walk in. Being surrounded from three sides is the standard way to die in this region.
Unlike an animal nest, which occasionally holds skins, weapons or beak thing eggs, a Deathyard drops nothing at all. There are no items on its spawn table.
The prisoner pole
The pole in the middle of the camp is what the location is actually for.
Fogmen do not fight to kill. The moment a target goes down they stop, pick the body up, carry it back to camp and tie it to the pole, and then a Fog Prince comes to eat. With no prince present a Fog Heavy does it instead, while the workers scream around them. Princes are drawn to a prisoner on a pole, which is why you are more likely to find one at a Deathyard than on the road.
Being tied to the pole is not the same as being dead, but a few things about it affect your character directly.
- Being eaten alive applies cut damage and pushes bandaged health into the negative. Leave that unrepaired and the character stays crippled even after a full-health robot limb goes on.
- The eating starts at the limbs, so a slow rescue means a character who comes back missing an arm or a leg.
- If leg health is still above a certain threshold and the character has the medic job enabled, a character on the pole can patch themselves up. In practice this is the only self-rescue there is.
- Killing every Fogman on site does not make the pole safe, because new Fogmen spawn in to replace them.
Prisoner poles are not exclusive to Fogmen. Cannibals, Gurglers and the Southern Hive all use them, and the Holy Nation has several standing in Rebirth.
Spawn table
A Deathyard has exactly two squads.
| Squad | Composition | Weight (Fog Islands / elsewhere) |
|---|---|---|
| Fog hive nest | 13–25 Fogmen | 25 |
| Fog prince squad | 1x Fog Prince + 3–5 Fog Heavies | 5 / 3 |
Those numbers are relative spawn weights in the FCS, not head counts. Working it through, roughly one squad in six carries a prince in the Fog Islands, against roughly one in nine everywhere else. If you are hunting prince heads, the home islands are noticeably more efficient.
Three kinds of Deathyard
There are in fact three Deathyard types. The contents are near enough identical; what differs is the spawn condition.
The native type appears only in the Fog Islands, and it is the one with the higher prince-squad weight. The other two are unlocked by world states. Once a Hive Queen is killed or captured, Deathyards start spawning in Dreg, Okran's Gulf and Vain. Once Holy Lord Phoenix is killed or captured, a separate Fogman nest invasion opens in Okran's Gulf. The last two are the same thing hung on different conditions.
With both conditions met, Okran's Gulf draws from both. Both weights are extremely high, so the density you actually meet does not change noticeably.
What it means for you
The Deathyard is the only terrain feature in the Fog Islands worth marking. It determines three things: where the patrols come from, where a downed squadmate is being carried, and where the princes are.
If you are running a rescue, head for the nearest Deathyard rather than trading blows with the pursuers where you stand. If you are after bounty money, a Deathyard is the most reliable source of princes in the open, at the cost of fighting inside its own spawn radius. The lazier alternative is to stand at the gates of Mongrel and let the assault waves deliver princes to you.