Approximately 2 weeks ago we posted an analysis of how the Patrol spawns worked and what affected their frequency.
If you haven’t read that post yet, we highly recommend you do so here

Our analysis was missing a key component of Patrol spawning behavior and that is the “Where” a Patrol would spawn and while we were performing additional testing to suss out these details, Reddit User, /u/GreyMaria responded to our original analysis with details about how the “Where” is determined. Huge kudos to them for both discovering and sharing this with us. We retested their findings and confirmed them to be accurate.

This Guide is an explanation of how the “Where” is determined and how players can manipulate the logic up to the point of completely preventing the spawns from occurring.

Luchs has put together a video summary for those that prefer a TLDR version. This video also contains our evidence and real-time demonstration of us actively manipulating the mechanics detailed below.

Each of the following topics will be detailed in its own section but here are the broad takeaways

• Patrols will always attempt to spawn 125 meters away from their associated player
  
• Patrols will always be orientated towards an active enemy Outpost which is randomly selected among all active Outposts
  
• If no eligible Outposts remain Patrol spawns will be orientated towards the nearest Map Edge
  
• Patrols will always move towards their associated Player's position at the moment they spawned
  
• Patrols can be completely blocked from spawning in certain circumstances and the system can be manipulated to virtually guarantee Extractions without enemies

First we need to explain the concept of the “Player Safety Bubble”. Each player on the map generates an area around them which prevents a Patrol from being spawned within this area. The hard range of this bubble is around 85 meters meaning you are virtually guaranteed to not have a Patrol spawn within 85 meters of any player.

Patrols will attempt to spawn at exactly 125 meters from their associated player but this distance can have variance depending on terrain. You will almost always see spawns between 90-140 meters. We refer to this area as the "Eligible Spawn Space".


Prior to Patch 1.000.103, we believe that when a Patrol spawned it failed to account for the Safety Bubble of players other than the one it was associated with. This led to the infamous “Spawning on top of me” problem. Furthermore, it appears that the Safety Bubble range was substantially increased with Patch 1.000.103.

With Patch 1.000.103, all Player's Safety Bubbles are considered when attempting to spawn a Patrol. This new logic also allows players to "chain" their Safety Bubbles together.

Patrols are always oriented towards an active enemy Outpost if possible and if that is not possible, they orient towards the nearest map edge. The size of the Outpost does not matter. Light, Medium, and Heavy can all be chosen to orient towards and there appears to be no “weight” associated with an Outpost’s size, they are treated as equal.

When a patrol spawns, it takes a slice out of the Eligible Spawn Space that is oriented towards the chosen Outpost or Map Edge. Then it attempts to find a valid spot exactly 125 meters from the player anywhere within that sliced Eligible Spawn Space. If a valid space doesn't exist at 125m, it shifts it around terrain until a space is found. This is why you sometimes get Patrols a bit closer or a bit further than 125m.


Which Outpost is chosen for a particular Patrol spawn appears to be entirely random. You could have multiple consecutive Patrols all orientated towards the same base or it could shift dramatically each cycle.


If a player is sufficiently close to an active Outpost such that their Safety Bubble overlaps the Base's center (Icon on the map), that Outpost is rendered ineligible for that Player Group until that player moves sufficiently far away again. In this event, a different outpost will be used for the Patrol’s spawning position or if no other Outposts exist, the nearest point on the map edge will be used.


If all the Outposts on a map are destroyed, Patrols will always spawn orientated towards the closest point on the map edge.

Once all Outposts have been destroyed the only eligible spawn space is the nearest point on the map edge. Players can leverage this situation by moving to 65 meters or closer to the map edge. Doing so causes the Map Edge Oriented Eligible Spawn Space to be fully engulfed by the Player’s Safety Bubble and no Patrols can spawn. So long as the player stays within 65 meters of the map edge, they can move anywhere around the map without any Patrols spawning.


This can also be leveraged during Extraction to completely block Patrols from spawning which means you have an Extraction with absolutely no enemies threatening you. Even with an Extraction that is somewhat far from the map edge, if you can stay within 75 meters of the next player in the Safety Bubble Chain, you can reach out to the map edge and block the spawns.

It is also possible to Spawn Block on certain maps without destroying all Outposts but it is extremely terrain dependent. Essentially, so long as the Eligible Spawn Space for enemies is entirely located in areas they aren’t allowed to spawn on, such as deep water, no enemies will spawn. The game does not fallback to Map Edge Oriented Spawning in this case, it just fails outright.

Actively manipulating the game state to achieve this is quite difficult but we want to call out that Spawn Blocking can occur without destroying all the Outposts or being near a Map Edge.

If players are split enough to form their own Player Group, each Player Group's Patrol will orient itself independent of other Player Groups. If one Player Group is in a position that blocks their Spawns or makes an Outpost ineligible, it does not prevent Spawn orientation for other Player Groups from that Outpost.

As last time, we know we're making huge claims about the game mechanics and Luch's summary video contains our real-time manipulation of the system to produce predicated outcomes. The demonstration starts at 9:50.

Once again huge thank you to /u/GreyMaria for providing us with the information regarding how this logic works, it was critical to putting us on the right path.

Huge thank you to /u/Psyker101, Bureau of Rizz and /u/LexLocatelli (Youtube Channel) for spending even more hours of their life helping chase down this information.

We hope that Arrowhead will approach this topic in a different way going forward as it is incredibly easy to Spawn Block right now and players can even experience it unintentionally. We are not spreading this information to encourage exploiting the mechanics, we are simply informing players about why things are happening. As part of this post, we are submitting an official bug report to Arrowhead along with our evidence so that they can address the issue. We all love Helldivers 2 and want to see it be as good a game as possible.