Kormos

Activity

It can’t do mist form or chasing ghost events.

Hunt

• Hunt sanity threshold: 50%, rising to 70% if a player sprints in the same room as it.
• It’s nearly blind. It has no line of sight unless you get within 5 m of it with no obstacles between you (furniture, walls). Even without seeing you, it can still kill you if it happens to bump into you.
• That’s why its kill range is shorter: it kills you instantly at 0.5 m or less (1.1 m for other ghosts), and at 0.6 m after 1 s (1.5 m for other ghosts).
• Unlike other ghosts, it can change its waypoint before reaching the previous one, every 5 to 10 s.
• Base speed: 1.7 m/s. When it’s heading to a detected point without seeing you, its speed is multiplied by 1.3.

Heightened hearing

Besides detecting voices and electronics, it hears the footsteps of nearby players. Other sounds, like breathing or a thrown object, don’t count. The game stores only one sound per player.

Every second of the hunt (not counting the grace period or Incense’s blinding effect) it sends out a “hearing pulse”: it clears whatever it had detected and looks for recent footsteps. It detects a footstep if the sound (which lasts about 0.2 to 0.4 s) overlaps with the pulse. It ignores footsteps that:

• are outside the range in the table,
• are on a different floor,
• or are at a pathing distance greater than 1.5 times that range.

Priority	Player movement	Range
Highest	Sprinting	30 m
Medium	Walking while standing	15 m
Lowest	Walking while crouched	10 m

If it wasn’t already heading to a point, it picks the highest-priority footstep (or the nearest one, if there’s a tie), places a waypoint on the player’s exact position, and starts a 5 to 10 s timer. When the timer runs out or it reaches the point, if it heard another footstep it sets a new waypoint where the sound came from and restarts the timer. If it heard nothing, it goes back to roaming.

Strategy

• During a hunt, don’t move. If you have to move, do it crouched: that way it only hears you within 10 m, instead of 15 m when walking upright or 30 m when sprinting (crouched or not).
• It can’t hear between floors: if it’s on another floor, move as much as you want.
• You don’t need to hide. Since it can barely see and can’t detect anyone standing still, staying put is fairly safe. Just avoid the spots it’s likely to pass through, because all it has to do to kill you is bump into you. Standing still in a corner of the map cuts the risk a lot.

How to identify it

• It’s one of three ghosts (along with the Hantu and the Onryo) whose three pieces of evidence don’t rule out the Mimic. Confirm it, or check whether it gives Freezing Temperatures: if it does, it’s the Mimic.
• Stand still in an open area during a hunt. If it doesn’t head straight for you when a normal ghost would already have seen you, it could be a Kormos. Rule out the Banshee by having everyone try the same thing at once, or by moving to see whether it detects your footsteps.

Trivia

• In Turkic folklore, kormos are evil, blind spirits that escaped the underworld by promising to behave. Back in the world of the living, they can do good and earn their way into paradise, or stay evil and go back to Tamag, hell. In modern Turkish, görmöz means “without sight.”
• If it builds up acceleration while you’re within 5 m and then adds the multiplier for heading to a distant point, it can reach 3.65 m/s. That makes it, just barely, the second-fastest ghost, behind the Moroi at full speed (3.71 m/s).

Change history

Version	Change
0.17.1.0	The Kormos is added.