The short version
The Eyeless Dog cannot see you. It hears you, and it comes to investigate every sound you make.
The counter is to become boring. Stop running, stop talking, and walk away.
What the Eyeless Dog is
The Eyeless Dog is an outdoor entity. You meet it on the surface of a moon, between the ship and the facility entrance.
It has no eyes and hunts entirely by sound. That makes it one of the few entities where your own voice is the danger, not the thing in front of you.
It is fast, and it kills on contact. There is no outrunning it once it has committed.
What calls it
Every crew loses people to this list. Each of these is a sound, and each pulls the dog toward whoever made it.
- Running. Footsteps carry. Sprinting across open ground is the loudest thing a diver does.
- Talking through the mic. Normal chat volume is enough. Shouting is far worse.
- Walkie-talkies. They transmit your voice into the open air.
- Gunshots and the zap gun. Loud, and they advertise your position.
- The ship engine and the horn. Both carry a long way across the surface.
- The boombox. It is a sound source by design, which makes it a liability out here.
The one that catches crews out most often is talking. People shout a warning about the Eyeless Dog, and the shout is what turns its head.
How to survive one
The moment you hear it, the crew does the same four things. Practise these before you need them.
Stop moving. Standing still removes the sound that is guiding it. If it has not locked on, it may drift away.
Stop talking. This is the hard one under pressure. Say it once, quietly, then go silent.
Walk instead of run. If you must move, walk. Running is louder and it also cannot save you, because it is faster than you.
Put distance or a wall between you. Break the sound line. Getting into the facility or back onto the ship ends the encounter.
Team play on the surface
A crew is safer than a solo diver here, but only if the crew is disciplined.
One person says it once. “Dog, north.” Then nobody speaks until it is over.
Move as a group. A scattered crew makes noise in different places and cannot agree on which way to walk.
Do not fire. Shooting tells it exactly where you are, and it tells anything else nearby as well.
Use the ship. If the ship is close, board it. The dog cannot follow you inside, and the encounter ends.
When it is already chasing you
If it has locked on and is closing, the options narrow.
Run for the ship or the entrance. You will not outrun it forever, but you only need to reach one of them.
Do not run in a straight line across open ground. Use terrain and the facility entrance to break the path.
Accept the loss of the haul. Drop heavy scrap if it slows you. Scrap respawns; the crew does not.
Why fighting is the wrong call
The Eyeless Dog is durable. A shovel is not going to end the encounter quickly, and every swing is noise.
Worse, a fight on the surface is audible to everything else out there. Crews that fight a dog often meet a second problem while the first one is still standing.
Leave it. That is the whole strategy, and it works.
Day versus night on the surface
The same crossing is a different problem depending on the clock.
In daylight, the surface is a route. You cross, you enter the facility, and the odds of meeting a dog are low enough to ignore.
After dark, the surface becomes the most dangerous part of the run. Outdoor entities spawn in numbers that daylight never produces, and the walk back to the ship with a full inventory is where crews die.
Plan around that. Looping the haul out before dusk is worth more than one more room of scrap.
If you are outside after dark, treat every crossing as a noise discipline exercise. No chat, no sprinting, no boombox, no horn.
Ranking the noise you make
Not every sound carries the same distance. Knowing the ranking helps you decide what to give up.
Loudest: the ship horn, gunshots, and the boombox. These are audible across a moon and should not be used while a dog is on the surface.
Loud: sprinting and raised voices through the mic. This is what most crews do by accident.
Moderate: walking, the ship engine, and dropped items. Manageable if you keep moving with purpose.
Quiet: standing still and crouching. This is the state you want while it investigates.
The practical lesson is that the gap between sprinting and walking is the whole margin. Walking gets you there. Sprinting gets you heard.
Crossing with a full haul
Weight changes how quiet you can be, and this is where the scrap tier list meets the monster list.
Heavy scrap slows you down. Slower means longer exposure, and longer exposure means more chances to be heard.
Two-handed items take your hands. That removes the option of carrying a light and a weapon at once, and it makes climbing and detours awkward.
If a dog is on the surface and you are loaded up, drop the low value-per-weight items and keep the dense ones. You are trading a little scrap for a much shorter crossing.
That trade is almost always correct. A crew that arrives with half the haul beats a crew that does not arrive.
What the ship player can do
The diver on the ship is not a spectator during a surface encounter.
They can see the monitor. That gives them information the divers outside do not have, including where the dog is heading.
They can talk without being heard. Radio volume is the issue, but a calm, short call is far better than four panicking voices outside.
They can open the door. Boarding ends the encounter. A ship player who is ready to let people in converts a chase into a save.
Give the ship player a job before the crew steps off. “Watch the monitor and tell us which way it turns” is a real role, and it costs nothing.
When there is more than one
One dog is a discipline problem. Two dogs are a route problem, and the answer changes.
Do not stand still and hope. Silence works when it is investigating. It works far less well when two of them already know roughly where you are.
Pick the nearest safe door. Facility entrance or ship, whichever is closer, and commit to it as a group.
Walk, do not sprint. Two of them hear a sprint from further away, and neither can be outrun.
Drop anything that slows you. This is the moment the value-per-weight rule earns its keep. Light crews get inside.
If the crew is split, the group that is closer to safety goes in and stays quiet. The other group waits for the dogs to drift before moving.
Building the noise habit
Noise discipline is a habit, and habits are built before they are needed.
Set a surface rule. Nobody talks on the walk between ship and entrance. Call it once and enforce it kindly.
Use short calls. “Dog, north” beats a paragraph. Long call-outs are themselves the noise problem.
Practise the walk. Crews that move together at walking pace look calm and stay quiet. Crews that scatter talk constantly.
Turn the boombox off outside. It is a tool with an indoor use. On the surface it is a beacon.
A crew that is quiet by default handles every outdoor entity better, not only this one. That habit pays across the whole game.
Mistakes that get people killed
- Shouting about it. Your voice is the beacon. Say it once, quietly.
- Sprinting across the surface. Loud and futile.
- Firing a weapon. It converts a hearing problem into a certainty.
- Standing outside talking after dark. Nights on harder moons are exactly when this thing is hunting.
Reading it in the bestiary
The Eyeless Dog is one of the 9 outdoor entities in the monster database. The table lists every entity with its location and hazard rating where the source data provides one.
Our source data does not populate hazard or health for many entities. We stick to behaviour and avoid invented numbers. The behaviour is what decides the outcome.
Related guides
- Outdoor monsters guide — all 9 surface entities and day versus night.
- Survival guide — stamina, exits and not dying.
- Equipment guide — which gear makes noise and which does not.
- How to beat Forest Keeper — the other surface entity you cannot fight.