Phasmophobia Advanced Tactics

A couple cool tricks to quickly track down the ghost's evidence.

Introduction

To keep this brief:
Over the past couple of days, I figured out quite a few cool things about new mechanics & techniques. Over the coming days I'll update this with some more information. (Got some cool stuff on Sound Sensors & Motion Sensorrs)

For now, I'll just put out a couple cool tricks you can use to detect the ghost pretty quickly, which is going to be very helpful for tricky ghosts or people that want to speedrun or do tricky challenges.

Anyway, have fun trying this out.

(Valid at 0.3.0.2 with 16 ghosts)

[Ghost Deducation] Excluding Confirmation

Non-Fingerprint Evidence comes in mutually exclusive pairs.
Detecting any piece of evidence, other than Fingerprints, always rules out the other.

The Pairings are:

Evidence	Evidence
Spirit Box	Freezing
Ghost Orbs	EMF 5
Ghost Writing	DOTS Projector

If you discover Spirit Box? => No need to check for Freezing
If you discover Ghost Orbs => Cannot be EMF5
If you discover Ghost Writing => Cannot be DOTS Projector

This easily allows you to focus on the evidence you actually need, without constantly checking in the book what evidence it could be.

[Ghost Deduction] Double Negative Confirmation

You can confirm any of the Non-Fingerprints evidences by ruling out its opposite and Fingeprints.

• Pick any Non-Fingerprints Evidence and check it (e.g. Spirit Box)
  
• If you're sure the Ghost does not have this evidence (e.g. stayed in the Ghost Room with the ghost, no replies on multiple attempts for prolonged periods of time)
  
• => Check for Fingerprints. If the Ghost does also not have Fingerprints
  
• It must be the opposite evidence of the evidence you ruled out (e.g. => Freezing)

The reason this works:
The ghost has 4 categories of evidence to pick from, the 3 main categories of mutually exclusive evidence and the joker (Fingerprints).

Pick	Evidence	Evidence	Joker
First Pick	Spirit Box	Freezing	Fingerprints
Second Pick	Ghost Orbs	EMF 5	Fingerprints
Third Pick	Ghost Writing	DOTS Projector	Fingerprints

Watch what happens when we rule out Fingerprints:

Pick	Evidence	Evidence	Joker
First Pick	Spirit Box	Freezing	Fingerprints
Second Pick	Ghost Orbs	EMF 5	Fingerprints
Third Pick	Ghost Writing	DOTS Projector	Fingerprints

Now the ghost can only have evidence from mutually exclusive pairs. So ruling out any one evidence forces the remaining evidence to be the ghost's evidence.

Ruling out Fingerprints and Spirit Box:

Pick	Evidence	Evidence	Joker
First Pick	Spirit Box	Freezing	Fingerprints
Second Pick	Ghost Orbs	EMF 5	Fingerprints
Third Pick	Ghost Writing	DOTS Projector	Fingerprints

=> The Ghost must have Freezing.

This works for any of the 6 main evidences in its mutually exclusive pairs. Rule out 1 evidence and fingerprints => the opposite evidence must be part of the ghost's evidence.

TLDR;
If you can rule out Fingerprints evidence for the ghost (the ghost has touched multiple doors and light switches, no fingerprints)

• Any piece of further evidence you can rule out automatically confirms its opposite.

E.g. If you don't have Fingerprints, and you don't find Ghost Orbs, it must have EMF5.

[Motion Sensor] Advanced Motion Sensor Placement

Motion sensors can be triggered by the player and the ghost.
However, the player and the ghost have different activation hitboxes!
Clever positioning can allow motion sensors that cannot be triggered by the player, only by the ghost.

Let's take a look at the height a ghost can trigger sensors at:


Ghosts can roughly trigger motion sensors up to this height. A good way to keep it in mind is to think of ghosts as doorway-high. Any sensor placed higher than the top of a door frame is not going to detect the ghost.

As you can see, all 4 motion sensors here have been triggered by the ghost.
The sound sensors serve as height indicators.

In order to understand height placements, we need height references. The sound sensors have been placed as two height indicators.

Shoulder Height: This sound sensor was placed by walking up to the wall with the camera level straight ahead. It's approximately on the height of your shoulders.

Above Head Height: This sound sensor was placed about 1 1/2 motion sensors above the shoulder height one, in such fashion that when standing in front of the wall, only the lower edge of the sound sensor is still visible.

The two pinkish lines are the cutoff lines. Anything placed above the lower line cannot be triggered by the player, only by the ghost.
Anything placed above the upper pinkish line is not triggered by player or ghost.

TLDR: Placing Motion sensors between the two pink lines makes them triggered only by ghosts.



Let's take a look at the individual sensors:


The framed sensor is slightly below shoulder height. This is the heighest a sensor can be to be triggered by the player and ghost (without special circumstances).

This is bad since you and other playerrs can trigger the sensor.







As you can see in this image, the sensor directly right of the left-most sensor is not triggered by the player, even though he's right in front of it.

This is better but problematic.







The Spirit Box Effect:

There's a weird special circumstance where holding a spirit box that's active increases the player's height profile.
As you can see, holding an active spirit box and walking past the sensors also triggers the second one that usually isn't triggered.

The two motion sensors on the right cannot be triggered by the player, even when holding a spirit box. These are optimal placement positions.

[Motion Sensor] Doorframe Sensors

Motion Sensors can be placed inside a doorframe. They are invisible, but can still be picked up again and can be seen on the chart.
This allows you to check if a ghost is walking through a door.

[Motion Sensor] Vector Tracking

One Motion Sensor by itself does not tell you a whole lot. Its triggered when the ghost passes by. If the ghost keeps standing in front of it, it will retrigger every couple seconds after going briefly dark.

But overall? The ghost is usually gone by the time you reach the area.

However, while one point makes a location, two make a vector.
By placing two sensors near each other, you can determine the direction and likely path of the ghost when walking past them.


Here, the ghost is in the dining room. By placing two motion sensors in either direction he can exit, I can not only know that the ghost moved past a sensor, but the delay in the triggering tells me the direction it's heading in.

This is a powerful technique to follow the ghost along and use the spirit box or thermometer, when dealing with a hard-to-pin-down corridor or wandering ghost.

Super Technique:
Ghosts often seem to follow reoccuring paths. You can often come across ghosts that almost never go into a certain part of the house and keep using the same or a similar path.

Observing this, aided by motion sensors, can allow you to pinpoint the room of the ghost without any evidence from within the truck! (If you're patient enough. A good confirmation can take quite a while)

But this isn't just useful for finding the ghost room.
Taking a moment to study the common movement paths of the ghost can allow you to form an understanding of where the ghost is likely to go, which routes it usually travels, in order for you to track it & get its evidence.

Warning:
Be careful with your motion sensor placements, especially when using door frames.
Check the red square in the picture above! This is an overlap area where the motion sensor extends into another hallway, meaning that this sensor can be triggered by the ghost walking through the door and, occasionally, by the ghost walking along the hallway to the living room if it's too close to the wall.

Example:

I placed two motion sensors on the stairs that I cannot trigger. By the sequence in which they light up & disappear, I can tell whether the ghost left or returned to its ghost room.
In this case, the lower sensor triggered first, then the one further up, thus telling me the ghost started on a roaming pattern and is currently not in its room.

[Sound Sensor] Advanced Sound Sensor Placement

Sound Sensors detect all sounds that occur within its box (visible on the map) which has a height of height of roughly 2 characters stacked on top of each other, meaning that a sensor placed at shoulder height (middle of the wall) will sense all sounds on that floor within its area. (

There are three positions you can choose for a sound sensor:



Top Sensors will not sense any sound occuring at the ground of the same floor, but will pick up noise from the upper floor.



Mid Sensors will mostly register sounds of the floor its placed on, but can - depending on the placement - at times pick up sounds from above or below, though this is rare and only occurs in unusual circumstances.



Bottom Sensors will detect sounds from the ground, but not any sounds from the higher part of the room (e.g. a triggered motion sensors just below door-frame height would no longer be picked up). They can also pick up sounds from the upper part of the lower level.






Different pickup heights

An active spirit box will constantly emit 5db noise. (Equivalent to 0.5 strength on the sound sensor)
Placing one on the ground will show us which of the sound sensors manage to pick up the noise.


Only two of the three sensors manage to pick up the spirit boxes sound. The one at the top does not hear the spirit box.

Note: Removing a Sound Sensor from a wall while it's hearing a sound will currently bug the Sound Sensor chart's entry for that sensor and freeze it. As you can see, the second Sound Sensor has no room assigned to it and its sound level is frozen.

Let's fix the bugged sound sensor and add a second spirit box. This adds an additional 5db to the sound in the room. (Verifyable with the paramic)

However, the sound chart will not show the increase in sound.


That is due to a currently flawed design decision of the sound sensor chart.
The chart registers all sounds, adds them together, but does not allow more than a maximum of 0.5 strength.
As a solo player, it's almost impossible to ever see the chart go above 0.5 strength.
The other half of the chart is purely for picking up player sounds, meaning that unless a player talks in sound sensor range, the sound cannot ever go above 0.5 strength (5db).

Here's a visualization of which sound sensors pick up with motion sensors when they get triggered:

How to use this information:

The most critical aspect and using sound sensors is understanding its hearing ranges, especially on a height-level. The biggest problem in sound sensor usage is clogging up a sensor's 0.5 max strength limit with a spirit box or a motion sensor, both which cause a 5db sound and fully fill the maximum 0.5 on the sound chart, thereby blotting out all other interactions.

You can use sound sensors placed in the upper area of a room to still catch most ghost sounds, but to avoid a spirit box sound on the floor.
Similarily, you can use highly placed motion sensors to track ghosts, but to not let them trigger a sound sensor by placing the sound sensor deliberately low.

Placing a motion sensor above the cutoff line does not make sense, since it no longer gets triggered by a ghost passing by. But placing one slightly below it can allow you to track ghosts movements, without tracking the sensor's activation on a bottom sound sensor.

[Sound Sensor] Floor Level Detection

A great usage of sound sensors is to identify the level a ghost is currently on.


In this example, we have placed 2 Bottom Sensors, 1 Medium Sensor and 1 Top Sensor.
On the Dining Area on the upper floor, an active Spirit Box is placed to create a constant 0.5 strength sound (5db).


This sound is only picked up by 1 sensor, the top sensor.

Expanding on the knowledge of Advanced Sound Sensor Placement, this means we can place Sound Sensors tactically to track on which level the ghost is currently active.

Placing a sensor in the middle can be a good way to only track the floor the sound sensor is placed on, but on floors that have both a floor above and below, this can cause sounds to be picked up from the wrong level if the placement isn't perfect.

• Placing a Bottom Sound Sensor on a basement floor guarantees it only tracks basement sounds.
  
• Placing a Top Sensor on the upper floor / attic prevents it from picking up anything from the floor underneath.
  
• Combining these two techniques, you can place 3 sensors at the same spot on 3 different height levels. Even if the one in the middle isn't perfectly placed, you can use the other two sensors to know if the middle sensor picked up a sound from its own floor (no other sound sensor reacts) or from a different floor (another sound sensor has the same reaction).

If you deal with a ghost that's hard to pin down in an area where it can often change the floor (Bleasdale, Asylum near stairways, etc.), placing strategic sound sensors can tell you in what area the ghost is moving, and on what floor level.

[Sound Sensor] Overlap Areas

Sound is a powerful tool to track down the ghost room.

There are great new ways to use sound via the parabolic microphone to track down the ghost.
But some of these new additions (especially frequent, often permanent or near permanent sounds in the ghost room) can be used to deduce the ghost's location.

You can place sound sensors very broadly to cover as much area as possible to track down the wing/rough area of the ghost room, and, using the floor level techniques above, the level the ghost room is on.

However, another great way to use sound sensors is to place them with overlapping areas.


As you can see, I placed 4 sensors around the house. One in the utility room, facing the west side, one in the Master Bedroom Bathroom, one in the Nursery, and one in the Boys Bedroom.
I've created 3 squares outlining roughly the 3 areas that are currently active on the sound sensor.

It's important to note that all three sound sensors are hearing a near-constant 0.35 strength sound (3.5db). Since the max pickup range is 0.5 strength, this tells me also that we're currently not picking up motion sensor activation sounds or spirit box sounds.
Whatever ghost sounds are currently produced on the spirit box, thus, must be from the ghost or ghost room.
The only thing that can cause a false lead is a permanently active sound source that the ghost triggered (car alarm, radio, etc.) So going in and verifying the ghost did not switch on the radio is important.

Getting closer:

After having confirmed that there is no radio on, this chart tells me a lot, marked down with the squares.

1. The Ghost, for a prolonged period of time, did not do any interactions that could cause a sound.
2. The Ghost, for a prolonged period of time, produced sounds that were registered by three different sound sensors.

=> I now suspect the ghost is either in the Nursery, or in the Master Bedroom.

This is not a confirmation!

Sometimes the ghost can wander for extended periods of time, so a single observation like this does not guarantee an immediately conclusive deducation.

But in combination with motion sensors and using vector tracking, I can now record how long the ghost is in any area of the house, and where it moves back to. Keeping track of its routes, and how long it stays at any location, I can close in on the ghosts actual location.

After having spent some time observing its pathways & the areas sound was produced in, the fact that sound almost always came from the utility & nursery regions, aided by the fact that the Master Bedroom often did not produce a sound & the ghosts routes always led back into the nursery where it stayed for prolonged periods of time, I can with great certainty conclude that the ghost is in the nursery - without having used any other evidence to observe the ghost.

When is this useful?
Now, the above is a bit more time-consuming than your average hunt (and a bit more boring, lacking the near-death experiences and everything).
In most cases, especially in smaller houses, you're much better served by using virtually anything else.

But on larger maps like prison, asylum or high school? Well-placed motion sensors placed via candle-light sprints can give you great information without any cost to your sanity.

Especially when dealing with the tougher professional ghosts (small transit area ghosts (e.g. Tanglewood kitchen), or corridor ghosts) that are very roamy, using sound sensors in combination with motion sensors is a great way to either zoom in on the likely area from the start with low risk - or to allow you to recover after having been mislead by a rare, particularily difficult ghost.

Ultimately, sound sensors still need some love. (e.g. the ability to switch the area size between small, medium & large and possibly the shape from square to long rectangle to wide rectangle and, most importantly the removal of the 0.5 strength limit on the sound chart and possibly an expansion of the sound chart range to 1.5 or 2.0 strength (15-20db))
But in some cases, especially when combined with the above motion sensor tricks, they can help a lot more than people currently give them credit for.

[Greenmovie13]

After awhile I've found some strategies for nightmare, which are just ruling out two pieces of evidence to remove possibilities of ghosts, and then from there it helps narrow down what evidence it could be. Nightmare is mostly just for those who can recognize the ghost's strengths and weaknesses the best, not for finding evidence, so usually ruling out evidence is hard unless you have one or two pieces of evidence

[kuraiken]

Yes, and it won't work at all once more ghosts get released. That's just the side-effect of those categories no longer being exclusive. Both the Excluding Confirmation and the Double Negative only still work for the pieces of evidence that don't have an opposite.

I'll update the guide in the near-future after the release of the patch that changes the unique ghost behaviour. That'll be in ~ 2-4 weeks according to the devs in a stream.
Once that goes life, I can give a detailed guide on how to do Nightmare.

Right now, there are two golden-bullet ways to finish Nightmare, one for solo and one for teams, but both are very time-intensive and not fun at all to play.
Once that's fixed it makes sense to actually write a guide on how to tackle Nightmare.

[Greenmovie13]

The double negative sort of works in a way depending on what evidence you get, but with the first piece of evidence it doesn't work

[kuraiken]

@Greenmovie13
Thanks! :)
I'll have to see about the Paramic, there's been a patch in the last week or so where they changed the ghost sounds which makes the paramic less useful according to some of the more famous streamers. I haven't tested the changed myself, but I might do a bit of testing in the near future & see if I can offer advice beyond the obvious (go to central location => slowly check in all directions => watch for 0.2-0.8 sounds and follow them.)

Quickly narrowing the ghost down is indeed a pretty good strategy, sound sensors & motion sensors are more for the unsually hard ghosts to track down. I'll have to warn that the double negative rule will probably cease working next update (Halloween) when they introduce 2 new ghosts - unless they deliberately keep avoiding ghosts that break the 3 pairings rule. So make use of it while you can - though the journal makes it much easier now to keep track of this.

[Greenmovie13]

A great guide that does definitely help track the ghost and its evidence. If you could add parabolic mic tips for others who need help tracking the ghost on large maps, that would certainly help :)

I'm around level 2150, came back after six months of not playing the game. I've adjusted to the new arrangement of evidence that each of the ghosts have, and I found that my strategy to quickly find the ghost's type seems to still work. It goes along the lines of using the quick-to-identify evidence pieces(fingerprints, ghost orbs, spirit box) which narrow it down extremely fast if all three of these pieces are searched for and ruled out quickly. With the strategy of double negative that you introduced, this also works and helps narrow down further. When the options of ghosts is between a wraith and another ghost, just use salt

And if the ghost won't do anything just say its name ;)

[kuraiken]

@tye Thanks. :D

@Heart lost Glad you like it.

@Deoplo
Depends on my goals.
Normal Run => Strong Flashlight, EMF Reader, Photo Camera (EMF Reader to verify interaction to track the ghost, Camera for Bone Ouji Board & Bone pictures)

Speedrun => Video Cam, Dots Projector, UV Light

Large Maps => Strong Flashlight, EMF Reader, Para Mic

Sensor run => 3x Sound Sensors (2x + 1 candle if I want to preserve sanity) placed with little overlap, usually across the 2-3 floors;
second run => 1 additional Sound Sensor in the largest floor, 2 motion sensors near where I've seen response on the sound chart when fetching new items. Usually placed tactically at passages the ghost has to pass through, cutting the level into smaller sections.
third run => 2x motion sensors, either further cutting the level into sections or, if I saw a sign of where the ghost is, repositioning of all sensors to create traps wedging the ghost into an area, using double motion sensors so I can use vector tracking.)

[Deoplo]

Great guide! I'll be referring to the section about ruling out evidence quite a bit.

How do you normally start your hunts out? Do you bring in a ton of sensors, or maybe just use a thermometer/emf reader?

[迷失]

good

[itstye]

This is absolutely phenomenal. Amazing job

[kuraiken]

@AlphaT3rrY Thanks, glad it's helpful for you. :)

@Ciazz
I'm not aware of anything affecting motion or sensors in the update, and the ghost deduction is unchanged, so all of this is still viable in 3.03. You can low-risk test anything here in the Training, which now features all equipment. Since the Training tells you the ghost room, you can just not look at the board, figure it out with motion sensors & sound sensors, use the ghost deductions, and then check if you correctly identified the room by checking the board.

@Regular Gamer
Or maybe I could explain something better. Is there a section in particular you feel is too difficult to comprehend? I'm considering a rewrite + some additional stuff I found out in the next week or two, when I'm not so busy with work.