If you have killed anyone in Death Stranding, you will have been given the warning to dispose of the dead body before it goes necro. We know that dead bodies lead to BTs and BTs lead to voidouts, but how does this impact regular gameplay. Is it possible to trigger random voidouts? The answer is yes, but it isn’t going to be as exciting as you might be thinking.
I spent a lot of time at this, far too much time really, waiting for a dead body to go necro. I spent at least 4 hours of my real world, earth time, sitting around waiting for something to happen and it never did. When I was about to give up waiting, it happened! I will link the video so you can see the full story, but here is the short and sweet of it all.
Killing humans with rounds from a lethal weapon will kill the enemy. You can tell the difference between dead and knocked out based on the icon above the body. A ghost appears above a dead enemy and stars above someone that is knocked out.
From my highly scientific and well produced experience, it takes over 4 hours for a dead body to go necro. I do think that progressing with deliveries and regular activities will influence the process of something going necro.
You will be warned before it is too late
You will get a call from Deadman when shit is about to get serious. It will give you time to get the body into a body bag and dispose of it at an incinerator. This will hopefully avoid you having to deal with a game ending experience.
Dead bodies don’t cause void outs on their own
A dead body doesn’t dissolve and explode, which is what I thought was going to happen. The bodies will turn into BTs. If the BT catches a human and kills them, it will cause a voidout. If you end up taking too long to reach a body, it can be easier to just let the body get absorbed into the ground and kill the BT that comes out of it. Saves you having to make a long journey to the incinerator.
Knot cities will dispose of bodies for you
IF you are willing to give away 400 of your likes, you can bring a body to a knot city and enter your private room. When you leave, the body will have been disposed of and you will have 400 likes taken away from you as a sort of punishment. To me, this was a pretty fair payment to make. 400 likes is not that much to save the trouble of having to make the journey to the incinerator.
What happens when a body goes necro
If you watch the video, you will see that it simply dissolves into the ground. Tar will appear and take the body away. Once this happens a fresh BT will appear and you will need to kill it before it kills someone else. One the BT is killed, the threat is gone. This feels like a much easier way to handle a dead body than having to waste time bringing it to an incinerator if you are not near one.
What happens if a body goes necro before you dispose of it
So since we know that a dead body just makes a BT, the real question is what happens if you do not deal with the BT. The answer is nothing. If the BT is out in the wild, chances are it will never find someone. I killed a bunch of MULE soldiers and the camp just turned into a camp of BTs. If you only killed one soldier, it turned into a BT and killed other MULE soldiers, then you would have a voidout.
What happens when a voidout occurs?
I had hoped that a voidout would just leave a huge crater in the ground. If you watch from a distance you would get to see a lovely explosion similar to blowing up megaton in Fallout 3. Sadly this is not the case. A voidout causes a game over to occur and you will need to reload a previous save in order to continue. You do not get to see an explosion either. The screen just goes white so there is no benefit to you letting a voidout occur. They are quite inconvenient.
If you want to see it all for yourself, this video will show you everything I did and the end result of me killing enemies in Death Stranding and trying my best to make a voidout happen.