What to Do When Chased

When a dinosaur commits to a chase in Fossil Force, the winning move is not speed — it is silence. Sprinting keeps you loud, and staying loud keeps you detected. The chase playbook is a short, repeatable sequence: stop what you are doing, break line of sight, go quiet, and let the encounter reset. It works in both biomes, and it works solo or in a squad. This page walks through the sequence step by step, plus the mistakes that turn a manageable chase into a lost haul. The detection mechanics behind it are covered in how dinosaurs detect you.

The chase playbook, step by step

1. Stop looting immediately. Whatever is in your bag is what you are playing for. The pickup you are reaching for is never worth the extra seconds of noise.
2. Break line of sight first. Use terrain, vegetation or a ridge — whatever the biome offers. Sight is the dinosaur's secondary sensor, and breaking it is the fast half of escaping.
3. Switch from sprinting to sneaking. This is the counterintuitive part. Once the dinosaur cannot see you, it tracks you by sound — and a sprinting player is a continuing broadcast. Slow, quiet movement after cover is what actually ends chases.
4. Chain terrain to stay unseen. Move cover to cover, keeping something solid between you and the last known position. Do not cross open ground while the alert is live.
5. Hold quiet and let the alert decay. Find a spot with a second exit, wait, and let the dinosaur return to patrol. The reset is the win condition — not distance, not fighting.
6. Then decide: continue or extract. If your bag is healthy and the area feels hunted, take the extraction route and bank the haul.

The mistakes that lose chases

• Sprinting after breaking line of sight. The most common one. The moment of quiet is what re-sets the encounter; the sprint re-opens it.
• Hiding in a dead end. A hiding spot with no second exit is a trap, not a plan. Every good hiding position has a way out — see best hiding spots.
• Standing in the open to "see what it is." Especially dangerous on the tundra, where long sightlines work both ways.
• Re-looting too soon. The alert has not fully decayed. Give the reset time to complete before making noise again.

Squad version of the playbook

In a squad, chases are a coordination problem with two roles:

• The chased player focuses purely on breaking contact using the sequence above — no covering fire, no heroics.
• Teammates ping the dinosaur's position, keep the extraction route clear, and can deliberately make noise elsewhere to pull pressure — but only if it was planned beforehand, not improvised mid-chase.

The tradeoff is real: squads gain shared audio coverage and ping support but carry more total noise. How to weigh that is covered in solo vs squad.

Why the reset works

Because detection is sound-first, the dinosaur does not "remember" you the way a PvP enemy would — it tracks a fading audio signature. Remove the sound and remove the sight, and the encounter decays back to patrol on its own. That is the whole secret: in Fossil Force, escape is a stealth action, not a speedrun.