Never-ending wake-up calls - a Grunt's worst nightmare!

Posted October 10th 2025

For each of the three Shades in the cavern, there's a dedicated team of Grunts to keep it manned. There's a team of three on the left as you enter, a duo on the right, and another trio on the far platform. When a Shade becomes vacant, a replacement gunner - assuming there's still one available - is soon woken to man it, if he's not already awake. But what if the Shade is inaccessible, way down at the bottom of the cavern?

Experimenting with this (wondering what would happen), I found that a replacement is still woken up, but because he has no path to it, he just stands around for a while until, if not alerted to infiltrating cyborgs or suchlike, going back to sleep.

But because the turret remains vacant, the game actually keeps on waking him. So the poor fellow never gets a proper nap. You can have some fun with this dynamic and with some odd behaviour of such Grunts, as seen in my movie. It can be seen as a type of grunty fun with Shades, but I thought it worth describing in this separate article.

Light-sensitivity and delayed aggression

The Grunt will exhibit some light-sensitivity. Directing your flashlight at him when he's sleeping may not cause him to wake (for that to happen I suspect he needs to've actually been alerted to you previously), but when awake the flashlight will get his attention, at least for a few seconds.

However, even after he's spotted you, you'll probably find that he's initially rather zoned-out, not initiating any aggression, and not even keeping you in his sights if you move around behind him. You can expect him to snap out of it after a while though. All this is illustrated in my movie. The Grunts I've worked with have always been like this; I don't know if things can be different.

Multiple replacements

In the case where there are two gunners left for the vacant Shade in question, only one of them holds the mantle of being "the replacement" at any one time. That's the guy who's repeatedly woken up. Interestingly however, the mantle can switch to the other Grunt if you get him woken up. I haven't explored the actual workings of this, just observed it. With a little sniping to cause waking up, I've seen the mantle pass, and later pass back again.

Ways of working things

One way to initiate your fun is to stealthily melee the Shade over the edge, and just hope that it lands upright. There's actually a decent chance that it will; maybe around 40% based on a little testing I did out of curiosity (I randomly knocked it off 20 times).

Another way however, is to forget about stealth and simply blast or ram the Shade off. With a Banshee you could also fly down to make sure it's upright. The other Grunt or Grunts may be alerted, but will go back to sleep after losing track of you.

Wake periods and sleep periods

When woken and left undisturbed, the Grunt seems to stand around for about 32 seconds before falling asleep, as timed on my PAL Xbox. The timing for NTSC/PC may differ a little.

As for sleep periods (if left undisturbed), those look to be dictated by the usual wake-up workings, which I wrote about in Merged Grunts via gunner sniping. With the particular Grunt I was focusing on, such as seen in the first part of my movie, he usually slept for about 16 seconds, but sometimes it was only about 4 (12 less) or about 28 (12 more). I didn't bother checking into this thoroughly though.

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