Combat hub
DREADMOOR Combat Guide
Harpoon variants as weapons, reading threats, and the cross-pillar play for survival.
Combat in DREADMOOR is real-time and crosses both sea and land, so danger can emerge at any moment on a routine expedition. The harpoon is the primary weapon, the same tool you cast for tough fish — pick the variant and the engagement deliberately before every fight.
- Primary weapon
- Harpoon (same tool as fishing tackle)
- Secondary
- Grapple gun for floating debris and bugs
- Approach
- Read the water, match the elemental variant
Harpoon as weapon
The harpoon doubles as fishing tackle and as the main way to fight mutated threats. Every harpoon variant swaps onto the same hotbar slot:
- Base Harpoon — default loadout.
- Healing Harpoon — restores health on every landed hit, the sustain pick.
- Toxic Harpoon — adds poison damage.
- Fire Harpoon — ignites targets.
- Frost Harpoon — applies cold damage.
- Plague Harpoon — spreads disease.
Throw or thrust the harpoon depending on range; the same stance rules from fishing apply to combat, so keep the line of fire on the creature's run direction rather than its head. On the trawler, the grapple gun is the second tool — useful against floating debris and bugs for salvage after the fight.
Reading threats
Read the water before engaging so you do not pick the wrong variant for the threat on the surface:
- Ripples and tentacle surfacings near the boat mean a creature is closing in.
- Gulls pulling away from a spot usually mean a predator has just dived.
- Night sightings are far more dangerous than daytime sightings — assume escalated threat after dusk.
- Barricade locations matter during longer stays on land because night monsters are explicitly warned about and scripted monster attacks happen on the surface.
Pick the elemental harpoon that matches the creature's weakness (Fire and Toxic against flesh, Frost against fast movers, Plague against large leviathan-class targets) and keep the boat clear of tentacles when working a fishing spot. The full threat-by-threat counter list lives on the DREADMOOR mutated creatures page.