Warhammer 40K Darktide Corruption System Explained

Warhammer 40K: Darktide features a health and armor system that represents a natural evolution of the mechanics from Vermintide 2. Players need to keep an eye on their health or “Wounds” to ensure they aren’t close to being downed, which can have negative effects, including corruption. Here is everything you need to know about how corruption works in Warhammer 40K: Darktide.

Corruption System in Warhammer 40K Darktide

Corruption is a negative effect on the player’s maximum health bar after they’re downed, take damage from certain enemies, or equip Grimoires. Corruption essentially fills up part of the health bar so players can’t heal themselves using medical crates.

Here are three ways your health bar can be corrupted:

Corruption Inflicted by Being Downed

If you take damage and lose all three “Wounds” or health bar segments, you’ll go down and need to be revived by a fellow teammate.

Once revived, one of your wounds will be completely corrupted and will be replaced by a purple segment instead of the regular white segment.

Regular Medical Crates will not heal this corrupted part of your health bar, and you need to use the Medicae Station.

Corruption Inflicted by Enemies

While most enemies in Darktide will directly damage your toughness and wounds (health) some enemies can inflict direct corruption damage as well, which can build up, and consume parts of your wounds.

This is different from losing an entire segment and you can see how the purple bar only covers part of the wound, rather than the entire segment:

Enemies that look mutated, or are inflicted with the pox are sure to deal corruption damage, so keep an eye out for the particularly gross ones. Here is a list of enemies and bosses that deal corruption damage in Warhammer 40K: Darktide:

• Poxwalker
• Pox Hound
• Poxbursters
• Trappers
• Daemonhost
• Plague Ogryn
• Beast of Nurgle
• Chaos Spawn

As mentioned before, any part of your health bar that has been corrupted can’t be healed using Medical Crates, and players will need to interact with the Medicae Station. Another thing to keep in mind is that corruption damage is

Corruption Infliected by Grimoires

Finally, if you pick up a Grimoire, you and the entire team will receive permanent corruption to your health bar effectively reducing it by 25% for one Grimoire and 50% for a second one.

However, it doesn’t end there, because equipping these Griomores will continue reducing your health with corruption by one point every 10 seconds or so. To get rid of the additional corruption outside the initial baseline Grimoire corruption, players need to interact with Medicae Station, which will bring the health back up to 75% for one Grimoire and 50% for two Grimoires.

That about covers everything there is to know about how corruption works in Warhammer 40K Darktide. It’s a fun little system that adds another layer of tension when interacting with certain type of enemies.

The game is in a great place right now, especially thanks to the major Unlocked and Loaded update, which intorudced a ton of balancing, new mechanics as well as a new mini-game for the Rolling Steel mission.