Redfall: How to Equip a Stake

If you’re going to hunt vampires, you’ll need some pointy chunks of wood. Buffy Summers taught us that, and her wisdom carries forward into Redfall. Here’s how to equip a stake for your fights against the undead.

Eat Pointy Death: How to Use Stakes in Redfall

Using a stake doesn’t quite work like you might expect it would, and Redfall‘s tutorial only covers it in passing. It can be easy to overlook, particularly if you’re playing in co-op. In Redfall, any vampire you fight can’t be finished off with standard weapons. They take damage from bullets, but bullets alone can’t kill them.

If you reduce them to critical health with a bullet, a vampire is stunned for a few seconds with their heart exposed, vulnerable to a stake. If you don’t kill them, they’ll return to full health after roughly 10 seconds.

Many of the long guns you can find in Redfall come standard with a wooden stake attached to their barrel like a bayonet. This includes all types of assault rifles and shotguns, but not sniper rifles, handguns, revolvers, or UV emitters.

To stake a vampire, switch to a shotgun or assault rifle, then run up to it while it’s stunned and hit the appropriate contextual prompt (F on PC by default). You’ll automatically finish off the vampire with a stake to the heart, as part of a canned animation also gives you a few frames of invincibility.

Other Effective Ways to kill Vampires in Redfall

Vampires, Fire, and Electricity

There are a number of other ways around this. A vampire that loses its last bit of health from fire or electrical damage will die automatically with no stake required. The same can be said for one that drops into its stunned state while a fire-based damage-over-time effect is on it, or while it’s standing near something that’s emitting electrical pulses. This can be done with:

• Flare guns
• Environmental damage like gas pools or electrical panels
• Remi’s C4 Charge
• Remi’s Siren, with the Electrostatic Feedback skill enabled
• Dev’s Arc Javelin

Stake Launchers

Stake launchers don’t have a bayonet attachment, but naturally, a clean stake hit to a vampire’s torso will kill it. If you reduce a vampire to 0 health with a launched stake, it’ll just die, which is also easy and fun. Even better, a stake launcher doesn’t make a lot of noise when it fires, which makes it your best option for silent vampire takedowns.

UV Emitters

UV emitters don’t come with a stake and don’t do any direct damage, but can petrify a standard vampire with a few consecutive seconds’ exposure. A petrified vampire will recover eventually if you let it, but you can shatter it with a melee attack or a couple of bullets, which counts as a kill. The same applies to UV lamps in the environment, such as the ones outside safehouses, or Devinder’s Blacklight ultimate.

Rare Guns

Finally, there are a couple of edge cases in Redfall that are worth mentioning. Some of the rarer guns, like the unique handgun Ambition, can come with an ability that lets them kill vampires directly with no stake required. A vampire reduced to 0 health by these weapons will, once again, just die. Shots from these weapons can also “stake” non-enemy targets like blood tree victims.

How to Equip Stake Skins

You can also gradually unlock new cosmetic skins for your weapons’ stakes. These can be equipped from the weapon’s inspection screen. On PC, hold R while mousing over the weapon in your backpack or loadout, then click on the Customizations panels below the weapon’s model.

After some testing, most of the stake skins in Redfall appear to be random drops from containers like safes and supply crates. The odds of getting one seem fairly high; by the time I’d hit the 60% mark in the campaign, I had about a dozen. It seems like it’s more common to see cosmetic drops from Corpses of the Lost in vampire nests.

What can be a little confusing is that you can only customize the stake attachments (and skins) for generic shotguns and assault rifles (i.e. Firebird, Gulch, Maenad, etc). Unique long guns like Grim Fate or Disproportionate Response already come with a custom fit, which cannot be changed. In other words, the guns you really want to keep can’t also be personalized, which does seem a bit backward.

That’s all you need to know about how to equip a stake in Redfall. For more tips and tricks on surviving vampire country, check out our dedicated guides hub.

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