Aisles of the Locust Locust Guide: Detection, Chases, and How to Survive

The Locust is the tall, insectoid thing patrolling Aisles of the Locust's dark supermarket while your crew fills grocery orders across several shopping days. The most dependable survival pattern in gameplay footage is simple: stay quiet. Hold Ctrl to sneak and keep the on-screen loudness meter low, because running, ramming shopping carts, gunfire, and loud music pull the Locust toward you. If it fixes on you anyway, expect it to be faster than you in a straight line — your escape kit is shelving and corners, a red pepper speed boost, a thrown noise maker, and the entrance safe zone.

One written guide complicates that picture: it claims the Locust hunts by sight and flashlight exposure rather than sound. Gameplay recordings consistently show the opposite — noise and movement detection built around a loudness meter. No source settles which sense actually dominates, so this guide presents both accounts, marks the tactics that hold up under either, and flags what is genuinely unverified.

What the Locust is

The Locust is a distorted, insectoid humanoid that walks the retail floor of a dark, vandalized supermarket. You play a shopper sent in to gather items from a grocery list over multiple days, and this thing is the store's primary threat — though not the only hazard you can meet; the Aisles of the Locust enemies and hazards page covers the rest. Visibility is poor, and the written guide describing the game says the Locust follows a regular patrol loop through the aisles rather than spawning on top of you.

How the Locust detects you

Two accounts exist, and they disagree.

The sound-and-movement account. Nearly every gameplay recording shows detection driven by noise. Your screen has a loudness meter (one player spots it at the bottom left) that rises as you move and act. Holding Ctrl to sneak keeps it low — one solo player sneaks the whole run and survives. Running, ramming a shopping cart into shelves, gunfire, and loud music all pull the Locust in. Player warnings sum it up: "It listens to the aisles" and "It can hear everything, even footsteps."

The sight-and-flashlight account. One written guide argues the Locust tracks players by sight and flashlight exposure, that an enabled flashlight is how it spots you in the first place, and that the long open central corridor hands it a clean line of sight. Its advice: flashlight off, and break line of sight behind shelving.

Until something authoritative settles the dispute, the safe play is to respect both: keep your noise low and treat your light as a risk. Either way, the game gives you warning cues before a chase starts:

• A filling loudness meter — you are being heard.
• A heartbeat sound — one player reads it as the Locust still knowing where he is: "if my heartbeat's going, it still knows where I am."
• Lights going out — players report blackouts as it arrives; in one story, "the lights went out and something tall came down aisle 9."
• Clicking audio nearby — the written guide treats clicking as a sign it is close; the Aisles of the Locust clicking sounds page goes deeper on that cue.

What happens when it spots you

Detection flips the Locust from patrol to a fast, destructive chase. Players describe it throwing a tantrum and smashing shelves the moment it sees you, tearing through the store to reach you, and moving dramatically faster than a walking player — "that boy fast... hawking me down." Contact kills your character, and the game runs on a limited pool of lives across the multi-day shopping orders, so a caught chase costs the crew a life. Players regularly finish runs down to their last life after one bad pursuit.

Avoidance tactics that hold up

These are the actions repeatedly demonstrated in gameplay, with the conditions they need:

• Sneak and keep the meter low. Hold Ctrl around the Locust and it can pass a quiet, crouched player without reacting. Crouching helps your noise; it is not proven invisibility (see below).
• Cut the noise sources. Don't ram carts into shelves, and skip guns and loud music — in one session, blaring music brought it straight over.
• Put shelving between you and it. The written guide recommends weaving horizontally through the broken shelf gaps instead of sprinting the long open center aisle, so every shelf breaks its line of sight.
• Redirect it with noise. Throw a noise maker or let noise happen in another aisle. One squad pinned under a glitch kept it away exactly this way: "Now he comes over here and I run all over here... he'll think I'm over there when I'm not."
• Eat a red pepper mid-chase. It grants a temporary speed boost of roughly 40%, and players repeatedly call peppers the reliable way out: "He can't catch me when I eat the peppers... Pepper's lowkey the method." The boost wears off, so use it when the Locust is actually on you.
• Cut corners; never run straight. Squads yell "cut the corners" through chases because the Locust turns fast, and getting caught running a straight line is treated as a death sentence.
• Save your sprint stamina. Players deliberately hold full sprint in reserve so it is available the moment a chase starts.
• Know the safe zone. The entrance/cash-out area is a haven: multiple recordings show the Locust unable to reach players standing inside it — "I'm in the safe zone. Don't touch me." When you hear its footsteps closing in and you're near the front, get inside the zone and stay there.

For the broader movement and cover system behind these habits, see the Aisles of the Locust stealth guide.

What's still unverified

Some widely repeated claims do not survive contact with the footage, so treat them as open questions rather than rules:

• Sight versus sound. The guide's sight/flashlight account and the recordings' noise/movement account are unreconciled. Nothing confirms which sense dominates or whether both apply.
• "Crouch and it won't see you." Crouching reliably lowers noise, but players are caught crouched anyway — "I can see you EVEN IF YOU'RE CROUCHED" and "I was crouched the whole time and he started chasing after me." Don't rely on crouching to beat sight.
• Standing still in darkness. The guide claims the Locust struggles to find stationary targets sitting in total darkness (its advice for clicking cues: kill the flashlight and freeze). But one solo player stood still in the dark and was killed anyway, concluding instead that movement is what reveals you — and another player's theory is that a scream cue means it's safe to stop. No verified chase-loss or reacquire rules exist; the heartbeat and scream cues have no confirmed meaning beyond what individual players observed.
• Daytime inactivity. One player felt the monster doesn't come out during the day. Unconfirmed — and one player's impression, not a schedule you can plan around.
• Microphone input. One player suspected the game reacts to their real microphone. Unverified.

Because threat behavior can change between updates, re-test these patterns after a patch before trusting them. When you're ready to see the Locust in the context of a full run, the Aisles of the Locust walkthrough covers the shopping days end to end, and the Aisles of the Locust flashlight page details the item whose light the sight account singles out.