The Bat in 99 Nights in the Forest is built to punish anyone who sprints blindly into the new cave system. It is invincible, it screams across a wide area, and it floods the tunnels with cultists that drag you down while you’re trying to navigate in the dark. You are not meant to kill it; you are meant to outplay it.
Bat basics: what it is and what it can do
| Property | Details |
|---|---|
| Role | Secondary antagonist (alongside The Owl and The Ram) |
| Type | Monster Entity (Hostile, Mammal, Animal) |
| HP | N/A – unkillable, no health bar |
| Attack pattern | Sonic screech + Shadow Cultist / Cultist summons |
| Mobility | Flies, swoops from above; doesn’t pathfind after you |
| Vision | Blind; detects by proximity and sound |
| Jumpscare | None |
| Location | Underground, in Caves and the Bat Cave |
The Bat is designed more like an environmental hazard than a traditional boss. It occupies specific underground spaces, especially the numbered cave entrances and the Bat Cave, and never roams the surface. When it acts, it does two things:
- Emits a piercing screech that travels as a red shockwave through the cave.
- Summons tougher cultist variants (often called Shadow Cultists) that rush your position.
Getting hit by the screech briefly scrambles your senses: your ears “ring”, your screen blurs, and you lose a chunk of health. The cultists that follow up are what usually finish you off if you let them stack up.
Where the Bat spawns and how to reach it
The Bat lives exclusively underground. You only encounter it when you opt into that risk by entering the cave network.
| Area | How it relates to the Bat |
|---|---|
| Caves (numbered entrances) | Primary access points; Bat appears in early chambers and deeper sections. |
| Bat Cave | Named location where the Bat is guaranteed to appear. |
| Underground tunnels | Extended network with crystals, hieroglyphs, statues, and cultist spawns. |
The cave entrance that houses the Bat is marked on the in‑game map. To reliably reach it, you need some early‑game setup:
- Deposit three Logs into the Scrapper to craft a Map.
- Upgrade your Campfire until the cave network becomes accessible.
- Head to one of the numbered cave entrances and hold the interact key (E on PC) to go inside.
You can leave the cave at almost any time and re‑enter later, but there’s one constraint: if someone is still inside, new players can’t go back in until everyone exits. That stops teams from cycling supplies in and out while one person sits deep in the tunnels.
What the Bat actually does in combat
The Bat’s behavior is different from surface monsters like The Deer or The Ram. It is blind, it doesn’t chase you once you slip away, and it focuses on controlling space rather than camping your position.
| Phase | What you see | What it does to you | How to counter |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wind‑up | Bat raises its head, flaps wings, sometimes visible above you. | No damage yet. | Immediately move behind a wall or large object; prepare weapons. |
| Screech | Red shockwave spreads outward from the Bat. | Instant damage, blurred screen, ringing effect if you’re in the wave. | Stay fully behind cover or far out of range until the wave passes. |
| Summon | Cultists and Shadow Cultists appear in nearby tunnels. | Melee or ranged hits that quickly drain health if ignored. | Thin them out with ranged weapons; don’t let groups snowball. |
| Retreat | Bat flies away into darkness, often to another chamber. | No direct threat until the next cycle. | Use the lull to heal, reload, and push deeper or back out. |
One important detail: the Bat only attacks inside its underground territory. It doesn’t follow you to the surface and it doesn’t roam across the whole map. If you reach open air, you’re out of its domain.
Why you can’t kill the Bat
The Bat has no health bar and is flagged as unkillable, just like The Deer, The Owl, The Ram, and Kiwi. Bullets and melee attacks don’t reduce any hidden HP value; they only waste your ammo and stamina while more cultists spawn.
It also cannot be stunned by the Flashlight the way other monsters can. Light still matters in the caves, but not as a “delete key” for the Bat itself. The design pushes you toward survival tactics:
- Anticipate the scream and avoid it, rather than trying to tank it.
- Control the cultist population instead of dumping shots into the Bat’s body.
- Break line of sight, reposition, and sometimes retreat to the surface entirely.
Thinking of the Bat as a permanent stage hazard – not a boss with a health pool – is the mental shift that stops runs from collapsing.
How to survive the Bat’s scream
The scream is the Bat’s defining move. Surviving it consistently comes down to reading the tell and respecting line of sight.
- Watch for the red exclamation mark. This HUD warning means the Bat is nearby and could attack soon.
- Recognize the wind‑up. When it raises its head and flaps its wings, you have a brief window to move.
- Break line of sight with “real” cover. Get entirely behind a cave wall, rock column, doorway, or big boulder. Half‑cover doesn’t reliably block the wave.
- Use distance if cover isn’t possible. The sound wave weakens with range; sprinting far enough away can put you out of its effective radius.
- Stay in cover until the wave passes. Stepping out too early clips you on the edge, which is usually enough to handicap you for the cultists that follow.
Some runs lean on the Flashlight to buy breathing room. Shining it directly at the Bat during the wind‑up can momentarily startle it and interrupt the scream, but that interaction is unreliable compared to simply ducking behind stone. Use it as a backup, not the primary plan.
Dealing with cultists in the Bat’s tunnels
The Bat’s screech is only half the threat. Every time it acts, it spawns new cultist enemies – including tougher Shadow Cultists – in the surrounding tunnels. Left alone, they snowball into small armies that make any later Bat encounter almost impossible to manage.
| Enemy | Behavior | Recommended response |
|---|---|---|
| Cultist (standard) | Melee rush, moderate damage, fairly common. | Pick off at range; don’t let them close in groups. |
| Shadow Cultist | Summoned by the Bat, tankier, can hit hard in clusters. | Prioritize focus fire; keep a clear retreat path. |
Weapons matter here. Rifles, Tactical Shotguns, and especially the Laser Cannon are strong picks because they let you thin cultists out before they reach you. Melee alone will get overwhelmed quickly in the narrow tunnels.
The key principle is simple: whenever a batch of cultists appears, deal with them immediately. Ignoring them to sprint deeper usually backfires, because you run into another group while the first wave is still trailing you, and suddenly there’s no safe wall to hide behind for the next Bat scream.
How the cave itself works: crystals, hieroglyphs, and statues
The Bat’s home isn’t just a death trap; it’s also a progression space with its own mechanics. Learning what each element does makes your time underground more efficient – and safer.
| Element | Function | Why it matters vs. the Bat |
|---|---|---|
| Crystals | Glow when you shine a Flashlight on them long enough. | Light up the cave, mark paths, and help unlock doors or “levels”. |
| Hieroglyphs | Wall carvings showing the Ram, the Deer, and the Bat. | Foreshadow the Bat’s blindness and behavior; add story context. |
| Statue shrines | Offer Blessings when you press the central button. | Let you tilt global modifiers toward the Bat or the Deer. |
Crystals are central to navigation. When you first enter a numbered cave, signs hint that “when crystals see the light, something happens.” In practice, that means:
- Equip a Flashlight (ideally an Old Flashlight from chests).
- Hold the beam on a crystal until its glow “fills” to the top.
- Repeat for additional crystals in the room.
- Use the newly lit area or triggered mechanisms to push forward, often unlocking a large door.
Deeper inside, statue shrines present a choice. Each shrine shows two Blessing options, one linked to the Bat and one to the Deer. Examples include:
- Blessing of the Bat: Decreases hunger rate.
- Blessing of the Deer: Increases day length and decreases night length.
- Later choices: reduced rain chance, reduced lightning frequency, and similar global tweaks.
Choosing repeatedly in favor of one side stacks that Blessing’s effect. The tradeoffs are real: taking a hunger reduction can speed underground exploration, but skipping better weather might make surface nights more volatile. You commit by detonating the explosives near the shrine to lock in the choice and blow open a new tunnel.
Prepping before you ever step into the cave
Surviving the Bat starts long before you see it. The early days around your Campfire are calm by design; nothing in particular comes for you, which makes that window perfect for stockpiling.
- Upgrade your Campfire early. Aim for at least level 2–3 quickly so you can craft essentials like the Map and better cooking tools.
- Bring a Flashlight. Caves are extremely dark, and crystals, hieroglyphs, and Bat tells are easy to miss without one.
- Carry real healing and food. Cooked Meat, Bandages, Medkits, and any higher‑tier meals you can manage all matter underground, where hunger and chip damage add up.
- Get solid weapons and ammo. A Rifle or Tactical Shotgun is the floor; a Laser Cannon is ideal for cultist control. Bring more ammo than you think you need.
- Don’t neglect scrap. Radios and other high‑yield junk are worth grabbing to keep the camp economy running.
Class choice helps as well. Survivors that accelerate wood gathering (for Campfire upgrades) or manage hunger more efficiently make the whole Bat update smoother. Lone players in particular benefit from anything that reduces how often they have to leave the cave for food.
Moment‑to‑moment tactics when the Bat is active
Once you’re in the tunnels and the Bat is live, how you move matters as much as what you brought.
- Hug walls whenever possible. If you’re moving through chambers where the Bat might swoop, staying near rock faces gives you instant cover when the scream wind‑up begins.
- Clear as you go. Don’t sprint through rooms full of cultists; thin them out before heading into the next choke point.
- Use zig‑zag movement in open spans. When you’re forced into a big open cavern, weaving your path makes direct swoops and cultist charges less efficient.
- Retreat is always an option. Unlike surface monsters that hound you, the Bat is bound to the cave. If everything starts to collapse – low ammo, stacked cultists, repeated screams – turning around and getting back to daylight resets the board.
On the surface, the Campfire remains a de facto safe zone. If the Bat’s presence underground is starting to spiral your run into constant anxiety, taking a day cycle to restock, cook, and extend your base is often smarter than forcing another push.
The Bat update shifts 99 Nights in the Forest from a mostly surface‑driven horror game into a hybrid between survival sim and dungeon crawler. The entity itself is unbeatable, but it’s predictable: it lives in very specific places, telegraphs its attacks clearly, and only truly punishes players who insist on fighting it like a regular boss. Treat it as part of the cave environment – something to route around, hide from, and work under – and the underground stops feeling like an instant death sentence and starts feeling like what it is: a high‑risk, high‑reward layer under the forest.
