Safehouse Nightmare

Safehouse Nightmare: A shallow dive

So apparently completing everything at Mayhem difficulty INCLUDES safehouse nightmare. Whose idea was that? Anyway here’s a braindump of info about safehouse nightmare followed by some (probably trash tier) builds. If you don’t want to read I can confirm that as of like Feb 2023 the turret cheese strat still works. If you want a cakewalk, do that.

The Heist

The main gimmick of this heist is that you have to survive for 6 minutes while being assaulted by Cloakers and Headless Bulldozers. The heist takes place in a very dark basement, only letting you out once the safe has finished drilling. You will need to leave the basement to get to the loot drop point, then escape by going to bed. Note the escape is NOT NEXT TO THE VAN.

Objectives

Drill the big safe
Survive for 6 minutes
Secure 4 bags of money
Escape

Random Elements

Upon starting the drill a selection of random effects will start. The possible effects are as follows:

Dangerous

Jumping will taze you
Pumpkins periodically appear and then explode

Cosmetic

Everything is on fire
Everything is foggy
Your screen regularly goes black for about a second

Map

Safehouse Nightmare Basement Map

Other

The heist won’t properly “start” until the big drill is started, so you have plenty of time to setup whatever you want to.
Sometimes a baby mask will appear. If you pick this up it’ll probably down you, so maybe don’t do that.
Drilling the small safes won’t start the heist, but also these safes don’t have anything useful/worthwhile in them.
The walls are made of Shields. Anything that pierces a shield will go straight through the walls.
You cannot take any hostages or convert any cops on this map.
Being next to a spawn point will not stop enemies spawning there.
The upstairs area will not open until the main drill has finished.

Enemies

A quick overview of the two enemies you need to deal with.

Headless Bulldozer

Bullet sponge. Think regular dozer but with no head. Yes you’ll probably need to bodyshot it to death. Luckily it has less health than regular dozers, but it’s still pretty chonky.

12,000 HP (Mayhem, Deathwish, Death Sentence)
TINY headshot hitbox
Headshot multiplier is X2 (Mayhem), X1.5 (Deathwish, Death Sentence)
Has a shield on his back, just to make life harder

Cloaker

Standard cloaker. It’ll kick ya. Honestly if you can kill the dozers you can kill these guys. Just remember you’ll want something you can shoot quickly at close range to deal with them.

3,600 HP (Mayhem, Deathwish, Death Sentence)
Get kicked idiot
Headshot multiplier is X12 (Mayhem), X9 (Deathwish, Death Sentence)

Scientist

Occasionally a horde of scientists will appear and sprint for the metal detector to leave.

Insignificant HP
Civilians
Cannot be cable tied
Might trigger trip mines…

Useful Items

A small selection of items (mostly weapons) that are good on this one map specifically.

PNV - BriteNite /Batshit Crazy /Cloaker-san

These masks (found in mask category Normal/DLC/Normal) have inbuilt night vision, turned on/off by holding V for a few seconds. Solves the “it’s very dark down here” problem this heist has.

Ammo Bags

This heist WILL drain your ammo. I don’t care what gun you bring, you will not have enough ammo to take out 6 minutes of dozers and cloakers. An ammo bag is required.

Akimbo Parabellum Pistols

These pistols are very good at taking down Dozers. Hight concealment lets you go for crits. Comboed with Pistol skills makes them pretty damn effective.

5/7 AP Pistol

Like the parabellums, this has high concealment for crits and benefits from pistol skills. Whilst it is MUCH slower at killing dozers than the parabellums, THIS PISTOL CAN SHOOT THROUGH THE WALLS. Taking out anything from the other side of a wall will be slower but safer than facing them down head on.

HRL-7 Rocket Launcher

This will one shot the dozers with a direct hit, and will two shot them with indirect hits (catching them in the explosion).

Commando 101 Rocket Launcher

This will two shot dozers on direct and indirect hits.

Trip Mines

These will ALSO one shot dozers when buffed with Technician skill Combat Engineering Aced. Also useful in sensor mode for letting you know where all the enemies are, making it easier to take them out through walls.

Un-useful Items

Some items seem like they may work, but they in fact do NOT. Here are some of those.

Thanatos

Useful in theory, in practice it’s almost impossible to get their damage high enough to one shot kill dozers on a body shot. Seriously, you’d need to stack Berzerker, Crits, High Value Target, AND Overkill and even THAT might not work.

Melee

You’d be forced to use Sociopath or Infiltrator perk decks, and then stand at point blank range for two seconds to take out a dozer. This does not an alive heister make.

Flamethrowers

I tried it. It did not appear to slow them down at ALL. I didn’t see ANY stopping/flailing to put the fire out. Don’t bother.

Strats

So here’s where I just list some things that might work/help. They won’t be fully fledged point by point “heres how you win” descriptors. I haven’t won yet so I can’t really do that. Honestly I don’t know why you’d trust ANYTHING I say I haven’t beaten this mission on anything higher than overkill.

Oh also they will be assuming you have a 4 man squad. If you just have a you, try this build. It did NOT work in a team of 4 because it relies HEAVILY on 3 AI crew with Thanatos sniper rifles.

C4 Lockdown

The idea here is, what if we just put C4 on every spawn point, and replace every one that goes off? I haven’t found ALL the spawn points, but have found most and there seem to be roughly 14 of them, which lines up well with the 14 trip mines you get if you ace Combat Engineering’s More Firepower. With a team of 4 all carrying max trip mines you may be able to spawn kill everything for six minutes then book it.

C4 Web

This idea is just to put C4 all over the place in sensor mode. Highlighting eveyrthing on the map might be VERY useful for you. Or it might be a waste of points.

Walls? What walls?

If you have a sniper rifle, shotgun, or the 5/7 AP Pistol you can shoot through the walls. The idea here is simple, you hide behind the walls, and shoot through them to kill everything without putting yourself in danger.

Teamkiller Extraordinaire

Explosions are just the best way to kill dozers. And also everybody else. Just bring the biggest explosions you have, probably grab Swan Song Aced, and just go ham. Probably good at clearing crowds at range. Might also just kill the whole team. I’d probably lean towards the Commando rocket launcher, Ammo bags with bulletstorm, Aced Swan Song, and at least ONE Leech with Inspire to clutch revive the team when you inevitably kill EVERYONE.

Dice King

Hey so you know how this heist has certain random effects? You could just restart the heist until it doesn’t have exploding pumpkins/your screen going black every few seconds. Also you can restart until you roll an auto-restarting drill to make life MUCH easier.

Git Gud

This one is basically, try and do what this guy did. Basically, use a Berzerker/Anarchist meta build with ammo bags. I’ve stolen some ideas from it for this “guide”, but yeah this needs skill to work so I can’t pull it off.

Diversity

This is basically just “what we had different party members with different skills”. Yes, this is probably the way to go. Ideally you’ll have a drill guy who has really good drills, someone with ammo bags, someone with doctors bags, someone with inspire, someone who can deal with single targets, someone to take out crowds. Basically see how many of the above strats you can cram into one team. Apes together strong.

Cheese

Oh yeah also there was at one point a sentry cheese where you put down a loud sentry somewhere impossible to get to, and all the enemies would just gather around it. I wonder if that still works? Anyway here is the video.

Builds

Here are a few PARTIAL builds. These are just pieces that you can put together to form your own build, because screw trying to create 4 full builds I’ve already put WAY too much time into this.

Pistol Damage

This is a build focused purely on getting damage out of pistols. Specifically the Akimbo Parabellums. If you need to drop points I’d personally start by dropping the berzerker skills, then move onto Desperado, then remove Ace from Gun Nut.

Techy

This build is for the equipment owner. Drill skills, ammo, and C4 are the focus. Probably bring a Commando 101 rocket launcher and….something else as weapons. For a perk deck go for something objective focused, like Sicario/Kingpin/Leech. Should let you clutch fix the drill. If you want to drop stuff, start by dropping C4/Jack of all trades. Or, if you are getting good use from them, ditch Swan Song.

The “Support”

This build plus Leech. Take a rocket launcher and just blow things up. Sure you’ll down your entire team, but you can inspire them back up again, and can even get YOURSELF back up if you need to! Swap uppers for Doctors Bags if you want to support your team more than yourself. OOh, or even BETTER have two people on the team, one with First Aid Kits and one with Doctors Bags. Then when you decide to be useful, ditch the explosives and drop the revenant skills. Then pick up some pistols instead.

Sources

Here is where I link to verious data sources I used while researching this heist. Honestly, you’d probably be better off looking at them yourself than reading my ramblings. There might even be one or two well thought through builds in there!