Dead of Night Co-op Guide: Caboomers, Chokers and Stanks Explained

Dead of Night is the closest StarCraft II Co-op ever gets to a horror movie. You are dropped into a Terran colony that infestation has already eaten, and the mission runs on a day and night cycle. By day the streets are quiet and you go hunting. By night the colony comes for you.

The loop is what makes it special. During the day the infested stay holed up inside the colony's infested structures, and your job is to tear those buildings down. Every structure you destroy is one less source feeding the darkness. When night falls, whatever you failed to clear turns into waves that march straight at your base — and each night is bigger and longer than the last.

That means Dead of Night punishes both extremes. Turtle all day and the final nights arrive with a horde you cannot physically kill. Overextend at dusk and you get caught in the open with no defensive line and no army at home. Good runs look like a rhythm: push hard and early in daylight, then be fully repositioned before the sun goes down.

The infested you need to worry about

• Infested colonists — the basic tide. Individually harmless, lethal in numbers. This is what splash damage exists for; anything that hits multiple targets at once earns its cost here.
• Hunterlings — fast, leaping melee infested that sprint ahead of the wave. They arrive before your main line is ready and love to jump past the front to reach whatever is squishy behind it. Keep workers and support units out of leap range, and make sure something with area damage is already in position rather than walking in late.
• Caboomers — bloated suicide bombers that detonate for heavy area damage. Never let them reach a clumped defensive line. Kill them at range, and keep your expensive units spread so one boom does not delete three of them.
• Chokers — long-range tentacle grabbers that latch onto a unit, hold it in place and chew through it. They are the reason a wave that looks survivable suddenly isn't: your frontline gets pinned while the swarm walks past. Focus them down fast, or pull the grabbed unit's support back rather than feeding more into the tentacle.
• Stanks — infested siege tanks, and the single biggest threat to a static defense. They shell your bunkers, cannons and spines from outside their range, so a pure turret wall quietly gets dismantled. You need mobile units, burst damage or long-range answers to remove them before they set up.
• Aberrations — armored heavies with huge health pools that soak everything your line puts out while the small stuff swarms behind them. Anti-armor damage and focus fire beat trying to out-DPS them with light units.
• Spotters — flying infested that exist to see. They provide vision and detection for the horde, which quietly ruins cloak-based plans: your stealth units stop being invisible the moment one drifts overhead. If you are playing a shadow commander, killing Spotters is not optional cleanup, it is a priority target — and it is the main reason you want at least some anti-air even on a ground-heavy map.

Read that list again and the mission's design becomes obvious: it deliberately mixes a swarm problem, a burst problem and a range problem in the same wave. Hunterlings punish slow setup, Caboomers punish clumping, Chokers punish tunnel vision, Stanks punish immobility, Aberrations punish light-only compositions, and Spotters punish anyone relying on cloak alone. A one-note army fails a late night even if it crushed the early ones.

How to actually clear it. Split roles with your ally instead of doing the same thing twice: one commander leans into daytime demolition while the other keeps a real defensive core at home. Hold chokes rather than spreading thin across every approach. Save global calldowns and big abilities for the final nights, when the wave sizes stop being reasonable — using them to clear a comfortable early night is how Brutal runs die at the end.

Commander pairings shift the plan a lot. Swarm-heavy commanders and Infested Terran floods trade bodies happily; burst specialists snipe Stanks and Aberrations before they matter; crowd-control and stealth commanders make daytime pushes safe and cheap. On the channel you can watch the same map solved very differently — Tychus and Kerrigan, Vorazun and Stukov, Zeratul and Nova — all on Brutal.

If you want the lore behind the horror, read the hybrids and Kerrigan pieces next. Then browse the StarCraft 2 archive on this site and watch how each pair handles the moment the light goes out.