Dead by Daylight how to repair a generator and how to damage them as a Killer

✓ At a glance

• As a Survivor, you can repair a generator by approaching it and pressing the man interact button. Then, you have to succeed at the quicktime event minigame to pass the test. Failing will make noise and alert the Killer.
• On the other hand, the Killer can damage any partially repaired generator, reducing or removing progress. However, fully repaired generators can’t be damaged.

If you’re playing as a Survivor in Dead by Daylight, you’ll need to escape before the Killer can sacrifice you and your friends to The Entity, but doing so is easier said than done. The key is repairing generators scattered around the map. On the other side, Killers can damage working generators to foil the Survivors. We’ll explain everything about repairing or damaging generators in Dead by Daylight to give you a fighting chance in Behaviour Interactive’s asymmetrical horror survival game.

How to repair a generator in Dead by Daylight

To repair a generator as a Survivor in Dead by Daylight, you need to hold the interact button while near it, and successfully pass the quick-time input events. Here’s a slightly more in-depth breakdown of the steps you’ll need to follow.

1. Find a generator on the map and approach it.
2. Stand or crouch next to it until the “interact” prompt appears. This will be the left mouse click for PC players and the right bumper for controller players.
3. Hold down the interact button to begin repairs. You’ll see a bar indicating repair progress along the bottom of the screen slowly filling up.
4. Watch out for quick-time events. A perfect success on these will speed up progress, and a failure will remove some progress and make noise, alerting the Killer to your location.

There are various perks and powers in the game to help you speed up the repair process. Using Toolboxes will speed it up until their durability is expended. A higher-rarity toolbox comes with more durability and a bigger speed boost. You can also use add-ons to improve the Toolbox’s utility, increasing the window on quicktime events, improving durability, and more. Plenty of perks can also help with this, and there’s an argument to be made for some of them to earn a place on the list of best Survivor perks in the game.

✓ Pro tip

There are actually more generators than you need in a game. Every match, eight total generators will spawn around the map. You only need to repair five of those eight to open the gates and escape.

How to pass generator quicktime events

Passing the quicktime events is the most difficult part of repairing a generator. It’ll appear as a small indicator making its way around the circumference of a circle, part of which is taken up by an empty outlined portion of the ring. Watch your screen carefully, and when one appears, use your secondary interaction key. For mouse and keyboard users it’s the Spacebar, while for console players, it’ll be the left bumper.

Your aim is to hit the secondary interaction key as the indicator rotates around the ring until it’s inside the small ring space. Hitting the key here will pass the event. If you’re able to time it right and hit the smaller white part of the ring, it’ll grant extra repair progress. Failing it, however, will cause the generator to stutter. This will reduce your progress and also generate noise, which the Killer can pick up on.

How to damage generators in Dead by Daylight

If you’re playing as the Killer, repaired generators are the last thing you want. Luckily, you’ve got an option to reverse the Survivors’ progress. If you approach a generator, you’ll be able to use the same interact functions to cause damage to it, reducing its repair progress. Note that the generator needs to still be in a partial state of repair, and not fully operational for this to work. Similarly, it’s not possible to fully destroy a generator, though there are some Killer perks that let you disable a certain amount of them for a while.