Illumination

 is the crucial element of combat. In the darkness of the Unterzee, everyone will hear you scream, but not everyone will see you.

Overview
Illumination is key to fighting. All offensive and miscellaneous actions have a certain minimal required Illumination to obtain. You can increase it in a variety of ways, with the most basic ones being Seek, Flares, and Potent Flares. Some actions will increase both the enemy's and your own Illumination (which can be bad), while others will only illuminate the enemy more, at the cost of having a longer cooldown.

Evasive actions can help reduce your own illumination and even break engagement and flee to safer waters.

Deprecated
Note that this article refers to mechanics of previously employed turn-based combat model which was replaced by a simplified real-time model in on one of the updates.

The information on this page is now irrelevant unless you are playing an older version of the game.