Active Matter Statues: How to Kill Them

The Statues are the anomaly players most often describe as ignorable and then get killed by, and both halves of that reputation are real. On most maps they sit inert until something disturbs them, which is why the usual advice is to walk past them. The exception is the military base, where they are out in the open and moving. This page covers what the game itself calls them, the kill routes players actually use, and the one mechanic change the studio has confirmed.

What the Statues are

The game labels them an anomaly, not a monster species. That is not our wording — the official 0.4.0.173 patch notes on 5 October 2026 group them explicitly: "Fixed an issue where Mimics and Statues dealt melee damage to Operatives inside armored vehicles. Base damage statistics for both anomalies remain unchanged." So in the studio's own taxonomy the Statues sit alongside Mimics in the anomaly category, separate from the creature types like Dendroids and Distorted.

That distinction matters for how you read other players' advice, because anomaly behaviour is governed by the zone rather than by a spawn table.

Official screenshot, © Matter Team / Gaijin Network Ltd.

How to kill them

There is no official weak-point documentation for the Statues, so everything here is player-reported from the official Steam forums, where the thread "I hate the statues" is the main gathering point.

Route	What players report	Caveats
Melee	One reply says melee kills them in roughly 130 hits while they stand motionless in front of you	The same player calls it easy in PvE and very risky in PvP, since you are stationary for the whole exchange
Grenades	Several players say they carry 3–4 grenades specifically for Statues	Reported as the default answer when you cannot afford to stand still
Avoiding them	The most-upvoted reply says they can largely be ignored until you break their totem stones	Does not apply at the military base, where they wander in the open

The melee number is worth treating as an order of magnitude rather than a stat sheet — it comes from one player's count, not from the game. The useful part is the shape of the advice: Statues are a resource problem (how many grenades, how long can you stand still) rather than an aiming problem, which is the opposite of how the Dendroid fight works.

The totem stones are the trigger

The single most useful player observation is about when Statues become dangerous. The top reply on the official forum thread states that on most maps "they kinda just do nothing until you smash over their totem stones, so they can be largely ignored", and then names the exception: at the military base "they are just out in the wild wandering".

If that holds, the practical rule is to leave totem stones alone unless you are deliberately clearing the area, and to treat the military base as the map where the ignore-them strategy stops working. We have not found an official page confirming the totem-stone trigger, so it stays labelled as community-reported.

The one confirmed change

The studio has touched Statue behaviour once, and it was in the player's favour. Update 0.4.0.173, published on 5 October 2026, fixed Statues and Mimics dealing melee damage to Operatives who were inside armored vehicles — meaning a vehicle is now a genuine refuge from them, which it previously was not. The same note confirms the base damage numbers did not change, so this was a bug fix rather than a rebalance.

That is consistent with how the studio has handled anomaly balance generally: the 30 September 2026 update adjusted Distorted pursuit and noise sensitivity, and the 0.4.0.182 build on 9 October increased armor and helmet resistance against melee and monster attacks by a flat 70%. If you are coming back after a break, those two changes affect Statue fights more than any individual weapon buff.

Official screenshot, © Matter Team / Gaijin Network Ltd.

Where to go next

If you are working through the zone's threats, the Dendroid page covers the creature that players most often confuse with Statues, and the guide covers loadouts and the death rule that makes standing still so expensive. For the wider picture of what the anomalies are, the official FAQ describes the game's SCP-inspired framing directly, and our PvE page explains which zone types let you fight anomalies without other players joining in.