Shift At Midnight Monsters: Every Threat & How to Kill It

Updated 2026-09-03 · Steam Shift At Midnight

The Shift At Midnight monsters are the threats that are not doppelgangers at your counter: the Entity plus the creatures that hunt beside it. The Entity is a spider-like creature the community wiki calls one of the game's main antagonists, and the Demented, the Marionette and Shrieking Dolls join it during a Hunt. Rakes are confined to Endless Mode and post-story play, Rats and Roaches are ambient pests on set shifts, and the Dentist is a stalker that follows you through story mode.

Everything below is drawn from the community Fandom wiki and from the developer's Steam patch notes. The Fandom is community-written and several of its monster pages are still marked as stubs, so a number of spawn shifts are simply not documented yet. Where that is the case this page says so rather than guessing.

Every monster at a glance

Monster	What it is	When it appears	How to deal with it
Entity	A spider-like being of abnormal size, the game's main antagonist	End of any shift where a Hunt triggers	Deal enough damage and it retreats; stay quiet, it hunts by sound
Demented	Tall, slender, with tiny wailing faces across its body	Alongside the Entity; a N.E.T. email introduces it on shift 4	Bear traps only. Looking at it freezes it in place
Marionette	A Hunt creature, rated a major threat by the community wiki	With Entity attacks from shift 9	Kill it with weapons; its health was reduced in the 23 July 2026 patch
Shrieking Doll	A small enemy that assists the Entity	During Hunts; first shift not documented	Low health, community wiki says bludgeon damage works well
Rakes	Forest creatures that give off a red glow	Endless Mode and post-story only	Shoot on sight, before one crosses into the playable ground
The Dentist	A serial killer who died 45 years before the game	Stalks you around the Midnight Mart across story mode	Do not confront it; the in-game N.E.T. warning says run
Car Doppelganger	A creature that baits you toward a car	The street beside the Midnight Mart, from shift 1	Escape it. It costs 12 health and locks your gun
Rats	Minor enemies in the store	Introduced on shift 3	Not documented yet
Roaches	Small animals wandering the gas station	Begin on shift 8	Not documented yet
Dumpster Monster	An antlered creature; the wiki page is still a stub	Not documented yet	Not documented yet
Robber	An armed human, not a creature	Appears on shift 3	Hand over 20 dollars, or fight
Troublemakers	Human customers who wreck your store rating	Shift 10 or 11, sources disagree	Toilet paper, thrown bottles, or a shot to the foot

The Hunt is where most monsters come from

Almost every creature in the game arrives through one event. According to the community wiki, a Hunt fires at the end of a shift when you let at least one doppelganger walk out, and it fires automatically during a Blood Moon regardless of how clean your checks were. How many gangers you waved through sets the difficulty.

The sequence is fixed. Seconds after the final customer is checked out the power cuts, the lights and the computer die, and a dim red glow fills the mart. You then get a 60 second countdown to board doors, lay traps and arm up. When it expires the Entity comes in, usually through the front, sometimes through the back or the doors by the toilet. Boards do not stop it, but breaking through slows it and chips its health.

The Entity is blind. It tracks in-game noise and your proximity voice chat, so a lobby that panics out loud is a lobby that gets found. You win by dealing enough damage that it flees, and by clearing any support creatures that came with it. Blood Moon Hunts are harder still: the arsenal stays locked until the Entity drops below half health, leaving you with the starter gun and side gun until then. See entity for its full behaviour and shifts for when the Blood Moon is introduced.

Demented: the monster you have to trap

The Demented is the most mechanically distinct creature in the game. It is tall and slender with elongated arms and short dark hair, pitch-black eyes and a fixed grin, and its body is dotted with miniature copies of that face, each one screaming instead of smiling. N.E.T. first tells you about it by email on shift 4.

It moves only when unobserved. Hold it in your line of sight and it is frozen; break eye contact and it closes distance fast. Crucially, weapons do nothing to it. Per the community wiki the only kill is a bear trap, and since the store cannot be shopped while the Entity is present, you must buy traps before the shift ends or spend the night simply managing it. The method the community wiki recommends is a bait: while one pair of eyes holds the creature still, drop a trap directly ahead of it, retreat the other way, and only then break your gaze, so its first stride forward lands in the jaws. In co-op this splits cleanly: one player keeps it pinned by staring while the rest set up. Trap and weapon stock is covered on shop and items.

Marionette, Shrieking Doll and the rest of the Hunt roster

The Marionette starts turning up during Entity attacks from shift 9, when the Anomaly Lens is also introduced. Bun Muen's 23 July 2026 patch notes list "Lowered Marionette HP" as a balance change, so anything you read about it being a damage sponge predates that update. The community wiki still rates it a serious threat.

Shrieking Dolls are the low-end filler enemy. The Fandom describes them as helpers that appear with the Entity, with a small health pool and, according to the community wiki, a particular weakness to bludgeoning. The shift they start spawning on is marked unknown on both the Shrieking Doll and the Silenced achievement pages.

Rakes are an Endless Mode monster

Rakes are the one creature confirmed by the developer rather than the wiki. The 29 July 2026 patch added them to Endless Mode and post-story play: the developer describes them creeping out of the forest, and says players need to gun them down before they cross into the playable area or things go badly. The community wiki adds that they live in the treeline nearest the street, emit a red light, and that shooting one makes it back off, reposition and try again. Leave one alone too long and it roars, drops onto all fours and kills every human in the area. Endless Mode unlocks after you finish story mode, so you will not meet a Rake during your first 13 nights. More on that mode at endless mode.

The Dentist

The Dentist is lore and stalker rather than a Hunt enemy. The community wiki records him as a serial killer who died 45 years before the game, roughly eight feet tall, emaciated, with cracked skin, bandaged hands and a broken hanging jaw. His eyes read black while he is stalking and bloodshot red when active. His doppelganger is what you actually encounter, and it is spotted repeatedly around the Midnight Mart during story mode: on the bus, on the roof, in the storage room, even posing as a prop in the break room.

The in-game N.E.T. broadcast is blunt about the response. It tells you not to hide, not to speak and "do not look back", and to keep running until your legs give out. It also claims that everyone who escaped a sighting was found dead inside a week. Named victims on the wiki include Ryan Holt on shift 4, Vanessa McCree on shift 9, and Clyde Dawson depending on your choices. Since the Dentist has a doppelganger entry of its own, the identification rules on how to spot doppelgangers still apply.

Pests, humans and things that are not monsters

Rats arrive on shift 3 and Roaches on shift 8. Both are listed as minor, and neither page documents damage or a removal method. An in-character Steam announcement from February 2026 nods at the rats as a routine sanitation matter, which is flavour rather than a mechanic.

Three more things get called monsters in searches but are not creatures. The Robber is a human who appears on shift 3 and demands you fill a bag; paying costs 20 dollars. Troublemakers are human customers who urinate, vomit, graffiti, blast an airhorn or breakdance to tank your store rating, and the manager's advised counter is toilet paper, with thrown vending-machine bottles and a non-lethal shot to the foot as alternatives (killing one costs you revenue). Note a source conflict here: the Troublemaker page says they begin on shift 10, the Shifts table places them on shift 11.

Finally, N.E.T. (Non-human Eradication Taskforce) and S.H.A.P.E. (Support for Humanity Against Persona Eradication) are government anti-doppelganger organisations, not enemies. N.E.T. is the one emailing you monster warnings and Blood Moon alerts, and it runs the ID database you check customers against. See doppelgangers for that side of the game.

Monster achievements

Three of the game's ten Steam achievements ask you to kill a specific monster, per the community wiki's achievement list, and two more are earned by surviving a Hunt rather than by killing anything. The remaining five cover a first customer kill, filling out the weapon arsenal, and the story choices that decide Clyde and your pet's fates.

Achievement	Requirement	Monster kill?
Silenced	Kill a Shrieking Doll	Yes
Freed	Kill a Demented	Yes
Last Performance	Kill a Marionette	Yes
Still Breathing	Survive your first Hunt	No, survival only
Relentless	Finish a Hunt inside 30 seconds	No, survival only

Freed is the awkward one, since the Demented can only die to a trap. The full list is on achievements.

Sources and last check

Checked 3 September 2026. Monster behaviour, spawn shifts, the Hunt sequence, the Blood Moon arsenal rule, the Demented trap method, the achievement requirements and the Dentist lore all come from the community Shift At Midnight Fandom wiki (the Hunt, Demented, Rakes, The Dentist and Shifts pages) and are community-written, not official; several of those pages are marked as stubs and leave spawn shifts blank. Two facts are from the developer's own Steam patch notes and take priority: Rakes were added to Endless Mode on 29 July 2026, and Marionette health was lowered on 23 July 2026. The Troublemaker start shift is contradictory across two community pages and is flagged above. Steam Community guides contributed nothing to this page.