Baby Striker

Baby sleepers, child sleepers, or gone by their colloquial name, "Babies", are the smaller form of Strikers. They are fast and agile, but have the smallest health pool and damage of any other sleeper. They were first introduced alongside Mother and their spawns are unique to the Mother.

Appearance
Babies are currently the smallest enemy type of the game. Unlike normal Strikers, babies have enlarged heads, a lighter skin-tone, and are covered with blood akin to that of a newborn child. They crawl around on all fours, on their backs.

Spawning
The Mother will emit a high pitch screech before "birthing" in which babies will spawn, usually in waves of 10-15 sleepers. After the spawn, there will be a brief cool down before the Mother will be able to spawn another horde.

In R5A2 some are found sleeping in the overload bulkhead but wake up right as the bulkhead door is done opening. The mother in there will spawn more baby sleepers adding to the horde. Proceed with caution when planning on entering the bulkhead.

In prior Rundowns, babies can only be spawned by a Mother. But in Rundown 5 D1 babies spawns without mother's presence.

Behavior
They act almost identical to that of a normal Striker, charging at the player at a greatly increased speed. They can be seen primarily crawling and, when in distance of the player, will use a smaller form of a sleeper tentacle to attack for 4% of player health. Unlike regular sleepers, the visible and audible warning of an attack is much more brief so it can be near impossible to avoid attacks from them.

Like Strikers, they don't pose a threat individually. However, they spawn in hordes, and failure to cull the horde can leave the player vulnerable.

Strategies
Babies by themselves pose no real threat. They have very low HP and their head size can be a large and easy target. Due to the cost effectiveness of most tools it is ill advised to use C-Foam, Trip-mines, or Sentries against them, although each will work as they should (the Auto-Sentry is a notable exception and presents a good counter to baby waves, if positioned prior to waking up Mother). Instead, a player should have some form of an automatic weapon as that will be the quickest way to dispatch larger hordes of them.

Spawn camping the Mother spawn with any form of automatic weapon, especially the combat shotgun with its higher bullet spread and count, can cull a large majority of the wave, giving the player more breathing room when it comes to the remaining babies.

Like most enemies, holing up in a corner works, as you will need your whole team focused on killing them, as they are very small and will scurry fast to attack you and your team.

Babies are only a threat as long as the mother is alive, so the quickest way to deal with babies is to quickly deal with the Mother. Spawns, although brief and in between, can outnumber the player as each spawn requires a heavy amount of resources to be spent.

Babies can also be melee'd with a normal hammer swing, but that is ill advised unless there is only a small amount of them remaining.

It is not advisable to attempt to run away from babies, as their speed allows them to easily catch up to and attack even a runnning player.