Deadlock Souls: Farming, Last Hit and Deny

Deadlock souls come from three places: last-hitting troopers, shooting the orbs those kills release, and farming camps, breakables and objectives. Since the June 30, 2026 patch a trooper's bounty splits roughly half to a ground orb that flies to whoever is nearby and half to a flying orb anyone can shoot, so the last hit alone is worth about half of what it was. Denying is the same mechanic run backwards.

Official source: Minor Update - 06-30-2026, Valve on Steam News

The three income channels and what each one pays

Those are the June 30 figures; Valve bumped the Guardian bounty again on September 16, 2026. Community estimates put a full lane wave at roughly 300 souls for four or five troopers, so the Steam thread on farming fast treats every wave as an appointment.

Half and half: why the last hit stopped being enough

The split was rebuilt in the 11-21-2025 update. The first half of a trooper's souls still flies out as a deniable orb, but instead of the other half being instantly handed to nearby players it now drops to the ground as an orb you must walk near, with an 18m capture radius, lingering 18 seconds and gaining 2 more per minute up to 40 seconds after the ten-minute mark.

• Standing in the wave pays. The ground orb travels to whoever is within 18m, and troopers must be within 45m of you for the drop to happen at all, up from 35m in that patch. Drift off the wave and you forfeit the half nobody contests.
• The split is progressive. Nearby-player split ratios moved from 1/0.65/0.28/0.15/0.12/0.08 to 1/0.54/0.36/0.25/0.2/0.16, so whoever is closest wins. A teammate standing on the trooper you are finishing takes part of your ground orb.

This is why the community rule of thumb that half your souls come from the last hit and half from securing the orb is not folklore. It describes the ground orb versus flying orb split, and since June 2026 the contested flying half has grown from 40% to 50% of the bounty. It also means an old line floating around Steam, that troopers stop paying entirely after ten minutes, is out of date. The ground half still lands on the kill.

What unsecured souls actually means

Souls come in two flavours. Secured souls are yours permanently. Unsecured souls count toward your total immediately, so you can spend them, but they can drop when you die. Valve's threshold: the minimum unsecured souls allowed to drop fell from a flat 150 to 50 + 5/min on 2026-06-30. Die carrying less and they are gone for good. Die carrying more and you leave a Soul Container behind, which the community wiki says any player can claim with a Heavy Melee and which despawns after three minutes. Unsecured souls also convert into secured ones over time.

How denying works, and what it costs you

When an enemy finishes one of your troopers, their flying orb rises in their colour. Shoot it and that share goes to you and your nearby allies instead of them. That is the whole mechanic, and IGN's beginner guide describes it plainly enough for a first match.

The cost is the part guides skip. Denying is a second shot per wave on top of the last hit, so you reload during the window when the next last hit is available, and you need line of sight to the enemy's wave, the one place on the map you would rather not stand. Experienced players on the Steam thread above make exactly that trade: melee last hits secure the value instantly and skip the aiming duel, but they commit you to standing on top of the wave. And sometimes you should skip the orb, when the trooper you finished is dying in cover out of the enemy's line of sight.

Why your orb sometimes hits and does not pay

This is the part of the soul economy almost no guide covers, and it is an open problem on the official Deadlock forum rather than a myth.

"when i shoot the soul orbs most of the time and i get the sound most of the time but never actually get the souls and confirmation then something is wrong... If you have low ping at 15 or under then you dont need to lead it at all and if you hear the sound you get the confirmation. But if you got higher ping then its all over the place." -- player post, Soul orbs timing, buffering, lag compensation

Another post in that thread claims that at 8ms against an 80ms opponent you get roughly 20ms to react to your own orb while they get 100ms. The most useful content is a player who reproduced the problem in the sandbox with injected lag: at net_fakelag 25, which is 50ms of ping, the sandbox orb timer reported the claim time as later by the ping amount, and with interpolation off, later by the ping plus one frame. That lines up with a claim window validated against a server timestamp, meaning a client with a fat round trip is asked to win a race it cannot see.

The only buffer size Valve has published is in the 04-04-2025 update: "Soul orb lag compensation buffer increased from 120ms to 140ms." The November 21, 2025 trooper rework added "very small tweaks to the secure/deny lag calculation to improve it". Neither the June 30, 2026 notes nor the September 16, 2026 notes contain a soul-orb timing entry, and no Valve reply is quoted on the thread. Treat this as an unresolved player report, not a confirmed bug and not a fixed one.

Whether high ping makes you a better denier is contested on that thread: one player argues laggers get an advantage, another reports denying more on a phone hotspot. Your own secures reliably get worse as ping rises. Do not build a strategy on either side of that.

What changed on September 29, 2026

City Never Sleeps replaced the neutrals you knew with Haunts, so every pre-patch farming route is invalid. Valve's map notes describe Blue Lane as "the neutrals you know have been replaced by a variety of creatures with new behaviors", and the new income includes a concentrated soul hotspot at the top of the Chinatown Bell Tower plus Tough Crates that need a Heavy Melee and pay extra. Valve publishes the nine Haunt families by district and no soul-value table at all, so any per-camp number online is third-party data. The families and tier system are on our Haunt camps guide; the rest of the patch is on the City Never Sleeps breakdown.

That patch also dated a lot of beginner material, IGN's included, which still lists neutral camps and a Mid-Boss spawning at ten minutes; Valve moved the Midboss to spawn at the start of the match back in May 2026.

What to do with the souls

Souls are currency and experience at once, so falling behind compounds twice. The investment bonus, your free stat package at soul thresholds, sat at 4.8k / 6.4k / 8k / 11.2k / 16k as of the 2026-05-22 patch; six more heroes are being released two a week from October 2, so treat that as a snapshot. See the first three matches guide for spending, and the Patron and objectives page for what those souls buy.

FAQ

Is the orb confirmation problem fixed? No published fix. The 120ms to 140ms lag compensation buffer from April 2025 is the last figure Valve has documented, and the September 2026 patch notes contain no orb timing change.

Does Street Brawl use the soul economy? No. That mode starts every round with equal resources and bans farming, so this page applies only to Standard and Ranked matches.