Sanity and urges
Quick answer
Sanity is the clock in Dawson Oaks Trailer Park. Every round it drains, and the only way to slow it down is committing the crimes on your role's urge list - which is the whole joke of the game: to stay alive you have to be exactly the kind of person the Supervisor is hunting.
This page explains the system the way launch-week lobbies describe it, checked against patch 1.0.3. Where something is still community folklore rather than confirmed mechanics, we say so.
What drains sanity
- Time. Sanity ticks down over the course of a round regardless of what you are doing. Hosts can tune round pace in the lobby settings before launch - streams show sanity-related options on that screen.
- Skipped urges. Your notebook is a list of desires. Every one you ignore is a further drain, and the criminal ones are the hardest to satisfy quietly.
- Getting into trouble. Fights, arrests and the chaos that follows are not sanity-neutral for the people involved.
The pressure is the point: a suspect on low sanity has to start gambling on more visible crimes, which opens the door to exactly the information the Supervisor needs.
What restores sanity
Everything on your task list is worth doing, but the two halves work differently:
- Maintenance urges (the boring half) - eating, drinking, bathing, using the toilet, sleeping it off. These are the safest: half the park is doing the same things, so completing them raises your sanity without interesting anyone.
- Criminal urges (the profitable half) - your role's actual business, like selling weed, brewing moonshine, setting a specific fire or emptying someone's pockets. These restore sanity too, but each one is a potential report.
Concrete moves launch-week players use:
- Milk. The in-game prompt is blunt: low sanity, drink milk to increase it. Players drink it with the right mouse button and it is a popular - and memed - quick reset.
- Bath, toilet, bed. Your trailer is a sanity room. Get into the habit of a maintenance pass every few minutes between crimes.
- Food and drinks. Hot dogs, sodas and anything else you can buy at the Community Center store count towards the same meter.
What low sanity actually does
This is the part new players underestimate. The game does not just warn you - it starts revealing you. The rule of thumb players repeat in every lobby: keep your sanity or your role starts appearing to the people around you. Stay unstable for long and the park reads your role off you without ever catching you committing a crime.
That is why low-sanity deaths cluster at the end of rounds: the last third of a match is when meetings and police calls happen, and walking into either with a visible role is how rounds end.
Managing the meter, by role type
You cannot play every role the same way. Three patterns that work in 1.0.3:
| Role type | How you keep sane without getting seen |
|---|---|
| Sales roles (Dealer, Cook) | Batch your crimes: fund, brew/sell in one trip, then hide behind maintenance urges while the heat moves on |
| Public-harm roles (Pyromaniac, Prankster, Drunk) | Accept that you are loud; pick the when. Public behaviour is normal in this park - do not also be weird about it |
| Stealth roles (Thief, Hobo, and the Snitch) | Live on maintenance: your crimes should be invisible, so your visible life should look exactly like everyone else's |
Two more patterns that matter:
- Bank sanity before the meeting window. Rounds typically tip into meeting-and-vote phase later on; walking in with a full bar buys you a suspicious silence you cannot afford.
- Never finish a maintenance pass in view for no reason. A person who takes three baths in the park square is as weird as a person lighting a fire. Sanity recovery should look like daily life.
Questions we keep getting
Can I see my exact sanity number? The sanity bar sits at the top of the screen with your task list on the left; you can read the trend rather than a decimal.
Does the reveal happen to everyone or just nearby players? Streams show the reveal escalating the longer someone stays unstable - treat it as "the park figures it out", not "a number".
Does the Snitch use the same system? The Snitch plays under a cover identity and has its own task list; the Snitch guide covers how its sanity pressure works with the reports.
Is the milk thing real? Real as both an item and a meme. Drinking it restores sanity, and launch-week lobbies treat a suspicious milk run as peak Snitch behaviour. Both things are true at the same time.
Related guides
- The tasks themselves, per role: roles guide
- Where to do crimes without being seen: map and landmarks
- The person reading your tell: Supervisor guide
Last checked: September 20, 2026 - game version 1.0.3. Core behaviours from in-game prompts and launch-week gameplay; exact drain rates and reveal thresholds are not documented by the studio - we will update this page when patch notes clarify them.