Bugs You Should Know: the double blacked-out (or fractured) leg damage

Tarkov has plenty of ways to make us suffer, but every now and then the game finds a new trick to keep things interesting. Like when one of your legs is gone, you’re just hoping your painkillers hold out long enough to reach extraction — and suddenly your health starts dropping at twice the normal rate, or worse. What is going on???

Yeah, I know... it's a gigantinc PMC limping somewhere 🙄

A Reddit post titled “Was there a nail stuck under my boot? Look how fucking fast my health is draining while running” recently caught my attention. In the video, the OP shows his health plummeting at an absurd rate just by running with his right leg blacked out — not even both.

As usual, some users jumped in with the obvious “that’s normal, you take damage when sprinting on blacked legs.” What they missed is that the damage was way higher than normal. To prove it, the OP later posted a second clip showing that under normal circumstances, running with a blacked leg drains HP much more slowly.

The hidden culprit: Tarkov’s double damage bug

What we’re seeing here is likely another manifestation of the infamous double damage bug. Already known in firefights, this bug occurs when the server, due to desync with the client, registers the same event twice.

In combat, that means a single bullet can sometimes be counted as two hits. While running on blacked legs, it means each damage “tick” can be applied twice (or more) — draining your health at lightning speed.

How it normally works

We know that when a leg is blacked out, every step while sprinting (which is possible using painkillers) deals tick damage that gets redistributed across all remaining body parts. Normally, this is dangerous but manageable if you pay attention to your health indicator and stop in time.

When the bug kicks in, though, the damage value of those ticks multiplies — and what should be a survivable limp across the map turns into a death sentence.

Fractures: the same story

As you may know, leg fractures can cause the same continuous damage while sprinting, the only difference is that the legs not being blacked-out will receive damage too.

And yes, the double damage bug can appear here too, causing the game client to apply more damage than it should.

How to avoid dying to this bug

Whether one of your leg is gone or just broken, keep your eyes open to see if you got the bug and are getting much more damage than normal. And if it is the case, stop and treat your leg wounds before you sprint again — or Tarkov will punish you in the most unfair way possible.

Heal up, use a CMS surgical kit to restore the destroyed limb, and apply a splint if there’s also a fracture. If you’re rich enough to carry a Surv12 surgical kit, it will handle both at once — restoring the blacked-out limb and fixing any fracture in it.

Just make sure to check the other leg as well: if that one’s fractured, the damage ticks will keep draining your health until it’s treated too.

If you don’t have any items to treat the wound, your only option is to avoid running and slowly limp toward the extract — saving your sprint for when it’s absolutely necessary.

Watch the bug in action

If you want to see the bug for yourself, check out the original Reddit post with the first video here:

Was there a nail stuck under my boot? Look how fucking fast my health is draining while running

And here’s the follow-up video the OP posted, showing the normal damage drain without the bug: Comparison video – normal damage while running on a blacked leg