SCP: Secret Laboratory for New Players: Teams, Roles, and How Rounds End

SCP: Secret Laboratory is one of those multiplayer experiences where chaos is part of the design. You get unpredictable classes, several mutually exclusive ways to win, a sprawling facility full of traps, and a proximity chat that turns every corridor into a small theatre production. For a first-time player, that can feel like being dropped into a movie halfway through. This guide breaks down the essentials so your first few rounds make sense instead of ending in confused screaming.

How Role Assignment Works

Before anything else, get this out of the way: in vanilla SCP: SL you do not pick your team. The server assigns it at the start of the round and again during respawn waves. Every match shuffles the deck. Embrace it. Trying to plan around "if I get scientist" is a fast way to be annoyed when you spawn as a Class D in a cell with no inventory.

There are three core factions: Class D Personnel, Foundation staff (Lab Personnel), and the SCPs themselves.

The Three Main Teams

Class D Personnel

Class D are the orange-jumpsuit prisoners. Practically everyone in the building wants you dead, and you start with nothing in your pockets. Your objective is straightforward: get out of the facility alive. Doing that solo is rough, since scientists and facility guards will shoot on sight.

The upside arrives if Chaos Insurgency drops in during a respawn wave. They are heavily armed soldiers whose job is to safely extract any surviving Class D. If you hear chants over the radio, you probably want to find them rather than run from them.

Lab Personnel (The Foundation)

This group includes scientists, facility guards, and later the Mobile Task Force.

• Scientists spawn with a yellow keycard and not much else. Their main goal is to escape with the help of guards or MTF units.
• Facility guards are the early-game first responders. They handle the initial containment breach, defend chokepoints, and try to keep scientists alive long enough to extract. They spawn with a higher-tier keycard, which is genuinely useful in the opening minutes. With a Facility Manager Keycard, an early file cabinet is also on the table.
• Mobile Task Force (MTF) units arrive through respawn waves. They come in several ranks: Captain, Sergeant, Specialist, and Private. Loadouts scale with rank. A Captain spawns with a Captain Keycard, Heavy Armor, and an FR-MG-0, while a Private gets an Operative Keycard, Combat Armor, and a Crossvec.

The MTF and remaining guards are the muscle that turns a desperate scientist escape attempt into something resembling a plan.

SCPs

The SCPs are the anomalies that broke containment. Spawning as one means you are alone in your role, your enemies are everyone except the Chaos Insurgency, and you have no inventory at all. Instead, each SCP has unique abilities tailored to its lore.

For example, SCP-096 (the Shy Guy) deals a brutal swiping attack that can wipe a tight cluster of humans in a single animation. SCP-106 (Larry) phases through walls and short-teleports, which makes him excellent at flanking. If you want a fuller breakdown of each entity, our SCP creatures guide on HolyHosting covers them in detail.

Win Conditions

Knowing the role is half the work. Knowing how a round actually ends is the other half. Since Update 11.2.0, a round closes when one of these three conditions becomes true:

• Only MTF and scientists remain alive.
• Only Chaos Insurgents and SCPs remain alive.
• Only Chaos Insurgents and Class D remain alive.

Once that trigger fires, the winner is decided based on three counts:

1. How many Class D personnel escaped.
2. How many scientists escaped.
3. How many SCPs are still alive.

A detail people miss: disarmed scientists and disarmed Class D do not count as escapees. Putting cuffs on the opposing humanoid is sometimes more valuable than killing them.

The practical victory rules look like this:

• Foundation wins if only Lab Personnel are alive in the facility, or if more scientists escaped than Class D.
• Insurgency wins (Class D plus Chaos) if only their faction remains, or if more Class D escaped than scientists.
• SCPs win if they are the last entities standing.

Stalemates

Not every round ends with a clean winner. The match goes to a stalemate when:

• More Class D escaped than scientists, but the SCPs are still alive (the inverse can also stall the round, depending on counts).
• Escape totals plus survivors line up in a way that no single faction meets its win clause.

When this happens, the server displays the message: "Site-02 is under certain control, but not without cost. The victor is undetermined." Translation: nobody gets bragging rights.

Respawn Waves

Dying does not end your night. You drop into Spectator until the next respawn wave triggers, which happens every 280 to 350 seconds. Waves come in groups, and the game decides whether the next reinforcement is MTF or Chaos Insurgency.

The interesting part is that surviving players can nudge that decision. Specific in-round actions award invisible tokens to each faction, and the side with more tokens when the wave timer hits zero gets the next reinforcement. Killing SCPs, escaping with personnel, and contributing to objectives all feed this scoreboard, which is why competent players keep applying pressure even when they cannot see the score.

The Alpha Warhead

The Alpha Warhead is the facility's self-destruct, and any player with proper authentication can prime it. Once armed, an audible timer starts and the announcement system makes sure nobody misses the news.

You then have 80 to 120 seconds, depending on the server configuration, to clear the facility. When the timer hits zero, anyone still inside dies instantly. The detonation can be cancelled, but it can also be re-armed by another player later in the round, so a deactivated warhead is not necessarily safe forever.

For SCP teams, the warhead is a strong panic button when scientists are scattered. For escaping humans, it is occasionally the only way to deny the opposing side their escape count.

Light Containment Decontamination

At the 11-minute, 3-second mark, the facility announces the start of decontamination in the Light Containment Zone. From that point, you have exactly 15 minutes before the zone purges every biological entity inside. There is no off switch.

The only response is to leave. Players can route through the Remote Admin panel area or push deeper into Heavy Containment, but anything still in Light Containment when the clock expires is gone. Class D players in particular should track this timer closely, since their spawn area lives right in the danger zone.

A Quick Mental Model for Your First Round

If you remember nothing else, hold onto these three ideas:

1. Your role is random, so adapt instead of planning.
2. Escapes and survivors decide the winner, not kill count.
3. Time pressure (waves, warhead, decontamination) shapes every decision more than any individual fight.

With that framing, the first few matches stop feeling like noise and start feeling like a game with rules. The chaos is still there, but at least now it is the kind you can navigate.