A Beginner’s Guide To Unlocking Dark Matter In 'Call of Duty: Black Ops 6'

WARNING: This article is on a violent game, and includes some language that may be triggering to certain audiences

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is the newest game in the Call of Duty series, released on October 25th. With a new Call of Duty game always comes a new camo grind. In this game, the final camo for multiplayer is called Dark Matter. For anyone new to Call of Duty, “camo” is short for “weapon camouflage” and is a type of cosmetic that changes the look of your weapon and is unlocked from completing specific challenges. These cosmetics show off your dedication and skill in the games, as you prevailed through the challenges. The process for unlocking Dark Matter is quite simple, but may be tedious for some. Below is a detailed guide to unlocking Dark Matter.

Key Terms

Black Ops 6 has a system where eliminations differ from kills, as simply damaging someone and letting someone else finish them off counts as an elimination, but not a kill. A kill is only when you are the player to finish them off.
Face off game modes are on smaller maps and have no score streaks.
Headshots, when referred to in Call of Duty, aren't just a single shot at the head, as they need to kill the enemy with a shot that hits the head to count.
Hardcore is a type of game mode where everyone has reduced health, so with most guns, one shot to the head will do enough damage to kill.
A “mosh pit” playlist is a playlist of the game modes domination, kill confirmed, hardpoint, kill order, and team deathmatch.
Scorestreaks are in-match rewards for getting points without getting eliminated.
when the phrase "bullet weapon" is used in this article, it refers to all guns that are not launchers or melee.

Important Things To Keep In Mind

Before you even start unlocking camos in Black Ops 6, you must unlock weapons. There are 33 weapons in total, but more will be added over the course of the year. For primary weapons, there are seven assault rifles, six submachine guns, two shotguns, three light machine guns, four marksman rifles, and three snipers. For secondaries, there are four pistols and two launchers. For the melee weapons (hand to hand, close range weapons) there is a knife and a baseball bat. This article will divide up the guns into launchers, melees, and bullet weapons (the rest of the guns). When you reach level four, you unlock the ability to make custom loadouts. For each different gun category, one is available at base level, but if you have a blueprint for any gun, it serves as a permanent unlock token and allows you to have it unlocked no matter what level you are. The way that you unlock camos in Black Ops 6 is a mix of the older style Call of Duty games and the more recent ones. You no longer have to level up your guns in order to start making progress on camo challenges, but some may require you to level up for an attachment.

Military Camos

Once you choose a weapon to start making progress on, you must complete a series of nine different camo challenges that require the same action but in different amounts. The game refers to these as “military camos.” For bullet weapons, the challenges make you get one hundred headshots in total per gun (yes, that does mean 2900 headshots in total). For launchers, you have to get 50 kills or scorestreak destructions per gun, which means that shooting down any scorestreaks (such as UAVs or Watchdog Helos) will count. For melee weapons, you have to get one hundred kills per weapon.

The easiest way to complete these challenges is to play the “hardcore face off mosh pit” playlist. In order to access this, select “find a match” and it will show you a menu where you can choose your preferred game mode. There will be another button that says “find a match.” select it and it will give you another menu, where at the top it will say “core” and “hardcore.” switch it to hardcore and only select the checkmark next to “hardcore face off mosh pit”. If you select the “find a match” button again, it will put you in a matchmaking queue.

When you’re doing headshot challenges, equip an optic to your gun and aim for the head. The best map for this is called stakeout, and it will continue to be for most of the challenges, as it is the smallest map, so the easiest for kills. For the launchers and knives, there's not much to recommend, just try and get as many kills as possible. Now, for the snipers and the knife, play regular face off, as they kill in one shot, so it will be easier to complete in core.

Special Camos

After you obtain the military camos for a weapon, you can begin the special camo challenges, which vary for all weapons, and there are two of these per weapon. Some weapons share challenges though.

The special camo challenges are:

Kills shortly after sprinting
Kills without the enemy damaging you
Kills with specific combat specialties (equip all perks of a specific color: red for enforcer, blue for recon, and green for strategist)
Underbarrel launcher attachment kills - equip it to your gun and switch to it by pressing the button that switches your firing mode
Two Kills without reloading - equip a large magazine
Kills while moving - aim down your sights and walk side to side while shooting
Kills with a suppressor - literally just equip a suppressor
Hip Fire kills - just shoot without aiming down your sights
Point blank kills - slide towards the enemy and hip fire once you can pretty much punch them
Two kills without releasing the trigger - equip the largest mag and aim at the enemy’s spawn area
4.0 or higher magnification scope kills - equip one and shoot
Longshots - play hardcore but switch from faceoff to any other gamemode; best game modes are hardpoint and domination, aim far
One shot kills - this is a sniper only challenge, aim for the upper body or head
Kills after switching weapons - run around with another weapon and switch when you see an enemy
Direct hit kills - aim for the enemy’s body
Scorestreak destructions - play hardcore domination, and for the HE-1 launcher, which does not lock on, aim where the aerial scorestreak is facing, drag your sight in that direction until you can no longer see the streak and shoot

Mastery Camos

Once you finally get the base camos competed for a specific weapon, you can start unlocking the Gold camo. In order to unlock the Gold camo, you must get ten double kills. The easiest way to do this is going to be hardcore faceoff mosh pit. Play aggressively, utilize sliding to dodge the enemies’ shots and carefully aim. For the launchers, the challenge is to get three aerial scorestreak destructions per match ten times. This challenge is very hard to complete, but the best way to do this is hardpoint or domination.

Once you unlock Gold for all weapons in a category, you can start making progress on the Diamond camo for any gun in that category. The challenge is fairly simple: get three kills without dying ten times. For the launchers, you just have to get three kills in a match ten times.

After you get 33 diamond camos, you can start getting the Dark Spine camo. Dark Spine has a fairly easy camo challenge: get three triple kills. To make it easier, once again play hardcore faceoff mosh pit. For the launchers, it is by far the most tedious, annoying challenge in the game: five scorestreak destructions in a match three times.

When you get the Dark Spine camo for 33 guns, the dark matter challenge becomes available for those 33 weapons. In order to get dark matter on any bullet or melee weapon, three killstreaks of five must be achieved. These can be tracked in game, as whenever you get one, a medal appears that says “bloodthirsty” under it. For the launchers, all that you have to do is get five kills in a game three times.

What Now?

Well, now that you have unlocked Dark Matter, what should you do? You could go for Nebula in the zombies gamemode or play the campaign, or if you wanted to, starting November 14, Black Ops 6’s guns, perks, attachments, equipment, skins, and much more will be available in Call Of Duty: Warzone, which is a battle royale style gamemode in which you drop into a map and fight to survive, picking up new guns and other items. Warzone, when the integration of Black Ops 6 happens, will have its own camo grind, which makes 2024 the first year with a camo grind unique to Warzone.