Hunting
"For what it's worth you have built up enough skill and courage to dare to attack, slay, dress, and prepare wild animals. Beware that some fell beasts of the wilds will kill and eat you, and that you might not be a competent enough fighter yet to take them on. Start out small, with Ants, and build your skills, before going for bigger prey."
"Some small animals, like Rabbits and Frogs, can be picked up without a fight, if you can catch them."
Necessary for picking up, attacking, killing, skinning and butchering various Creatures across the hearthlands. It is also required to build Drying Frame.
In-Game Text
... Some small animals, like Rabbits and Frogs, can be picked up without a fight, if you can catch them.
General Techniques
Archery mechanics: When shooting a target with a Hunter's Bow your first click on the animal brings up the aim meter. This is a vertical bar which slowly fills with color the longer you are 'aiming'. When you are ready to shoot, click again. How far you allow the bar to rise before a shot directly affects the accuracy and damage of the attack; waiting for the bar to fill completely gives you the best chance at a successful hit for max damage, whereas shooting immediately will almost guarantee a miss, or low damage on hit. Note that your target will still turn aggressive if your opening shot misses. Enclosing an animal in branch stockpiles to prevent it from fleeing when it takes too much damage is a good idea. It won't prevent it from attacking you though, and it will break the stockpiles if they block it's way to you. You can shoot from boats or over deep water to be safer.
Also note: If several characters surround the same animal at once it will keep moving to try to get at them all and make aiming that much harder and take that much longer. The animal will stand still for longer if only one player attacks it.
See Archery for more information on shooting a bow.
Unarmed/meele combat mechanics: See Combat Guide Overview to learn some basic combat techniques.
Hunting small game
To hunt chickens, rabbits, hedgehogs, moles, adders and squirrels: Have at least a 2x2 inventory slot available.
- Chickens, Cocks and Chicks will scatter when you get too close. Setting your speed to running should be enough to catch them.
- Rabbits will flee if you come too close or right-click them. Come as close as you can without startling them, and then change to sprint or run and right-click to chase them. Rabbits can be tricky to catch, as they often run faster than you. Either try to catch them on a terrain where you can sprint or ride a Horse to easily do it. Wearing Bunny Slippers makes you run much faster when chasing rabbits.
- Squirrels will flee, but are easier to catch. You can easily outrun them at running speed.
- Hedgehogs will flee, but are easier to catch. You can easily outrun them at running speed. Beware however, that when picking up a hedgehog you will receive roughly 8-10 HHP damage.
Some things to note: wearing gloves greatly reduces the chance of taking damage. killing the hedgehog via combat will not cause any damage.
- Moles will teleport a short distance away. Keep chasing them and you will eventually catch them.
- Adders will fight you and their bites can leave you with nerve damage. It is recommended that you run them over with a horse.
Horse Riding Method if you have access to either a Horse or Wild Horse, riding over any of these animals will trample them, allowing you to pick up their corpse.
To butcher: Right click the animal again to get the option to kill it, "wring neck". It then becomes two squares in size vertically. If you wish to go on hunting it is often best to leave it in the form of a dead rabbit/dead chicken because when you continue and butcher it, the animal will then take up more inventory squares. Of course, if you only need the meat, or only the skins, just butcher them and drop the rest of the items.
To hunt toads, frogs and rats: Have a single square empty in your inventory. Right click the animal.
Toads can be used to make the Enthroned Toad curiosity.
Rats make a good early energy rich Rat-on-a-Stick food.
Frogs can be used to make Grilled Frog Legs.
To kill them they must be killed in combat or trampled with a horse. This results in simply a splatter of blood, and no item.
Hunting big game
Hunting big game is much different than hunting small game. While small game require no combat skills to hunt and kill, you must be able to kill big game through combat. The intricacies of combat are too great to explain here, so instead some methods to hunt which require little or no combat experience will be discussed
Boat Method
- With this method, almost every big game can be hunted safely with very low Unarmed Combat
- Once you have access to Boats, acquire two. One boat you will ride in, and the other you carry overhead.
- One you have found your big game, initiate combat from the shore and lure the animal to shallow water, preferably somewhere that you can easily block the animal's escape with the boat you are carrying. this can be done by finding a narrow strip of shallow water.
- After ensuring the animal cannot escape or flee, attack the animal and then move away before it has a chance to retaliate. Any combat move that creates openings, such as punch, low blow, chop, or kick will work.
- After a certain amount of damage is done, the animal will leave combat and begin to flee. however, as the animal cannot flee, you can simply kill it.
Cave Method
- If you have a cave nearby you can aggro the animal you want to kill and lead it to the cave entrance.
- Attack it to build up openings and when your defenses are getting high, enter the cave and lower them. Rinse and repeat.
- It can take a while but eventually you will kill the animal and it rarely runs away.
- Be careful with taking too long inside the cave as you may break combat and lose your IP.
Some things to note:
- You will sometimes be attacked. be sure not to take too much damage.
- Animals will attack your boat, so be sure it doesnt break beneath you.
- If you butcher animals on shallow water, their bones will be dropped into the water and thus irrecoverable.
- Bears will begin to flee after a certain amount of damage, and will then enter rage mode. Be aware of this fact while trying to kill bears.
- Mammoths have a ranged attack that can be used at a distance, nullifying any advantage of boat hunting.
- If you have access to the Knarr blueprint, you can build a knarr construction site behind an animal using a block of wood and negate its escape.
Other methods to be added later
On how to hunt other animals, see Sevenless' begginer guide to Haven and Hearth
Skinning and butchering animals
You need a Sharp Tool to skin or butcher animals. When a big animal is dead you get the options to skin or to butcher if you right click. If you butcher first the skin is ruined and the skin option is not there. If you want the skin and the meat, you must first skin and then butcher. If you make a mistake and click butcher you can still back away before the job is complete. Then you can skin it and the hide is okay. Also if you do not have space for all the meat you can start to butcher it and then step away in the middle. The rest of the meat will still be there.
If there is even only one piece of meat left it will look like the animal has not yet been done.
Butchering is needed to get fresh hide, raw meat, intestines and entrails from animals corpses
- The quality of your animal while butchering is determined by quality of animal corpses and softcapped by your sharp tool quality and survival.
If (ToolQ < HideQ) then
If (Survival < HideQ) then
Tool quality softcap is applied before the survival softcap.
