UnReal World > General Discussion

help with hunting and trapping

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rescue_toaster:
I need serious help with hunting and trapping.  I've read the trapping guide and various posts on these forums and reddit regarding active/persistence hunting, but I cannot keep myself from starving.  I've created about 5 characters and all except one has died to starvation.

I'm trying to build my character specifically for this: very easy custom with high endurance, speed, spear, tracking, trapping.

How many lever traps should I be placing and how close?  In one game, I probably placed about 50 of these on various water coasts and across land restricted on both sides by water.  I was usually placing them in a rough line 3-4 tiles apart.  I can't bait them though, because i did not get enough food to even feed myself.  On a good stretch, I would get one bird every 2 days, but eventually the traps seem to stop producing food.  Is there a good way to figure out where to place these?  The trapping guide seems to suggest that this should bring in lots of ducks, but I cannot find much success.

I tried active/persistence hunting, but I rarely even find big animals to try to track/hunt.  In my most recent game, I wandered around for 2 days and found nothing.  I try to get on top of high ground to look in all directions.  Occasionally I do see an animal on the zoomed out map, but entering the animal's tile does not trigger an encounter, and using tracking doesn't result in finding any tracks.  So I move around a bit but then the animal seems to just disappear.

My only two almost successes:

* I encountered an elk, but could not chase it/fatigue it to kill it.  I think I chased its tracks for a full day before my character just dropped to sleep.  I don't think I was carrying too much, but I could not even catch up with it to see it.  I was running/walking trying to keep myself from getting too fatigued.

* I encountered wolves.  I was so desperate to try and get something that I tried to get one.  I had javelins and threw and hit one and followed it until it fell down.  I was able to eventually bash its skull in (after like 10 attacks on the unconscious dog -- killing blow shots need some serious buffs in this game) I then got killed by the other wolves.

Any advice would be great, as I started playing again after like several years off, but I don't see myself sticking with the game much longer if I can never catch food.  My longest game was the wolf death game where I had traded boards for food, which seems to be my only real success acquiring food, but that's not really fun.

Shrimp:
I am by no means and expert, so anything I say can probably be improved upon, but I have had my fair share of successes as a hunter in this game, so here is a summary of what I do for hunting:

- You need to think about you want to hunt and be equipped accordingly. It's nice to be an opportunist and hunt whatever you find on the spot, but some animals are near impossible to get with certain tactics. For example, most small animals are impossible to get with persistent hunting, so you need to keep traps with you. Berries bait for birds, raw meat for foxes and turnips for hares. Be sure to keep stuff with your for the ocassion you think you might find.

- When you spot an animal you think you could trap, set the trap with bait as close as possible and continue your way. More traps if you think there are multiple animals (happens a lot with birds). Some people opt for trap spamming but I honestly never see the benefit of that vs the effort it is to set up all the traps.

- If the animal is something you think you could persistent hunt, like a reindeer or an Elk, be sure to be as unencumbered as you possibly can. Use a combination of wilderness view and track following to find your prey and think outside the box when it comes about corraling it. If it escaped the moment you tried to bring it down it doesn't mean you failed, just track it down and try again. What I do is set up a camp as close to the prey as possible and dump all my unnecessaries and food there so I can focus on the hunt and go back to camp to sleep. If you are particularly commited and the prey is particularly elusive, this process can very well take days, so be sure to have food with you.

- Do not be afraid to travel long distances from your main camp in search of prey. And with this I mean literallly weeks away from what you consider your homelands. Hoping animals will happen to be near your bases is wishful thinking. Just bring an axe for the shelters and keep a look on the skies. With weatherlore you can check if it will rain, in which case you can pass the night with only a bunch of spruce branches(I forgot the name, the ones you make shelters with) beneath you.

- The world is quite empty but not as empty as it seems. Travel in local map as much as you can stomach it instead of in wilderness map. it can be very deceiving because animals often don't appear in the distance in wilderness map, you will even fail to see big animals like bears or elks so it's better to be on the lookout. Besides, that way you can find tracks as you travel or learn more things you didn't know about the world, like me who only realized you could actually find bird nests with eggs in them by playing more often in local map. It can get very boring though, it's often about dodging trees endlessly.

- Diversify your food sources. If you travel in local map, you will start noticing the patterns of the plants around you, what grows where and when and even find eggs sometimes. If you can get into routines, try to fish at least once or twice a day in case you fish something, and even better try to keep trap fences in chokepoints or nets fishing for you.

- Unless you are hunting in the winter, it's an inevitability that some of the stuff you get from the big animal will be wasted. If you are hurting for food consider only taking what you can eat before it can rot(it's often around 20 to 30 cuts) and refuse to skin. That way you can keep flexible and on the move right away. Trying to make fur can leave you having to make camp for a couple of days while it gets processed.

- Killing blows is not a matter of just bashing it's skull. It is an opportunity to make an unmissable blow to the target (unless you are really bad at handling the weapon in question) so considering blunt attacks until the prey is down and then for the killing blow do something like a stab to the skull or something similar so it dies quickly.

That's all I can think at the moment, not sure what else I could say about it.

PALU:
There are several ways to go about it, and my strategy differs from the one used by Shrimp.

If you start in autumn you ought to be able to find berries with limited effort. Berries aren't particularly good for staving off starvation, as picking and eating berries constantly just slows down the rate at which you starve (although I've see the claim that you can actually hover on the starvation threshold indefinitely on berries alone).
However, berries are good bait for birds, i.e. in lever traps and snares. Note, though, that an autumn start means little time to prepare for winter (my characters start in "spring")...

Personally I tend to travel a for the first few hours to locate a decent spot for an early game camp (close to water, good terrain for hunting nearby), after which I set up lever traps around the camp, with the traps being placed in lines. I then expand this to similar trap line sites a few tiles away.
Once this has been set up, I check the traps once per day, processing the birds (and occasional hare) I might catch as I go. Note that you may want to skip skinning/tanning some of the time, as that's very time consuming (although it does train an important skill).
Once this baseline has been set up, I then try to roam around in search of "real" prey by zooming out, move one tile, zoom in, turn 180 degrees, zoom out, turn 180 degrees, move another tile....
This allows me to find tracks and an occasional bird that I can throw rocks at (they rarely hit, but sometimes you can down a bird and kill it).
When hunting elk/reindeer, open terrain is the best, so you can follow tracks and then see the animal at a large distance and move directly towards it, thus moving a shorter distance than the animal did. Once I scare it so it runs, I follow, try to track it, and when catching up I check its status. Once it shows signs of tiring, I then start to run towards it as soon as I catch up to get it to flee, at which time I immediately returns to walking speed. It's possible to gradually tire the animal so it builds up more and more fatigue for each encounter, until it gets completely out of breath, at which time you can walk up to it and bash it to death.
If you can get an animal to run back and forth along a bend in a river, you can tire it fairly quickly, and that works with animals such as hares as well.
Note that the above tactics are by no means guarantees of a kill: animals get away more often than not, although many attempts to get the same animal over days may eventually succeed.

When you manage to kill a large animals and it's too warm to dry the meat (one advantage with the "spring" start is that you can dry meat during the early phase, and thus build up a small backup stash of fairly non perishable food), I typically keep some of the meat raw (for later roasting) and roasts the rest. Once the hide has been processed, it's typically time to sleep, wake up, process the hide a second time, but then it's off to the nearest village to barter roasted meat for preserved food and/or useful items (keeping 20-30 cuts for near term consumption).

I don't fish much with my characters, but haven't used the new fishing system to any extent.

While it's somewhat annoying that you may have to bash an unconscious bird in the head a lot of times to kill it, note that each attack is a valuable skill training attempt, so I consistently use blunt attacks (even with spears) against all non dangerous targets.  Blunt attacks before the animal is unconscious cause the least damage to the skin, and once it's knocked out attacks should be aimed at the head (and they never miss), which doesn't degrade the skin.

If you see a wolf: back away and leave. If you see a bear: back away and leave. A pack of wolves is extremely dangerous, while a bear is "just" very dangerous. I never attack either animal if I have a choice.

Another early character trick: you can opportunistically steal the kill from a predator either by scaring away e.g. an owl from a bird it killed, or getting a few cuts from a kill they've left behind. It's not glorious, but it's some valuable cuts of meat.

LoLotov:
This might just be me, as I've seen plenty of folks swear they never pay attention to the spirits, but keep sacrificing even as you get closer to starving. I always stay, from the very beginning and toying with death the whole time, very grateful to the spirits. Eventually you cant walk for tripping over the fattest capercaillies god ever injected with lard. This gives you the energy to hit the real meta, kill at least one Njerp, sell his gear for a pupper, and persistence hunting becomes laughably easy. If you dont want to try to save up for a dog/just do the start where you have a chance of having one, only hunt in open/pine mire, and NEVER RUN, as in shift+r fuck your stamina for 2kph. Animals always follow a relatively straight line, even if they diagonal around what that line is. Getting an idea for where a lone animal is heading gives you the opportunity to catch up by not zigzagging about as much as it had to, and you surprise it over and over at full stamina while it might only be "somewhat tired" looking after an hour.

The really important part of PERSISTENCE hunting that I still have trouble with is that you... have to be persistent. Is it early afternoon in summer and you're understandably mad it's been a minute or two real time since you found a track? Double back. You have time. Bipedalism is best pedalism, you'll catch that silly moosey boy long before you can't see him anymore.

Tinker:
I have had plenty of characters die but never from starvation, even doing the challenge, start in winter with nothing in your inventory. Sometimes my starvation gets up to about 40% but I usually freeze to death before dying of starvation.

In more normal starts I never use any of the easy setups, I would prefer not to have to add 5 skill points in custom so I use them in things I never use like weatherlore. I always accept whatever random character I get. First thing is to find a camp site, somewhere with a variety of plants and berries, near to water and with trees nearby. First thing after a shelter is make 5 snares which I scatter around the shelter, not to close but where I can see them just by turning around, I do not worry about the quality or initially about bait. I then settle down to making whatever tools and weapons I can and collecting berries , leaves and plants, if I can fish I try it once a day. Unless I am very lucky my initial food is gone on the third day. I keep going mainly on plants, eating ones I know are safe and one unknown one with each meal, this helps to train herbalism.

There seems to be a programme glitch you can exploit. if you have no fish or meat in your inventory or cellar in the first month or so then birds will tend to land on your snares and there is a 50% chance of catching a pike. Last week I was on my second day of no food when I tried fishing, while fishing 3 ducks land on snares and I caught a pike, while finishing the ducks of and resetting traps four more birds landed on the snares. Enough food for a week and during that week no more birds in traps or fish on hooks. Then two days after my food ran out I caught another pike a found two birds and a hare in the snares. This only seems to work with snares I have not seen this with other types of traps.

Incidentally I never sacrifice anything, I worked hard to get whatever it was and if the spirits are so powerful then they should be able to get whatever they want themselves.

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