Can't harvest

[OldFartLowlife52]

New to game. Very new. But on two occassions I've harvested a mule deer and after a short tracking of blood trail, easily found the animal, looked at bullet trajectyory etc, but would not give me credit for kill (pressing space bar nor clicking w/mouse worked). Also both the collect harvest and taxidermy were not highlighted. So the game 'told me' that collectying the reward was not an option. What gives?
Again, being VERY new, I can use the money.

Both times were different days, different computer starts, game reboots.
The first time I was able to harvest several other animals and recieve credit after restart of game.
Today, I again shot a mule deer and again all I can do is look at it. Could not collect reward.
Being new to the game, what am I doing wrong, or is it a bug?

I've got over 1,100 hours (as per Steam) in Call of the Wild but downloaded and am trying to learn this game due to multiple non-fix'd bugs in CotW which becomes very exasperating. Is this game also buggy and I should just throw in the towel on hunting games? I haven't yet tried Hunter 2 (or whatever it's called).

Anyway, I am seriously hoping it is me and not the game and you have an easy to digest fix such as i'm a dumba$$ and need to do this.....
Heck, I'm color blind and think, not totally positive but think I've dealt with that issue. Hope it was not time wasted.

Sorry for the rant and attitude but with seemingly more bugs in a different game..., well, never mind.
Thanks in advance.

[6Taylor4]

How long did you wait? It may still be breathing; it can be confusing for three reasons:
- if the animal's bowels empty, there's an Analysis button
- if the animal is not dead there's an Analysis button
- if there's a blood spot under/near the animal, it will display an Analysis button.
If you don't get a Claim button, waiting is good, or if its not inconvenient, mark your spot, fast travel to the nearest location supporting fast travel, and return.
You could turn off Hunter Sense before Claiming an animal.
There is a setting for colorblind in the menus.

[dbond1]

Were you on private land and had not obtained a permit yet? harvest goes to landowner in this case.

Do all landowner missions (from lodges) and you will be rewarded with free passes to the private land.

[6Taylor4]

Originally posted by dbond1:

Were you on private land and had not obtained a permit yet? harvest goes to landowner in this case.

Do all landowner missions (from lodges) and you will be rewarded with free passes to the private land.

Wow! Sorry, I left that out of my list - nice catch! Definitely a possibility.

[OldFartLowlife52]

Wow.
So let me, hopefully, get this straight:
I just now went back into the game and was deposited back where I left off, and not at a lodge (like CotW, ok, sorry for the memory bias, learned something new. Again.). Saw and followed the trail back and forth several times, frothy pink blood. No deer. When I was able to look at the deer earlier, the bullet (6.5) had traveled thru thru both lungs, entering from the left side.
Though no deer was found, I found a blood trail I had not / did not remember seeing before, followed it a little ways before examing it (red) with the analysis saying animal survived. Wow! Just wow!! So this mule deer lay there while I examined it, shot thru both lungs, and when I came back later, it had recovered and left?

and

Yesterday when the mule deer "rose from the dead", I had fast traved back to the lodge, walked back to the kill site (only discovered later how to recall the jeep, told you I was new), and the deer was still there but still could not claim credit, get my 'reward', ok, get my money. When I went back yet again late yesterday evening, the deer was gone. Again, I made the assumpition from time spent in CotW that if not harvested before game close, its gone.

I gotta get the name of these deer's medical provider as that medical team does good work.

Couple questions:
1) Anything killed but not harvested will be there when I return later, even after closing and restarting the game? E.g. When I'm called to dinner by my loving wife and I shut down, I won't lose the harvest? And I won't have been returned to the nearest, last visited lodge? If so, I do like that. I like that a lot!
2) If / when this happens again, do I quickly get out of 'examine mode' when I can't collect, and quickly shoot the beast, point blank in the heart to 'make it dead'?
Or . . ., what? What do ya'll do?

As an aside, this stirs an ancient brain cell:
when I was in high school, mid to late '60s, east coast of US (Virginia) it was common practice when approaching a downed deer to quickly and decisively slit its throat. Cut thru the pharnyx. Make a big hole in the front of the neck. How ever you want to phrase it. The concept being juist to make sure it didn't get back up. Moved to Alaska in 1985 and hadn't heard of this practice since leaving VA and had forgot about it. I wonder if this was just something done locally in VA? Have you ever heard of such?
Got a meeting tonight where some local Alaskan hunters will be present and i'm gonna pose this question.
Gee I just love it when old brain cells get stirred up.

But finally and again: what do ya'll do when faced with this situation?
Thank you very, very much for your response and patience with what now seems like something I should have known. I'll read the Encyclopedia, again, and try to absorb more of what I read this time.

Yeah. I know. I know. Better shot placement so the situation doesn't happen, but . . ..

[6Taylor4]

1. you have about 24 hours before the meat rots.
2. No. Shooting a dying animal in this game reduces the usable meat total, which is how we make our money, by the pound. Also a head shot ruins the trophy value, so just let the poor beast have its last minutes in peace. Shooting any animal twice will reduce the quality of the hunt rating (second screen in the Claim pages). Try to always make one sure shot.
I just finished watching this weekend a program on hunters living off the land in Alaska. They totally hunt for the meat, so they demonstrated no hesitation in delivering a finishing shot to the brain when they first approached the downed animal. It doesn't pay to do a kill shot here.
You can try marking that spot and then leaving and come back later.
Please confirm you are not seeing at the top middle of your screen Permission needed to hunt, or somesuch? That message would mean you can't claim the animal.
Hope this helps.

[Alf Tupper]

Interesting comments, and welcome aboard!

Apols - I have edited this, got called away by the wife!!


1 - yes, the animal will be there for 24 game hours before being totally 'rotted' , but if you close the game down, time is suspended. I was sad enough to kill a goat and see how long it took to disappear, 24 game hours is about right. Therefore enjoy dinner with the wife, and come back refreshed.

As 6Taylor4 suggests, not all real life practises work out in this game. Two shots into an animal at recommended energy levels usually loses you 20% meat quantity, whereas one one at recommended energy levels loses you about 0.8%. I started collecting data on meat loss as I was sad enough to be interested in the game's mechanism.

2 - your animal was dead (unless this is a bug I have never seen or witnessed myself!) and I think this will link back to why you could press E to examine but not harvest/taxidermy - the private reserve issue, which we can confirm if you can tell us on the map where the animal was shot. It will have rotted away in 24 hrs, not come back to life. The timeline you gave looks about right for that.

The only other similar bug I have witnessed is a dead animal laid on steep ground/boulders, but you can't even press E to examine them.

The 'animal survived' blood tracks - not sure why that would be, as I'd guess you'd not shot at any other animals in the same place.

So - if can you ID on the map where this took place, it might confirm/deny you were on a locked estate.

[VictoriaHuntress]

Originally posted by dbond1:

Were you on private land and had not obtained a permit yet? harvest goes to landowner in this case.

Do all landowner missions (from lodges) and you will be rewarded with free passes to the private land.

This is true, but the one time it happened to me (unintentionally, I shot an Elk in Nez Perce - it was on private land, but I was in public land, and I didn't realize that until I claimed it LOL),
a dialog popped up to chastise me for illegal hunting.

[VictoriaHuntress]

To the OP re other hunting games:
You mean Hunting Simulator 2. That was the first hunting game I acquired for my PS4.

It's okay, with a rather relaxed pace.

You have to buy licenses (on per species basis) for each of 4 regions that are available. Once you have filled all your tags for a particular species, the game will tell you if you try to shoot one of those animals. The game will warn you if you try to shoot a female.
I don't think the game actually prevents you from taking those shots, but it does impose fines for doing so.

The harvest screen is very rudimentary - just the basic information about the kill, and a simple 2D display of the animal showing what organs were damaged.

It has a nice shooting range for rifles, bows (IIRC no separate archery range) and trap/skeet for shotguns.

You can spot animals with the superb rangefinder-binoculars, but you can't put a marker down as in COTW and WOTH. You would have to estimate the distance and the direction to the animal and place an animal icon on the map at that (guessed) location.

There is no equivalent device to COTW's HunterMate to assist you.
You can turn on a downed animal location feature - that puts a red 'X' on the map where the carcass can be found.

You can put down a waypoint on the map, and see it in the HUD compass, which is pretty much the same as the one in WOTH.

Nice weapons, but the available weapons optics are very limited in functionality. There are no portable tents, hunting structures or vehicles - there is fast travel to a region's main cabin and campsites (once you find them).

The 'hunter sense' and animal spotting information are okay.

There are two play modes: Hunter and Park Ranger. The latter is sort of mission oriented - to do typical park ranger tasks.

It's an old game, and I don't think it is in production or support now. I haven't noticed any serious defects in the game mechanics.

That being said, once you've played COTW and WOTH, HS2 is less appealing, IMO.

[OldFartLowlife52]

Thankyou everyone for your time and insightful comments.
I've been shoveling snow and haven't been back into the game. Maybe tomorrow. Thank goodness for Advil, though I feel like a walking toxic dose experiment.
Anyway...

... I clearly need to just roll up my sleeves and hunt, though I don't know how long it might have taken me to figure out the deer were not dead, eventually "surviving" to simply leaving he area as I was told when i found the new blood trail and investigated.

I don't think I was on private property but will look into this more when I get back in game. The second Mule deer was in the general vicinity of the first tower you are directed to when you start the game, just south of the target range. Indeed, as I hadn't climbed that tower for a while, decided to do so and took the shot from that tower. The deer ran only across the creek to the south and lay down at the top of the far bank.
The first deer was shot earlier, just east of the first little camp you open up in game, west of the tower mentioned above.
After giving up on trying to harvest the first mule deer, as I walked away (east), maybe only 100 m or so, I shot a pheasant with .243. Yeah, I know, but I wanted to see if I could harvest it. I could. No problem. The harvest value was only $3, but that wasn't the point.
After the second mule deer was shot and could not harvest, soon afterward (several hundred meters away) I shot a whitetail doe (using the 6.5 this time), again, just to see if I could harvest it. I could. Being the first area you hunt in the game, I've been all over this area several times and never once thought about or had concerns about private property.
But of course these comments prove little to nothing and as I said above, i'll take a much closer look when back in game.

Thankyou VictoriaHuntress for your synopsis of HS2. I'm embarassed to admit that I was too quick to judge WotH based on percieved issues I've had with CofW (it's not me, it has got to be a bug!) and was just about ready to try HS2. My lack of knowledge and experience with WofH was not worth the knee jerk reaction to just being ignorant and applying biases of one game to another.
But I most certainly learned a lot from everyone's comments.

**************
If interested, I did start a conversation with the group of 'hard core' Alaskan "meat" hunters I chatted with last night (Thursday). They all knew what I was talking about when I mentioned verifying the deer were dead. All knew about using a knife on the throat, but didn't do it (one guy said he used to do it consistantly, but stopped years ago.) Most just kick the animal when they walk up to it and look for a response and if not dead yet (a rarity, it seems) place a shot at the base of the skull.
No one cleaned and gutted the deer at that point, simply picking it up, throwing it over their shoulder, and leaving the area as quickly as possible. Firing a shot, as they describe it, is like ringing the dinner bell to any brown bear in the area who are known to come to a new kill, looking for at least a gut pile. Sitka Blacktail deer are generally small enough to just toss over your shoulder and start moving away from the kill site. Though I have many, many (too many?) encounters with our coastal brown bears, black bears, some moose, and other critters, those encounters were thru my work with the State. Not hunting. My hunting experience in the State is very limited; i've only harvested three Sitka Blacktail deer (30-30 for one, 45-70 for the second two), but even I was able to just pick them up and tote them back to the beach (waiting boat) or one time to a cabin. I rattle on about this as it might seem absurd to do this. It is not. I certainly had never heard of this when hunting whitetails and frankly doubt it's possible though ringing a dinner bell is just not a problem in Virginia. Also, even if it weren't for the dinner bell problem, most hunters agreed and prefered not to bleed out their harvest, hanging the deer in a cool shed for several days; supposedly not draining the blood improves the lean meat's flavor. Obviously not an option for larger game (mose, black and brown bear, etc.).

Thanks again everyone. Happy hunting!

[Alf Tupper]

No problem; I think you may have had a minor bug then - if you were on private property you would have notice the Hunting Not Permitted pop up in your screen I am sure.

I used to play theHunter a lot, moved to COTW and stopped playing eventually. I'd say I am 95% happy with WOTH, I hope you decide to stick around and give it a try.

[OldFartLowlife52]

Just for the record: hunted most of the day yesterday (Saturday, 11 Feb) in WotH and was able to harvest most everything I shot at: moose, mulies, whitetails, couple badger, grounded pheasant, and one fox. Yes, everything I shot was harvested as everything that I aimed at and pulled the trigger (except birds 'on the wing') was harvesred. Too big a rifle used on the badger and fox, but oh well, at least tracking wasn't an issue. Couldn't help myself. Oh. I did try the bird shot on the badger; nope, that was a mistake. A few blood sign but no joy. Won't try that again. The concept of carrying an armory around with me, ala CofW, needs to be abandoned.
Also, I just can't seem to hit a bird in flight, but that's me; thank goodness for free ammo. Maybe I'll get better but not holding my breath. One of the missions I got just before closing the game last night, requires me to take ducks in flight, that's gonna be on the list of 'gotta' dos' for a long, long time.

Anyway, now that the "minor bug" has healed (knock on wood), I proceeded to explore (and harvest) with more vigor, and finally saw the private property banner; it's persistent and hard to miss. But it is such a beautiful game that just wandring around exploring was also fun (for a while).

Sorry for the knee jerk reaction and quick posting. Had recently been exposed to a plethora of bugs (and perceived bugs) and just immediately assumed same in this game and temper flared a bit.

Beautiful, beautiful game and I've only explored the tip of the iceberg, finally turning up the graphics to max with no problems (again, knock on wood).
Social obligations today but will be back in the field tomorrow (maybe tonight if I can convince my beloved and extremely patient wife to leave the party early).

[6Taylor4]

Good to hear. As to birds in flight, try to be under 50'. It is possible.
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