Trailing/Finding a wounded or shot animal

[The Eagle]

I seem to have trouble finding animals that I have shot. The blood trail seems to disappear after a while. What am I doing wrong. Some I just don't find and that don't seem right as to what I'm doing, and at night it becomes darn near impossible for me to find them

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

If you dont hit them into vital organs then they often just stop bleeding if the wound was not severe enough. If you want to know if there is actually point to track them then check the map for hunting pressure circle, if the circle appears it means that animal actually died from this shot and center of the circle shows where they were initially hit.
At night you need to use the flashlight to see the tracks at all.

[Starwight/ttv]

Originally posted by Rumpelcrutchskin:

If you dont hit them into vital organs then they often just stop bleeding if the wound was not severe enough. If you want to know if there is actually point to track them then check the map for hunting pressure circle, if the circle appears it means that animal actually died from this shot and center of the circle shows where they were initially hit.
At night you need to use the flashlight to see the tracks at all.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, this is a huge help! I have had the same issue, where tracks mysteriously dissapear--when I KNOW it was a deadly shot. But at least, this gives me a way to know if it is worth tracking at all!

[jal273]

Just remember (BLOOD DOSE NOT LIE) always follow the blood tracks

[Hidden Gunman]

Some blood trails often get longer distances between blood drops, the longer the trail goes. It can take some effort to pick up the trail when that happens.

[Striker]

Once U find the initial hit blood it is the next blood U find that will help you understand just how badly you damaged an organ. A slow bleed rate is not as good as a medium or large. Spinal shots often prove fatal but the initial hit spot blood may be very small. There is also a skill/perk (forget offhand which one it is) that will put an arrow on your hunters mate indicating which direction you will find the next track. In some cases tracks may be 30-60 meters apart so keep going and looking while following a blood trail. Lastly, many times an animal will return to the area it was initially shot in. Don't get in a rush, make the shot then sit tight and check your map to see if the animal is dead. Give the animal time to die and watch and wait to see if it comes back. Most will die within 5-6 min but I have had some that took 10m or more to do so. If you chase right after a wounded animal it will likely run a long way.

[Hustensohn]

If you don't hit a vital organ, or the spine, the animal can survive the shot and it will at some point stop bleeding.
Try to hit the lungs or the intestines or aim for the spine.
Brain and heart work best, but are obviously much harder to hit.

I know how hard it can be to keep track of an animal that survived a shot, so why don't you try a hunter stand? They are relatively expensive to build but they conceal your location, even if you're standing with a lamp on your head shining bright in the night.

Then just lure some animals in with your noisy toys and boom gotcha you get an easy shot where you can take your sweet time and can hit them up close for maximum damage.
Just be aware that if animals come too close to a building, they WILL notice you and run back a short distance. BUT they come real close before that happens ;)

[Geronimo]

another thing to keep in mind when tracking, is dont just follow the blood signs alone and remember that animals dont just run in a straight line.

When following from track to track dont just assume that the directional code is pointing you toward the direction the animal will continue in. Sometimes the direction of that last track you checked was changed with the very next track, and if you didnt check that next track and just kept going in that general direction, you will be going the wrong way.

Make sure you tag every third track or so so if you do lose the direction and the trail you can quickly get back to it, and having the marker in sight is always helpful when having to do circles around it after losing the direction.

Also do not ignore the poop sign as you track. It is just as important as when you are trying to find the animal before you shoot it. Often animals will work their way back around you and you can sometimes pick up on this by checking tracks going in opposite direction. And if you can confirm the age of that track by tagging a dropping, which shows very fresh or just now, when the ones you are following are showing fresh or old, then you know what you have to do, and have saved yourself having to do that whole trip just to end up back at that spot again.

Be aware though that old and new trails often crisscross each other, and when you combine that with the flesh wound dynamic of a wounded animal beginning to show tracks that are actually increasing in health, it cab get tricky trying to stay on its trail.

Successful tracking will be achieved by using a combination of options, perks and skills, and utter experience. But mostly by not being fooled by animals that use tactics like running in crazed circles crossing all over their old tracks before they make that beeline out of the area. In such cases trying to sort out all of those tracks is a waste of time while the animal gets further away and maybe heals. The best thing to do is to drop a map marker at the last sign of blood and then head away from that center out to about 150 yards, and begin to make the circle until you pick up the trail where it leaves the area. It might seem like it would take more time but believe me, when it comes to some of these higher level animals and the tricks they can employ you will avoid spending 30 minutes of confusion trying to find that exiting trail.

One of the things you will hear from the game narrator is that there is no sense in following a trail that shows old or very old dropping sign.

That could be misleading in some cases where that animal has made those droppings an hour ago but has turned around and come back in the other direction where those tracks are a just a few yards out of sight but will be showing fresh droppings. Its also possible that the old dropping you see now is only a few yards away from their need zone where they have been doing their thing for the last half hour. which means they are really just a few yards away even though the last dropping you see makes them seem far off.

Id like to have a dollar for everytime i started running thinking i had to go for a ways to catch up because the dropping i just checked said old, and as soon as i started running the trophy which was really just eating 50 yards away takes off like a bat outa hell.

Never assume that a trail is cold or old when you know that an animal can backtrack or stop for a long time at a need zone nearby.

[Hotschi48]

Sometimes the last two or three tracks before you find the dead animal point to the wrong direction, i.e. towards you and not to the dead animal. I experienced this a couple of times, with no tracks of the same animal nearby.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Hotschi48:

Sometimes the last two or three tracks before you find the dead animal point to the wrong direction, i.e. towards you and not to the dead animal. I experienced this a couple of times, with no tracks of the same animal nearby.

True, many times you can expect the animal at 25 percent health to suddenly veer off its trajectory usually to the right or left and make a mad dash, like a death throw, a sudden burst to try to flee whatever is killing it, and sometimes that can be a long dash without leaving any sign, almost like it is flying, which means that last track could be as much as 150 yards or even more from where you will actually find that animal.

Sometimes that last track is a dropping, which as you all know, does not give a directional cone, so at that point drop a map marker and begin your circling.

Just yesterday I nailed a good sized Red Deer, and tracked it to its last dropping, and despite a half hour of circling I could not pick it up again. The dropping was at the foot of a steep hill, where it should have been easy to re-establish the trail at its base, and i checked backwards, sideways, even looked into the ceiling for glitches. I went around the hill to get to the top of it just in case it went up the side without leaving tracks i could see from below, but there was no sign up there either.

I usually dont give up, and i usually always find them. I have rarely lost a kill. But I had to assume that this one fell into a terrain glitch or something that was making it invisible and impossible to interact with.

At that point all one can do is give up.

But it is my experience that 95 percent of the time, animals tracks will lead you to a carcass if you are persistent and know what to look for, learn some of the tricks, and more importantly, what not to do.

Now I also want to note that this is on xbox and may not correlate with PC experiences. I am aware that many PC players have been complaining about disappearing tracks, ambiguous bloodspatter, and disappearning carcasses.

But I do have to wonder how much of that is simply inexperienced players or guys that dont like to work hard at tracking.

IMO higher level animals are going to be harder to track, and all of those so-called anomalies would be akin to skilled animal AI. And it is one of the things in CoTW which make the game even more appealing to real hunters, and guys-gals that enjoy the challenge of tracking down a kill.

[Hotschi48]

In my case it was indeed the last two tracks in front of the dead animal in sight were pointing away from it, like --> / --> / --> / <-- / <-- / Dead Body.

This was clearly no dash to either side by the panicking near-dead animal - a behaviour which sounds perfectly plausible to me - this is clearly a bug/glitch/whateritscalleditswrong kind of thing