How does the Yokai hunt threshold work?

[Cathulhu]

Had two Yokai games tonight, we were talking near the ghost in the ghost room with <80% sanity for 10+ minutes and never triggered the early hunt. How close do you have to be to the ghost? How rare are these early hunts?

[Bangal]

It is unknown, i think
The Wiki: At least one player talking in ghost's current room [verification needed].

[Download]

I believe the hunt threshold can raise from 50% to 80% if a player uses their voice within the game. From what I remember, the player needs to be within 2.5m of the ghost. Unfortunately, I don't know the % chance of the threshold increase.

[Watcher Rat]

It's difficult to know the exact radius around the invisible ghost where it increases the threshold, but the other difficulty is that it just gives it a chance to hunt at 80% or lower, not a guarantee. Like any ghost, when and how often it does anything (including hunt) is completely up to RNG; you may get a sensitive Yokai that hunts almost immediately, or one that continues to ignore talking players until they cross the 50% line naturally. This is why, generally speaking, early Yokai hunts are harder to confirm as evidence of the ghost, though it does help narrow things down to a couple choices if you do get lucky.

I normally rely on the Yokai test (trying to lure it during a hunt) instead, it has a much better rate of success.

[Tracker]

From my experience you have to be standing right on the ghost's foot while talking to trigger that ability. You can have full on conversations with the ghost room being the nursery on Tanglewood at 60% sanity and never trigger it.

[Cathulhu]

Good to know this isn't a reliable test (I didn't realize it was just a chance to increase the threshold), thanks.

[An Actual Skeleton]

you gotta remember that its a hunt "threshold", not a guarantee, and because the chance of a hunt occurring increases as sanity drops, the yokai ironically doesnt have a great chance of hunting at 80% sanity- its possible, but because everyone is healthy and stable you will need to keep everyone at 80% for long time to properly test for the hunt threshold.

(And as the others pointed out, you have to be pretty close to it in the first place, so its kinda risky to test for yokai this way- you're basically begging the ghost to start a hunt right on top of you.)

It's less of something that you are supposed to actively search for and more of something that, if it happens, tips you off, like how demons can just... hunt whenever they want.

if you realllllly need to test for yokai, the best way to do it is not by checking for the hunt threshold, but to try and test for its hearing range during a hunt.

[Cathulhu]

What I didn't expect was really *how low* the chances of forcing this ability to trigger actually was. Last night, my friend and I were jabbing in the ghost room (the computer/piano room in Ridgeview) with the lights on for like 10 minutes, and no crucifixes burned. But all of the factors (ghost roaming, high sanity, and that the threshold raise isn't even guaranteed) really add up.

We decided to do the hunt test was because it wasn't behaving like a Banshee or Yurei (the only other options we narrowed it down to), and we already got fooled once by a peaceful Yokai that night.

So yeah, tl;dr chance-based abilities shouldn't be used as a negative test.