Is hunting worth it?

[MattN]

Recently started a new fortress and had no hunter so I assigned one, gave her a crossbow and some bolts and away she goes!
So far the only thing I have gotten out of the endeavor are some mildly comical logs. (cow vomits. Cow retches, cow vomits, cow becomes even sicker!)

The amount of bolts she goes through is prodigious. To kill a single animal takes over 25 bolts sometimes 50. I thought I would be able to keep her in bolts by making bone bolts from the bones of the animals she kills but that just led to her grabbing 5 bolts, running out to kill something, running out of bolts immediately, running back to the fortress, rinsing and repeating.

Is this just a learning curve thing and if I give her enough bolts she'll eventually get good enough at hunting to not need 25 bolts to kill one animal?

[Johan 2.0]

Bone bolts being in abysmally small stacks has always been a thing and we used to be able to control what type of ammunition was used for hunting and training but that feature was skipped, ignored or removed for some reason, probably an oversight because the devs assisting don't play the game religiously.
The good thing is, bone bolts are basically free and your dwarf is training their ranged skills by doing this. They'll improve eventually.

[Dirty_Curty]

I generally like to start with a hunter so I have someone training on crossbow skill early, the meat/leather/tallow is just the occasional bonus.

[BonPadre]

Honnestly, depending of animals in your area, you may well be better of using cage traps.
You can try to tame the cought animals, you can decide to butcher them as well, you don't waste ammunitions.

The amount of wild boars I catch is quite decent I recon.

Also when your dear hunter killed the animal and decide it's time to get a drink... and then totally don't go grab said animal, yeah. so more wasted ammo.
To me (new player) having tried a bit of both, cages it is for me.

[Miles Teg]

To add to the trap idea, make a trap fence. Lines of walls that end with traps. Works good at herding animals into traps in Unreal World anyway.

[LastChime]

Early on no, later it can be useful to train ambush/marksdwarfship.

It's just one of a few labors you never want active militia involved in due to uniform debacles, miners and woodcutters are similar but they're all great places to farm up recruits or put disabled veterans back to work.

[malthenielsen]

It is yes.

It depends a lot on the skill of the hunter and also on what game there is. Depending on where you live they can kill like giraffes if they're good. It's a lot of food.

It's also an way to train marksdwarves. I often later on convert hunters to soldiers, as they got some skill in crossbow from hunting.

[Grimsever]

Assign a few hunting dogs to each of your hunters and they (almost) never fail to bag a kill. The dogs do most of the work, but also keep the prey stationary so it's harder to miss.

[Haethei]

Hunting is useful, but it's not very important. The materials you can get from hunting are available from domesticated animals, I typically bring dogs with me on embark to turn into meat and leather later, and they're valuable guard dogs until you have a real military. Other animals that produce milk at the same time would be useful too

It's usually easier to just train your marksdwarves with archery targets instead of hunting, of course that doesnt produce materials but you can get most of your bolts back by doing the old bolt collector trick (dig a hole in the ground behind the targets, bolts that hit a wall above open air will drop down instead of destroying themselves on impact)

Soap can also be made from plant oil (quarry bush, cotton, flax, hemp, kenaf, olives) instead of tallow