Getting Started & More

A basic guide explaining a few things the game, and other guides, might not make clear.

Introduction

To start this guide, let me put up a disclaimer. I'm not a hunter. I've never fired a weapon at an animal in my life. I've been trained on firearms, so I know how they behave, but I have not shot deer, elk, or anything else you'll encounter in this game. This guide contains tips and pointers from my experience playing plus a little research, nothing more.


The scope of this guide is to cover the technical aspects of basic gameplay and to get the player reading this to make informed decisions. I will cover this in a manner that is semi-arranged like a short walk-through, with pointers for variations. Generally, the audience intended has already sat down and at least has some inkling of what they're doing past the basics of 'how can shoot web' and more intended to fill in the gaps of 'what am doing wrong' and the frustration of having to figure out some simple, but unadvised pointers along the way.

I should also warn you that I often switch between yards and meters almost at random in this guide. Just a head's up. They're so close in value as to not be TOO much of a problem.

The Hunt Begins

Starting out, you are given a choice between two hunting reserves (Not counting DLCs). Hirschfelden, and Layton Lake (Or, Central Europe, and the Pacific Northwest respectively).

After some play time, I have determined that for a beginner using this guide, Hirschfelden is more akin to an easy mode. The starting area all but walks you right into a small herd of smaller game and has easily spotted areas on the map that are ideal for taking ranged shots. Compared to the pacific northwest, this is a cakewalk. With the .243 caliber rifle you start with, easy game will advance you more smoothly.


STARTING EQUIPMENT:
You start your game with a .243 caliber rifle, a 1-4X magnification scope, and soft point bullets as your primary means of bringing home the venison.

This weapon is ideal for smaller deer sized game you first encounter, and actually slightly overkill for dealing with Fox or Coyote. The rifle is fairly accurate at ranges up to and exceeding 300 meters/yards, despite it saying the effective range is only 150, but has all the stopping power of an anemic curly straw in an avalanche. Avoid engaging large game like Bison, Moose, and Bear unless you have the precision shooting skills of a gun god behind you (or get a lucky shot on a bear because it stood up... Put a round dead center and severed the thoracic spine. Hard to do anything when you can't feel your legs)

I have pumped two magazines of soft point .243 into a bison, and all it did was make it angry. If you haven't noticed the health bar in the corner- Yeah, you have a health bar.

That means you can die.

If you want a suggested goal for first upgrade, go for the hyperion scope with the 4-8x magnification zoom. The accuracy of the .243 at long range leaves itself open to making use of the scope immediately. And the starter bullets type are free, so you can pack ammo on and not worry about wasting shots initially.
BASIC TRACKING POINTERS AND THE SENSES:

Let's start our first tracking session. I'm going to assume you've at least fooled around with the tutorials and know the very basics. Tracks, Calls, all that stuff. You know it, you can follow basic directions. You shot those roe deer that were RIGHT THERE after start.

Right?

Now you need to actually hunt.

So we'll go walk abouts.

Now, between the core senses of the animals, you have sight, sound, and smell to worry about. It's pretty simple, if they see, hear, or smell you, they're off into the underbrush and now we see if you're a good snap-shot or not.

Chances are, you're not. So let's worry about not letting them know you're here by teaching you about the thing that's going to have them bolting long before you can get close:

Sound.

The uninitiated reading this guide might not realize this, but they can hear you a LONG... LONG ways away. Especially if you're running and crashing through the underbrush. How far?

Try 200 yards/meters.

That's right. If you're prancing around at a sprint in the game, powering through tall grass, smashing through shrubs and saplings like a bull in a china shop, the animals can hear you brushing through foliage at distances equal to looking across two American football fields. And they will KEEP you at those distances. What does this mean? It means that no matter how hard you try, you can NOT out-pace the animals if they hear you coming.

BUT all is not yet lost. Because what works for them, can work for you.

The game may have pointed out that the animals make warning calls when they are alerted to your general presence. This may be your first indication that something is nearby, rather than trying to stumble onto a track. The calls also scale in volume with distance. After some practice you can distinguish 'somewhat close' from 'waaaaay the way out there' (No fixed values here). Each animal also has distinctive calls for warnings or mating. After some time playing, you don't even need to use the 'E' command on a call, as you'll know what it is from experience.

Side note: Did you know humans are really good at taking advantage of loopholes in the system? Because animals suck at it.

You may find it useful to deliberately go running down a path or crashing through the forest to elicit a response from any nearby animals. Trust me. It's a lot easier to zero in on an animal when it emits what is effectively a 'Here I am!' Forget tracks. Follow your ears! (And don't play the game with music on. Especially death metal. I don't care HOW awesome Rammstein makes you feel at 4 AM, you can't hear anything over electro-metallic audio destruction at its finest).

On this factor, I mean it, pay attention to the sounds around you. Even as you go traipsing through the forest, the animals likewise have movement sounds for walking. And strangely enough as of when this guide was written, their footsteps are louder than yours for the estimated distance. It may sound like an animal is on top of you when it's still 20 to 50 yards out. Learn to gauge it, and know when to drop.

Incidentally, this method is decent for beginners, but harder difficulty animals tend to stay quiet. Advanced hunting skills probably won't include a one-man stick band in it. But for now, you just want something to shoot at.

Now, speaking of dropping, we need to cover the second way animals can sense you, by sight.

Remember, if you have sight of something, there's a good chance it can see you. This is both true and false, actually. Deer have notoriously poor eyesight, and aren't the brightest tools in the shed. The game reflects this.

Overall, my best advice is that if you can see the animal, get low, and get slow. Not only do you reduce your visibility profile, but you become quieter as well. Win win.

The game has an indicator of your visibility level down by the compass. It's represented by an amorphous blob of a shape that at your most visible, is a large circle. The less visible you are, the less obvious the shape is. Becoming a smaller circle, a widened blob circle, a flat line with a half circle, a flat line, and a narrow faded line.

As a point of reference, animals will get to about ten yards away from you before they see you when you're at 'flat line' visibility. Keep in mind, this includes being in precarious places like perched on flat rocks, in all but see through underbrush, and even hiding in short grass while prone.

Another thing to note is that the only movement that counts is traveling movement. You can swing your rifle around and 'move your head' like a mohawk wearing metalhead at a Megadeth concert and the deer won't see it. You can even switch items, reload your weapons, and check your voicemail on your RTG powered hunter-mate (I want that thing's battery!). They just don't count.

Really, when it comes down to it, combine what you know about visibility with movement and worry more about sound. And when in doubt, if you can hear them walking your way, drop, go scopeless, and swish back and forth left and right to zero in on them audibly (headphones for the win). It's pretty easy to pop an animal right in the nose from a surprise shot from the prone as they walk up on you.

And that brings us to sense three.

Smell

(Apologies, but there seems to be a hidden character limit that cut the previous section off.)

Smell.

In gameplay terms, scent is pretty vague. You have a green cone shape on your compass that represents the direction your scent is blowing, and from what I've read of the codex, is supposed to become narrower and blow further in strong winds. But the indicator never seems to change shape, just direction.

Best advice? Just be aware of the wind direction. It doesn't snap around or do any crazy directional shifts very quickly, but it does move over time, and the animals DO spook from your scent (They also make warning calls if they smell you. ^_~). The game has some scent-based consumables, such as odor eliminators and scent-lures. However before you really get into using those, let's work on just making sure you do

Taking a Shot

When you've got a target, and you've decided to take a shot, remember that the game rewards you for killing like you would (or 'should') kill in real life. Quick, neat, and reliable. Keeping this in mind, know what kind of weapon you have, and the rounds available. Here, I'll describe the ratings given to rounds.

First, you have penetration. This is straight forward. It's the metric of how deep a shot will penetrate into a target. The higher the number, the deeper it goes. Keep this in mind when shooting animals that are larger and heavier.

The second value is expansion. To make this understandable to the firearms illiterate, remember that in real life, just punching a hole into a body isn't guaranteed to kill it. Anyone who's ever had a shot knows that doesn't mean you're going to drop dead from a needle-thin hole. The same goes for bullets hitting non-vital areas.

Expansion is the metric that describes the destructive nature of a round once it enters a body. High expansion values describe rounds that fragment, tumble, and bounce inside the body once it strikes. It 'expands' the internal trauma, making wounds bigger on the inside and causing an animal to bleed to death faster. Naturally, the higher this value, the more you're effectively wrecking an animal's internals with the round.

Between expansion and penetration, you need to choose a round that is right for you. Penetration rewards you for being a sharp shooter that can hit vitals reliably. The penetrating rounds will more reliably pierce thick flesh and strike the vital organs, guaranteeing a drop on the spot or nearby. Conversely, rounds with a focus on expansion help cover sloppy shooting. The nature of causing more body trauma from non-vital hits and flesh wounds guarantee the animal will go down... Eventually. Or maybe immediately. Depends on how much your round actually tore up.

When taking the shot itself, it's pretty much academic that you want to go for vitals. The Heart and Lungs in particular. Generally, the best shot angle and position as described by shooting guides is a side-on profile of the animal with a shot just behind the front legs where they connect to the body. Other guides can expand on this in detail with images.

Alternately, there are a few other shots that can all but guarantee instant drops. A shot to the spine at any point in the body is one of them. If you're looking at an animal from behind and don't believe it's going to give you a good profile, a center-line shot to the neck will either hit the spine in the neck, or cause lethal trauma even with a flesh wound. If you're looking at the body face-on, you can still go for the heart. Aim between the front legs, but low of center mass.

Keep in mind that larger caliber weapons do more damage, though you may lose your 'integrity bonus' when you do so. If you don't care about that bonus and just want XP or money, bigger guns equal easier kills. But remember, on the larger weapons, a box of rounds costs as much as the kill you make. So try and be economical.

Also, make sure you spot your target animal with binos before taking a ranged shot, this'll make it easier to bag them as will be explained shortly.

Post-Shot Tracking

'BLAM!'

You fire your rifle, and your target goes down like a sack of potatoes. If this is the case, and maybe you took the shot at quite the distance. Pull out your binos and keep them on the body as you move in to bag it. You'd be amazed how different an area looks from 300 yards out even before you account for the underbrush draw distances. You might lose track of the body if you don't keep eyes on it all the way in. And while you likely WILL find it, it'll be a few minutes of annoyed searching.

Alternately, the animal doesn't go down, maybe you didn't get the perfect shot and it bolted away injured after stumbling around.

Don't give chase juuuust yet. So long as the animal is up, it can run. And if you're tearing down a hill to go after the animal you just shot, you may find yourself on a cross country hiking trip worse than the stalking phase of your hunt. As a data-point, consider that a Whitetail Deer can run at 30 mph (48 km/h). That's a speed of 13.4 meters per second. Consider a lung shot. If you pop an animal in the lungs, causing them to deflate over a few, let's say five seconds, and also consider that the bloodstream of an animal (based on a human) holds enough oxygen for about ten seconds of useful consciousness.

Well, 13.4 x 15 = 201. In the time it takes an animal just to lose consciousness from air deprivation, it can power sprint the length of two football fields. So spooking it further should be avoided at all costs if you want to find it in a reasonable amount of time. Keep in mind, this is based on lung deflation, not blood loss from rupturing major arteries near the lungs. That kind of damage drops an animal even faster, which is why the suggestion to hit high and near the front of the lungs is suggested.

Now, if you're in or near a need zone, chances are the animal will come back, injured, and ready for a follow up shot. Or maybe it'll drop somewhere in the brush after bleeding out. Hard to tell, but the game has inadvertently given you a tool on the map to determine this.


If you are aware of hunting pressure, the purple circles that appear on a map after a kill that warns you when animals are going to start avoiding and area...

What was that one part? Purple circles that appear on the map AFTER A KILL?

That seems like a pretty good way to determine if you've made the kill or not. I suggest exploiting it, mercilessly.

When you've shot an animal, it may not drop immediately, but run off into the brush to die. Rather than giving chase immediately, check your map and stay put for a few minutes, watching if the hunting pressure circle appears. Note, the HP circle appears centered where you shot the animal for the first time, not where it dies, and not where followup shots are taken. It's the first shot that connects, every time.

If the animal is out of sight, and you see it died by the indication from the map, getting up and moving is now the prudent course of action.

If it hasn't died, keep an eye out. The game has animated animals with injuries. You may spot it limping and staying off a leg, or bowing its head and moving awkwardly. It may still die, or you may need to speed along the process with a follow up shot. Your call. Quick Kill is a bonus after all (though, if you waited long enough for it to limp back from panic, chances are you've already burned out Quick Kill).

One thing to keep in mind, that isn't made clear, is that bleeding animals that have relatively small injuries, such as a flesh wound with a very low bleed rate trail, may not actually die. If you've taken skills to see the animal's remaining health, it may show a percentage range that just never declines past a certain point. At the time of this guide's writing, I am unsure if it is a bug, or a feature. Mentally, I just label this 'minor wound that is healing'. This animal will give you a trickle-blood trail until the end of time, but is otherwise as if you never shot it, and will out pace you. If you want to down this animal, revert to pre-shot hunting routines.

Continuing, do note for yourself that when engaging animals in groups, I really, REALLY suggest shooting and bagging only one animal at a time. Downing multiple animals and then moving in to bag them is more likely to result in trying to track them down in a mess of criss-crossing, double-backing tracks. This can be somewhat difficult if you lose track or lose count. There is also the consecutive harvest bonus, which will reset to zero if you fail to bag one of your downed animals. This becomes more pertinent when it is possible that downing multiple animals can result in one of the first downs getting deleted. Either a glitch, or intended. Just think of it from a realism perspective. You down a deer, you gotta' haul that carcass back to the truck. You can't haul an entire herd.

Anyway, if you recall my mention of spotting an animal with binos first, remember that spotting an animal sets all its tracks to the 'current tracked animal' status, turning them blue. This includes the blood splatters and blood trail if they survive your marksmanship initially. When dealing with a group, having that blue highlight before you run down to the tracks will save you a headache of finding exactly where the splatter went amongst a mess of animated white icons.

As you give chase, focus chiefly on following the blood trail. Footprints may be from older routes, but the blood trail is all but guaranteed. Don't be surprised to find the animal may have fled a hundred yards through all kinds of terrain before succumbing to its injuries. As an example, a White Tail Deer can travel at speeds of to 30 miles per hour. That's fifteen meters a second. If a lung-shot deflates the lungs in five seconds, and the body has ten seconds of oxygen in the blood stream before it passes out and dies, that animal can cover over 200 meters from shot to drop. It's no wonder it seems like the animals can extend on forever sometimes. Tracking a downed animal that's managed to put 150, 200, or even 300 meters between you after being mortally wounded can take quite a bit of time at a walk or crouch-walk. So don't be surprised at the distance.

If you lose the trail for a bit, don't be discouraged. You know it went down thanks to the map. Feel free to take guesses and widen your search area if you dead-end on some droppings. If you have skills taken in tracking, whip out your binos as sometimes the auras for tracks will be more easily spotted in that manner. And when in doubt, if the animal has tended to running in a straight line, feel free to extend beyond the line you've already seen. Often, the path is straighter than you expect. Also, with some of the animals, the distance between tracks can sometimes be unexpectedly large. I once tracked an animal who's blood-trail had a gap almost 70 meters across. I thought it had made an unexpected turn at some point, but found the trail a short time later doing a spiral pattern search. So be prepared for that.

Anyway, the downed body will highlight when you're close enough, and once you see it, collection is a snap.

In Conclusion

Keep a few small generalizations in mind to help remind yourself how to roll.


1: Be patient.
It takes caution and planning to get in close. Hunting is more effective when you think and plan the encounter on your terms, instead of just plain chasing animals down. This isn't Call of Duty, and the map is huge. Try and relax and just flow from one activity to the next. There's no need to hurry.

2: Don't be greedy.
The more you gun down at once, the more you have to keep track of to find the bodies. Keep being patient in mind and remember that the animals that are alive aren't going to vanish, just go elsewhere.

3: Keep moving.
Hunting pressure is less likely to build up in an area if you travel and hunt. And keeping hunting pressure low allows you to use your map as a kill-confirmation screen more easily. I have personally downed more animals just traveling to outposts and lookouts to unlock them, than actually downed in determined tracking. Really, encountering the animals is more about area coverage.

And remember one last thing. Relax, enjoy your hunting. Don't go running around trying to 'beat' the game.








Addendum: Using Callers

When you start getting the hang of it, give the callers a try. Remember, if you can hear them, they can likely hear the caller. A couple of repeats of a Roe 'squeak toy' caller can usually get a Roe Deer in range heading your way. But be aware of two things.

1: The animal will often come RIGHT TO where you've been squeaking. Those comments about them walking right up to ten yards? Using a caller. They WILL eventually see you and bolt.

2: Watch how they approach. Each species is different in its approach pattern. A Roe deer may seem like its about to alert when you watch it approach. But after watching some in a field close on me, I'm fairly certain that a halting, zig-zag search pattern is just how the Roe deer roll.

[CurtisNewton]

Just two additions once your are making progress
- Deadly shots on bears are not too difficult with 243 PSG ammo
- Caversham Steward is perfect for roe deer in Hirschfelden. Though the hit will most likely be reported as a flesh wound only, the deer will fall dead after some yards. And, due to the nature of the ammo, you can be lazy with aiming.

[GibteK]

Each pip in the audio meter represents about 50m in animal awareness for audio only. (Riding the quad bike will send animals fleeing from over 300m away. If they can see you as well then their flight response is amplified. Different animals hear better than others. There is an animal matrix someone has developed but I can't remember where. In general, there's a reason real hunters stalk. (including the animal ones) if you're hunting then stalk.

[Spenard Stu]

okay -so I save my money and bought the 7mm. took me darn near down to zero. I have worked my way back up but cannot find 7mm ammo listed in the store at all. Is this a glitch or do I need more poiints to get this ammo?

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

The audio bars are pretty straight forward. The more bars you have, the louder you are. You have two 'tiers' as well. White bars for 'generally quiet', and yellow bars that overlap them for 'louder than sin'. I can't get a distance measurement as that's really hard to build a metric for, but in general, you don't want to be making much noise when moving in close.

[Jethro]

Thanks for taking the time to do this. I don't mind learning things on my own but a little help from the developers would 've been nice. It's sad that they don't offer a guide at all, especially considering the UI is BS. I won't buy any more products from this developer again if this is how they do things. I'm curious about the sound detection meter in the bottom right corner. Any idea what values the three bars represent?

[vegasguyster]

where do I get the manual so that I may know how to controll all aspects of game?

[DeadRabbit]

Well I thank you for the time you took to help me...I must be having a huge brain fart right now...cause it doesnt work...I have even lost my weapon now...so ammo doesnt matter anymore..ha ha...Anyway, looks like my backpack isnt working..maybe if I re install the problem will correct itself...Ive played a lot of games..and never had this problem..so I think maybe I just have a little bug in my game...Thanks again for your help...

[AdmiralTigerclaw]

Consider that you have multiple types of bullets to use in various firearms. Just buying them won't load your weapons. 1: You need to transfer what you've bought from your shop inventory into your player inventory. IoW: The bullets are bought and 'put in the shed'. You need to 'pull them out of the shed, and put them on you'. Do that by interacting with the shop at any outpost, and dragging them from your storage category, to your player inventory. Might take you a moment to find.
2: Once you have your stuff in your inventory, you need to equip them. Leave the shop, open your player inventory, and you'll see weapons that are assigned an ammo and scope. It's all drag and drop.

[DeadRabbit]

Hi, first of all good info, thank you. What I need is the very basics and I dont see any help on the web. I just purchased the game and have been playing with it now for about 3 days....I have a backpack but cant access it. I have purchased bullits but cant use them...how do I use bullits that I have purchased..right now I cant do anything but watch the animals run by me...If you could suggest a where I can get this info that would really help me...or maybe I have a bug...mmm
thanks in advance for your help

[Jaaaaack]

nice