Hunting: tracking and the shot

Animals live where they really would, and they smell you on the wind. Stay downwind, move slowly, and carry a round with enough energy for a clean kill. Gunfire during a hunt draws the dead.

Reading the wind

The small chevron on your compass points the way the wind is blowing, and it gets bolder the stronger the wind. Your scent goes the same way. The climate line says where the wind comes from and how fast, for example Wind from SE · 14 mph. Close in on an animal with the wind in your face, so the chevron sits behind you.

• With animals or infected nearby, a Scent cue appears under the compass. Carrying means the wind is taking your scent to them, Hidden means you're downwind of them, and Crosswind is in between. Pooling means the air is still, so your scent spreads a short way in every direction.
• A stronger wind carries your scent further. Keen-nosed animals like deer smell you a long way downwind, but never from upwind.
• You can hide the chevron under Settings, Interface, Wind on the compass. The wind line and the scent cue stay.

Hunter sense

Hold U to read the ground. The world fades and fresh hoof and paw prints show as a glowing trail, blood shows as drops with a faint pulse running the way the animal went, and signs glow amber. Any live animal in clear sight within about ninety meters gets a faint outline. Walk up to a glowing mark and look at it to see what it is, and look at a sign with ALT to Read the sign. Two signs read at one spot tell you what the animals use it for, and that goes into your hunter's log.

• Prints last about three quarters of an hour and blood about half an hour. Rain washes both away much sooner.
• The trail reaches further as your Hunting skill grows, from about fifty-five meters to ninety.
• It doesn't work from inside a vehicle.

Binoculars

Use your binoculars and scroll the mouse wheel to zoom from 2x to 10x. Hold an animal in the center for a couple of seconds and a card tells you its species, sex, age, weight and condition. Experienced hunters can also judge a trophy and spot an animal that looks sick.

Where to put the bullet

• Brain or neck: it drops where it stands.
• Heart: it runs fifteen to forty-five meters and is dead within seconds. A heavy round sometimes knocks it straight down.
• Lungs: it runs twenty-five to seventy meters, leaving frothy pink blood.
• Liver: it runs up to a hundred and sixty meters, beds down and dies in a minute or two. Dark blood means wait before you follow.
• Paunch: it runs a long way, takes minutes to die and taints part of the meat.
• Shoulder, hindquarter or leg: a wounded animal that may well live. Walking within thirty-five meters of a wounded animal that has bedded down makes it get up and run again.

A bullet loses energy over distance, and every animal needs a minimum to go down cleanly. A small round in the vitals only wounds, and a big round on small game ruins the meat. Buckshot falls off fast past a few dozen meters. Fists, tasers and gas only frighten animals.

Hit marker and bullet cam

A tick at the reticle tells you what happened: a hit, a vital hit, the animal going down, or a clean miss. On a kill or a vital hit with a scoped rifle past thirty meters, the bullet cam follows the round to the animal in slow motion, and your first kill of each session always gets it. It never plays with the dead close by, right after you've been hurt, or while you're flagged for PvP. Skip it with SPACE, BACKSPACE, right mouse or ESC. Both can be switched off in Settings, under Interface, Hunting.

Real hunters wait after a liver or gut shot. Follow too soon and you push the animal a long way before it dies. See Butchering and preserving for what to do once it's down.