Hunting & Wildlife

Wild animals don't stand around to be clubbed, and meat isn't free. Hunting is a craft of stealth, patience, and endurance.

Wary game

Wild animals are skittish, and they watch you with two senses — sight and smell:

• Sight/sound. Standing, they spot you at about 12 blocks and bolt. Crouch (stalk) and they only notice you up close (~4 blocks), so you can creep in.
• Smell — and this is the one that matters. An animal smells you from ~20 blocks when you're upwind of it (your scent blows to it), and no amount of crouching hides that. Your scent rides the prevailing wind exactly as it does for predators: it reaches an animal downwind of you and blows harmlessly away from one upwind.

So to actually get close to a deer you have to beat both — crouch and keep the wind in your face (approach from downwind). Stalk in standing, or with the wind at your back, and it's gone before you're in range. Reading the wind isn't just about predators; it's the heart of the stalk — the way it is in real life and on the show. Failing that, wear the animal down by persistence.

Domestic livestock (cows, pigs, sheep, chickens) stay calm, so farming and herding still work — but you won't meet them out in the wild any more (see The wild is wild — livestock live at villages).

Persistence hunting — run it down

Wild game outruns you — you can't run it down in a sprint. But it can't run forever, and you can: that's persistence hunting, humanity's oldest method and our species' real advantage — endurance. You pace it at a jog and keep it moving until it overheats and collapses, the way people ran down deer and antelope before the bow. It's a long grind, not a dash — a proper hunt, not a grab.

• Pace it, don't chase it flat-out. Once you've spooked an animal it stays on the run, and it keeps fleeing as long as you stay within range — so you don't have to sprint-glue to it (you couldn't anyway). Jog to keep it in sight, and sprint only in bursts to close the gap; sprinting burns stamina fast, so a hunt is paced, like the real thing.

• It tires slowly. Keep it running and it builds chase fatigue over minutes — a mid-size deer takes ~2–3 minutes of sustained pressure to exhaust. It starts to visibly flag partway through and slows more and more as it nears collapse, until it's slow enough to run down and finish by hand — no bow required.

• Don't let it rest. Fatigue only builds while it's actually fleeing, and a worked animal stays hot — it cools off only slowly if you fall back, and much slower than it tires. So keep the pressure on; lose it for long and you'll have to start the wear-down over.

• This is for wild game that runs — not calm livestock, tamed pets, or bold predators (wolves and polar bears don't tire this way).

• Little animals wind faster than big ones. A quarry's endurance scales with its body size: a light animal (a rabbit) is spent in ~1 minute, a mid-size deer takes ~2–3, and a big-bodied horse has real staying power at ~5. And a skilled tracker reads the quarry and presses it harder, so the better you get, the sooner it flags.

Blood trails — track a wounded animal

Wound an animal and it bleeds, and while it flees it drips a trail of blood you can follow — the other half of tracking.

• The wound bleeds heavier the harder you hit it, and clots over time as the bleeding runs down.
• The drops fade within a second or two of hitting the ground, so what you see is a short, fresh dotted line trailing the animal — enough to follow it through brush and over a rise, but only while it's fresh. Track it promptly or the trail goes cold.
• Pairs with persistence hunting: wound it, then stay on it — the blood shows you where it went, and the chase wears it down.

A deep wound is mortal. While an animal is badly bleeding it loses blood and weakens — about 1 health a second, tapering as the wound clots. So a solid hit bleeds it out and drops small game (a rabbit, a chicken) outright, while a graze only clots and heals. Big game needs more than one good wound. This is what makes a well-placed shot worth landing: put a real wound in it, follow the blood, and the bleeding finishes the work.

A bleed-out death isn't a blade kill, so it still forfeits the hide (same as an arrow kill) — finish it with a blade if you want the hide.

A blade kill butchers the carcass — hide, bone, and sinew

Killing a hide-bearing animal with a blade (knife, sword, axe, or spear) lets you work the whole carcass: it salvages a raw hide, bone, and often a strand of sinew (cordage), on top of the meat — plus a lump of animal brains you'll need to tan the hide (see below). Kill it with a blunt tool or bare hands and you waste it all — no clean butchering means no hide, bone, or sinew, only the meat. (Animals don't drop leather in their base loot at all — everything comes from a blade kill, so a clubbed cow gives just beef.) See Tools & Crafting.

The hide comes off green — a fresh kill gives you a wet raw hide, not usable leather. Turning it into leather is a separate, patient job (see From raw hide to leather).

The salvage scales with the animal. A big-bodied beast gives a proper hide and heavy bone; a mid-size grazer (pig, sheep, cow, deer) gives a usable hide; and small game — a rabbit or squirrel — gives only a scrap of pelt and little bone, sometimes barely worth the skinning. You don't get a cow's worth of leather off a squirrel.

Every part has a use:

• Bone is a real tool material, not just fertilizer — one bone, several jobs, so a kill is worth carving up:
  • → crushed into bonemeal, a real fertilizer that feeds the soil (restoring a tilled plot's fertility — it doesn't force-ripen the plant) — so a good hunt helps grow the produce that keeps scurvy at bay.
  • → a bone scraper (bone + cordage + a stick): a fleshing tool that halves tanning time — see below.
  • → bone marrow (crack a bone): the fatty, calorie-dense tissue inside, a rare source of fat out here. A small morsel that fills you well out of proportion to its size — but raw, it spoils like any offal, so eat it fresh.
  • → a bone hook (a carved gorge-hook): with cordage and a stick it makes a primitive fishing rod, so you can fish before you ever smelt iron — genuine early tech.
• Sinew (string) → animal cordage, an alternative to twisting plant fibre — for rope, bandages, bows, and more.
• Raw fat → tallow → a candle. A big carcass carries fat you strip off when you butcher (1–2 off big game like a bison, boar, or bear; a scrap off a mid-size grazer; nothing off lean small game). It's no use raw — render it down over a fire (a campfire while you're still hunting rough, or a furnace once you have one) and it clarifies into tallow, a stable block of hard fat. Cast that around a cordage wick (tallow + string) and you have a candle — a dim, honest light. That's the last of the nose-to-tail use: meat, hide, bone, sinew, marrow, brains, and now the fat all find a purpose.

From raw hide to leather — tanning

A fresh hide is green — wet, and useless as it is. In real life leather is made, not pulled off the animal ready to wear: you scrape the hide, tan it, and let it cure over days. So leather here is a worked product — and the tool for it is the one you already build to dry meat: the drying rack. A lashed frame of poles is a lashed frame of poles; a real camp uses the same rack to dry meat and to stretch and tan a hide, and so do you. What the rack does depends on what you load it with.

• Load a raw hide by right-clicking the rack while you're carrying a lump of animal brains — the classic brain-tan, because "a beast has just enough brains to tan its own hide." Both are consumed to start the work, and the hide stretches on the frame while it cures. (Try it without brains and the rack tells you it won't take.)
• Flesh it first with a bone scraper and the work goes far faster. A real hide is scraped — fat and membrane taken off — before it will take the tan. If you're carrying a bone scraper when you load the hide, it's fleshed on the spot and tans in half the time; the scraping wears the scraper down (it fleshes about 16 hides before the bone edge is gone). It's a soft bonus — tanning still works without one, just at the full, slow pace.
• Come back days later. Tanning is the slow, patient job — the rack works for roughly three in-game days (about an hour of real time, and it keeps curing while the chunk is unloaded, so it runs through the days you fast-forward by resting). That's deliberately about twice as long as the same rack takes to cure meat: leather is the more involved craft.
• Check it with a right-click — while it's still working this reports progress ("Tanning… 40%"), and once it's done the same click takes the leather. It only comes off early if you sneak + right-click, which gives the raw hide back but wastes the brains and restarts the tanning — so leave it to finish.

(One rack, two jobs — hang meat on it to dry into jerky, or a hide to tan into leather. See the drying rack for the meat side and how weather and a smoky fire affect it.)

Because each kill drops one lump of brains per hide (big animals run slightly brain-short — one skull, a large skin), you can roughly tan what you hunt, but not for free. Leather is now something you earn: a dangerous hide off a bison, or a hide off your own hunting, then days on the rack — the whole reason a leather coat or a tarp is a real mid-game milestone rather than a punched-cow freebie.

Tan promptly — the brains spoil. Brains are offal: like meat, a lump of brains rots if you sit on it too long (faster in the heat, slower in the cold — the same freshness clock as food), and rotten brains are useless. The raw hide itself keeps — a green hide you can hang onto — but without brains to tan it, that hide is stuck until your next kill provides more. So a fresh kill is a use-it window: get the hide onto a rack while its brains are still good.

The wild is wild — livestock live at villages

Cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens are farmed animals, not wildlife — so, like real life, you won't find them roaming the open country. Their natural spawns are held to villages: a village is where a cow, pig, sheep, or chicken lives, as the settlement's own herd. Out in the meadows and forests you'll meet only genuinely wild animals — skittish prey and dangerous game.

This is the same logic that keeps hostile mobs near ruins and structures: the empty wild stays wild, and the things humans keep stay where humans are. It also hardens the early economy — there's no free beef, wool, or hide from a cow you punch in a field. Livestock (and the leather, wool, and meat they give) become something you find at, tend at, or take from a village. Breeding still works normally, so once you've got a pair home from a village you can farm them; the veto only stops them appearing wild in the first place.

Deer — the forest's wild game

The deer is the proper wild game of the woods — the animal a survivor really lives off. It's a skittish grazer: get near and it bolts, running fast, so you can't just walk up and club it. You stalk it (stay downwind, move slow) or run it down by persistence hunting over distance. A blade kill yields venison and a hide (with bone and sinew), like any hide-bearing animal, and deer count as game — overhunt a patch and they thin out. They spawn in forest, taiga, and hill country in small herds, and — like all animals — won't breed in winter.

(Deer currently use placeholder cow art until a proper deer model is made.)

Small game — the staple you actually live on

Big game is a jackpot; most days you eat small game. Alongside the vanilla rabbit and chicken, the woods hold the squirrel — all of them proper skittish wild game that bolts, so you stalk it, run it down (small animals wind fast), or trap it. Each gives only a scrap of meat, so small game is a numbers game: you take several, not one big kill. They count as game too — hunt a patch of them too hard and they thin out. It's the food economy of the show Alone: rarely a deer, often a squirrel.

The squirrel doesn't flee like a rabbit — it scurries along the ground, and when you close within a dozen-odd blocks it makes for the nearest tree and climbs the trunk, then clings and watches from up in the canopy where you can't follow on foot. Cornered near a tree it goes vertical, not sideways — so you either take the shot before it reaches a trunk, get one out in the open away from timber, or trap it. (It only climbs actual trees, not walls or fences.)

The slingshot — the first ranged weapon

Before the bow there's the slingshot — a forked stick, two bands, and a leather pouch (stick + string + leather). It flings a foraged loose rock: draw by holding right-click to build power, then loose (release) to sling the stone at whatever you're aiming at. A full draw carries ~20 blocks and hits hard enough to drop a rabbit, chicken, or squirrel — but it barely troubles anything big, so it's a small-game food-getter, not a war weapon. The stone flies true (it's stopped by a wall, and a weak draw carries only a short way), and each shot spends one rock, so keep a few loose stones on you. It's a natural loadout pick when you want to eat without closing to arm's reach.

(Squirrels currently use placeholder rabbit art until a proper squirrel model is made.)

Dangerous game — the bison and the wild boar

Not all wild game runs. Two animals hold their ground and fight back — they're the big-meat, big-hide prizes of the wild, but taking one is a real risk, not a walk-up club. Unlike a skittish deer you can't just wear them down; you have to actually beat them.

The bison is the wild bovine — the "wild cow" that fills the big-grazer niche a docile cow used to. It's a heavy, dangerous animal: it grazes the open plains and savanna in herds, calm until provoked, but hit one and it charges and gores with real force (it hits hard and knocks you back), and the whole herd turns on you — one careless swing and you've got several tons of angry bovine bearing down. It has far more health than a cow (it's built to survive a fight), so you commit to the kill. A shield won't save you — like a bear, a charging bison's mass smashes a braced guard aside (knocked down for a few seconds), so there's no turtling behind a shield. The payoff matches the risk: a bison gives a big haul of beef and, blade-butchered, several hides — the wild's answer to cow-leather now that cows live only at villages. This is the realism: big-game hide and meat are huntable in the wild, but you earn them at knifepoint.

The wild boar is the forest's mid-size version — the wild ancestor of the pig. It roots around the forest, taiga, and swamp peacefully, but it's not placid: corner it or strike it and it charges and gores (a real boar is genuinely dangerous). It's tougher than a farm pig, hits hard, and its charge shoves you back — you can't just stand and trade blows. And a shield is no answer: a real boar is low and fast, so its charge bowls your guard aside for a moment and drives in under the shield at your legs (the vanilla shield-stagger — briefer than the bison's full smash, a stagger you recover from). The lesson is the historical one: boar were hunted with a crossguard spear, not a shield — you take the charge off your guard and strike on its overshoot, rather than hold block. A blade kill yields pork and a usable hide.

Both are butchered like any hide-bearing animal — a blade kill gives the hide (to tan), bone, and sinew; a blunt or bare-handed kill wastes all of it and leaves only the meat, so bring a knife if you want the hide. And both count as game, so a hunted-out plain or wood thins of them too.

(Bison and wild boar currently reuse vanilla cow/pig art — scaled up for the bison — until proper models are made.)

Trapping — the food that works while you don't

Active hunting costs time and daylight; a trap feeds you while you do everything else. It's how people really live on the show Alone. You have two land traps — the snare and the deadfall — and which you reach for is a real decision that comes down to what you can spare (see below).

The snare is a cordage noose set on the ground.

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• Craft it from cordage: two string and a stick — and string is a real investment now (strip plant fibre, then slowly reverse-wrap it into a length), so a snare is cordage you've earned.
• Set it on solid ground near cover and a game trail, then leave it. Over time, small game blunders in and it springs — you can see a set snare from an empty one.
• Check it with a right-click: take the catch — a scrap of small-game meat, sometimes a hide — and the snare resets itself for the next one. Break it to pick the snare back up.
• It catches rarely, and only draws on the local game population — a snare in stripped-out country catches almost nothing. So you set a line of snares and walk it, the way a real trapper does, rather than trusting one. Trapping is patient, mostly-empty work that pays off across days, not a food faucet.
• A snare near camp keeps working through the days you fast-forward by resting — you wake, walk the line, and see what the night brought.

(The snare currently uses placeholder string/cord art until a proper model is made.)

The deadfall — bait for better odds

The deadfall is the other trap: a heavy stone propped over a trigger, the Paiute trap. Where the snare costs cordage but then runs itself, the deadfall needs no cordage at all — you can build one your first day — but it costs bait and is one-shot, in return for pulling game in far better:

• Craft it from two rocks and two sticks (a heavy flat stone and its trigger).
• Set it on the ground, then right-click it with any food to bait and arm it — you can see a baited trap from an unset one. The bait is spent when you arm it.
• Baited, it catches better than a snare (the bait draws game in) and gives a larger haul — one to two meat, more often a hide. When it springs, the stone drops.
• Right-click the sprung trap to take the catch; it collapses and must be re-baited to use again.

Which trap, and when

The choice between them is the real one a trapper makes, and it comes down to what you can spare — cordage, bait, or energy:

• No cordage yet? Build a deadfall. It's just rocks, sticks, and a scrap of bait — buildable your first day, before you've twisted any string. The price is that it eats food to bait, is one-shot (re-bait after every catch), and is hands-on to tend — the primitive, higher-effort option.
• Have cordage? Run snares. Cordage is a real investment now (strip fibre, then a slow twist), but once you've paid it, a snare is bait-free, passive, and resets itself — you set a line and walk it for next to no food and almost no energy.

That's exactly how it goes on Alone: with cordage to spare you run passive snares — they cost no food and barely any energy, which is everything when you're starving — and with none (or with bait to spare and game that comes to food) you fall back on the deadfall. Both draw on the local game population, so neither works a stripped-out patch, and both reward spreading a line across country rather than bunching them on one spot.

The fish trap — passive fishing

The fish trap (a woven basket weir) is the top rung, and the way you really fish on Alone: set it in the water and it catches fish passively, no rod and no standing on the bank.

• Craft it from sticks and string (a woven funnel basket).
• Set it on the water's surface — like a lily pad, at the edge of a pond, lake, or shore.
• It draws on the same finite, size-scaled fish stock the rod does, so a trap in a small pond fishes it out and then sits empty, while one on a lake or the sea keeps producing. Right-click a trap holding a fish to take it; it resets itself.
• Like the land traps, it keeps working through the days you fast-forward by resting — set it before bed, take the catch in the morning.

The gill net — the open-water alternative

The gill net is the weir's portable, open-water cousin — a mesh of cordage (crafted from string, no basket) you string across deep water. Where the weir funnels fish at any shoreline, the net is a lake-and-coast tool:

• It only fishes open, deep water — set it on a puddle or a narrow creek and it catches nothing (the fish just go around it), so you read the water before you set it.
• It's faster than the weir, and it holds a batch — up to three fish accumulate before it's full — so you check it less often and haul up a catch at once (right-click to take the whole lot).
• It draws on the same finite fish stock, so even open water thins if you work it too hard.

So the two fishing traps split by water: the weir for a shore or pond, the gill net for open water — pick the tool to the place.

So the trapping ladder is three passive food sources you set and leave: the snare (free small game), the deadfall (baited small game, better odds), and the fish trap (passive fishing) — the backbone of how you eat when you can't hunt every hour of daylight.

(All three traps use placeholder art until proper models are made.)

Game runs out if you overhunt

Wild game isn't infinite. Hunt one patch of country too hard and you thin it out — the animals grow scarce there and stop spawning, until the population breeds back over the following days, or you move to fresh ground. It's the hunting twin of finite fish stocks: a small valley empties fast, a broad range lasts. So a survivor works a range rather than camping one spot and stripping it bare. (Predators don't count as game — only the animals you hunt for food.)

The wind carries your scent

There is a prevailing wind — a single direction the whole map shares, steady through the day and shifting from one day to the next. It matters because scent travels downwind:

• A predator that lies downwind of you (where the wind is blowing) smells your carried meat and blood from much further — up to about 1.6× the normal reach.
• A predator upwind of you barely catches you at all — down to about 0.4×.
• So you can slip past a bear, or work a carcass, by keeping predators upwind of you, so your scent blows away from them rather than toward them.

While you're carrying fresh meat you feel the wind — the game tells you which way it's blowing from — so you can plan your line. It's the same read a real hunter makes before every stalk.

Carrying meat draws predators

Fresh meat you carry reeks, drawing wolves, brown bears, and polar bears. A drawn predator comes for you — it turns hostile and closes in, not a passive walk-up you can club for free, so it's a real threat you have to fend off or flee; if it reaches you it may snatch a piece and bolt with it. But it isn't relentless: once it's grabbed a piece or you've driven it off (hurt it), it gives up on you for a few hours rather than pestering you in an endless stream. Preserving or caching your meat — so it doesn't reek — is the real counter. See Food Preservation.

The brown bear

The brown bear is the forest's big predator — the one that actually belongs in the temperate and boreal woods this game is set in, where a polar bear never would. It's built like its polar cousin (same bulk, same "leave me and my cubs alone" temperament) but roams forests and taiga instead of the snow. It's a bold predator: it doesn't flee from you, it holds its ground, it tracks the meat you carry, and it can't be run down by persistence hunting the way skittish game can. Kill one with a blade and it yields a hide like any hide-bearing animal.

A shield won't save you from it. You can turn a person's blade with a raised shield, but bracing one against a bear (or a ravager, an iron golem, or the warden) is folly — the mass and power bash your guard aside, knocking the shield down for a few seconds so the next blow lands on flesh. You can brace a single hit; you can't turtle behind a shield against a charging bear.

Shields come in tiers. All three block the same, but they differ in how much they take before they break and how badly a big creature bashes them aside:

• Wicker shield (branches lashed with cordage — sticks + plant fibre): the day-one guard, before any metal. It blocks, but it's flimsy — the lowest durability, and it's knocked aside the longest when a beast smashes it.
• Wooden shield (plank boards faced with hide — planks + leather): the round-shield tier — far sturdier, and bashed aside for less.
• Shield (the vanilla wood-and-iron shield): the metal-reinforced top tier — the toughest, and the least time knocked down.

So a shield is worth upgrading, but no tier lets you turtle against a bear — the bash scales, it never stops.

The iron golem — you can't cheese a giant

An iron golem is a multi-ton iron construct, and it drops its iron when killed — but taking that iron is meant to be a real, dangerous fight, not a safe farm. So the two usual ways to cheese a big mob don't work on it:

• You can't wall it off. Hurt it from behind a one-block wall or poke it through a small hole, and it smashes through the cover — pulverising the dirt, wood, or stone in the way to open a path straight to you. Only earth-, wood-, and stone-tier blocks give way; metal, obsidian, and deepslate are too tough for even a golem, so a genuinely fortified bunker still holds — a thrown-up dirt wall does not.
• You can't perch above it. Climb a tall pillar or ledge just out of its reach and hit down, and it reaches up and strikes you anyway — a 3–4 block perch no longer keeps you safe.
• You can't tower up and snipe it. Throw up a taller pillar to shoot it with a bow from safety and it digs the pillar out from under you — loose earth has no cohesion, so an undermined dirt tower collapses and drops you back into its reach. (A proper fortified position — natural high ground, or stone/obsidian you actually built — still gives you the archer's advantage; a flung-up dirt column doesn't.)
• It won't stand in the open eating arrows. Shoot it from range and — if it has a clear path to you — it just charges, closing the distance fast (it'll hunt you from a good way off). Only when the direct approach is blocked does it break for cover instead, working its way in behind anything solid — and because it's a ~2.7 m construct, it takes real cover (something tall enough to hide it, not a one-block wall) to screen it. Either way, sniping from range only buys you time until it's on you.

The lesson is the same as the bear's: against something this big and strong, there's no free poke from safety. Stand and fight it properly, or leave it be. (Its iron is a risky, one-off prize — not a bypass for the bloomery, which stays your steady source.)