Suggestion: Better animal Hunting

[OreEnthusiast]

I started the game recently and have been enjoying it quite a lot. I love the visuals, the gameplay, the crafting, the mods, the multiplayer, everything. Almost nothing I particularly dislike. One of the very few things I have found a problem with though is Hunting.

The animals are incredibly janky to kill as they're extremely tanky relative to your damage output in the early to mid game. Prey animals lead you on overly long and tedious chases through terrain and LOS breakers as you chip away at them piece by piece, and Predator animals are so dangerous that you're incentivized to cheese their AI via water, holes, or getting somewhere unreachable. 

Over my few dozen hours playing thus far one of the things I've wished for the most is some kind of mechanic that adds interactivity to the hunt to circumvent the need for those aforementioned problems. Obviously not everyone sees them as problems, but I came to dislike them. 

While doing a lot of hunting for my multiplayer sessions with friends I came up with a spitball idea to theoretically solve this problem: A Wound Mechanic. 

Every animal gets a secondary health like bar that emulates wounds, and all bladed weapons get a secondary "wound" damage stat that applies exclusively to it. Upon being wounded all animals begin bleed leaving trails behind them (purely visual), and are slowed down. The amount of blood left behind and the strength of the slow both increase the more damage is dealt to the wound bar. 

Upon reaching a certain threshold the animal will then be inflicted with a fatal wound where the wound bar will begin to drain until it reaches zero, at which point the animal will die. Additional damage can be applied to secure the kill quicker but they can also be left to bleed out on their own. Excessive damage can also theoretically bypass everything entirely and just kill the animal outright. If desired, additional effects can be added at this point to make it even more interactive. Deer could get 1 last fast sprint off before dying, and Bears could become enraged making them aggressive and dangerous in their last moments. 

The idea is to make the gameplay more interactive and a bit more immersive. 

 

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums and the game!

13 minutes ago, OreEnthusiast said:

A Wound Mechanic. 

I daresay this is something we'll see when the status effect system finally gets added to the game. It only makes sense that wounds would be covered by such a system, and I think animals will likely be able to inflict wounds on players almost as easily as players can wound them.

In the meantime, you might try out this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bloodtrail

While it doesn't make the animals bleed to death, it does make tracking them down a little easier.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

43 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

In the meantime, you might try out this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/bloodtrail

While it doesn't make the animals bleed to death, it does make tracking them down a little easier.

I was just thinking of this mod when reading the post. Yes.

[Bruno Willis]

I've just written about this topic on a very busy, contentious discussion thread, and I'd love to put it more clearly, somewhere more relevant and constructive. Also, I love the blood-trail mod, and I think it is a good addition to the game.

As hunters IRL, both me and my brother enjoy V.S. hunting as it is, but if it needs improving this is what I'd do: In real life, most wounds to an animal will be fatal eventually, but unless the wound drops the animal immediately, you're going to spend the rest of the day looking for it. A deer can run kilometers with a fatal wound. To stop that sort of thing happening hunters will aim for a cluster of arteries just above the heart, at about the top of the shoulder blade. If it hits, blood leaves the animal's brain instantly, killing it on the spot. If they miss the general spot they hit the heart, lungs or break the shoulder blades, which kills the animal almost as fast, or at the least drops it. Any other area, even with a high powered rifle, will allow the animal to run or scramble a good way away (we're talking goats and deer here, not rabbits). To reflect that:

• Add a instant-kill hitbox inside the center of animal's chests. It would have to be small enough to be hard to hit, and only be able to be hit with piercing style weapons (arrows, spears, swords).
• Reward instant kills with more meat. If you're hitting an animal with multiple wounds, or god forbid, wailing on an animal with a tool intended to tear into rust-foe, you're going to damage the meat and spoil some of it. If an animal is dropped in one hit, it yields more meat. 
• Ensure that arrows are more accurate than spears. That way spears can still outpace bows in damage, but bows become better hunting weapons because they can drop an animal instantly, more often.
• Keep the current damage system alongside. Currently animals run away when injured, then lie down for a rest. Keep it, or make them slightly more intelligent about where they hide, but that might be too punishing? There's no need to go full realism, and have them scramble into unreachable bracken to die. 

There are a few caveats.

• Wild pigs are notoriously tough to kill IRL, so I would make the instant-kill hitbox only available from the front, so you can have them run on your boar spear, medieval style. 
• Bears are too big to reach the heart spot (or at least, I feel like they need to remain a boss-level threat, so lets say they are).
• Small animals really shouldn't be able to survive a hit from any of the weapons in the game. I've shot at a rabbit, missed, and it died of shock anyway. Give small animals an instant-kill hitbox which takes up the whole front half of their body. 

[OreEnthusiast]

On 2/13/2026 at 1:29 AM, Bruno Willis said:

I've just written about this topic on a very busy, contentious discussion thread, and I'd love to put it more clearly, somewhere more relevant and constructive. Also, I love the blood-trail mod, and I think it is a good addition to the game.

As hunters IRL, both me and my brother enjoy V.S. hunting as it is, but if it needs improving this is what I'd do: In real life, most wounds to an animal will be fatal eventually, but unless the wound drops the animal immediately, you're going to spend the rest of the day looking for it. A deer can run kilometers with a fatal wound. To stop that sort of thing happening hunters will aim for a cluster of arteries just above the heart, at about the top of the shoulder blade. If it hits, blood leaves the animal's brain instantly, killing it on the spot. If they miss the general spot they hit the heart, lungs or break the shoulder blades, which kills the animal almost as fast, or at the least drops it. Any other area, even with a high powered rifle, will allow the animal to run or scramble a good way away (we're talking goats and deer here, not rabbits). To reflect that:

• Add a instant-kill hitbox inside the center of animal's chests. It would have to be small enough to be hard to hit, and only be able to be hit with piercing style weapons (arrows, spears, swords).
• Reward instant kills with more meat. If you're hitting an animal with multiple wounds, or god forbid, wailing on an animal with a tool intended to tear into rust-foe, you're going to damage the meat and spoil some of it. If an animal is dropped in one hit, it yields more meat. 
• Ensure that arrows are more accurate than spears. That way spears can still outpace bows in damage, but bows become better hunting weapons because they can drop an animal instantly, more often.
• Keep the current damage system alongside. Currently animals run away when injured, then lie down for a rest. Keep it, or make them slightly more intelligent about where they hide, but that might be too punishing? There's no need to go full realism, and have them scramble into unreachable bracken to die. 

There are a few caveats.

• Wild pigs are notoriously tough to kill IRL, so I would make the instant-kill hitbox only available from the front, so you can have them run on your boar spear, medieval style. 
• Bears are too big to reach the heart spot (or at least, I feel like they need to remain a boss-level threat, so lets say they are).
• Small animals really shouldn't be able to survive a hit from any of the weapons in the game. I've shot at a rabbit, missed, and it died of shock anyway. Give small animals an instant-kill hitbox which takes up the whole front half of their body. 

I thought of the same thing as well but because there doesn't seem to be the framework for selective hitboxes I assumed it'd be pointless to suggest as that'd be a mountain of work to implement. Status effects just seem easier to implement from a coding standpoint, however if possible I do think your idea is better.

[Tabbot95]

On 2/15/2026 at 11:15 AM, OreEnthusiast said:

I thought of the same thing as well but because there doesn't seem to be the framework for selective hitboxes I assumed it'd be pointless to suggest as that'd be a mountain of work to implement. Status effects just seem easier to implement from a coding standpoint, however if possible I do think your idea is better.

I'm not sure it would be so hard to implement, might actually be useful for various other projects if they worked out such a framework.. 

 

I'm pretty sure combat overhaul has a selective hitbox setup for serephs.

 

[Thorfinn]

Keep in mind that the easier you make hunting, the less reason there is to bother with animal husbandry. It's already hard to justify the time and resources involved, as there is enough protein on just predators to keep a handful of players topped up.

[LadyWYT]

30 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Keep in mind that the easier you make hunting, the less reason there is to bother with animal husbandry. It's already hard to justify the time and resources involved, as there is enough protein on just predators to keep a handful of players topped up.

Hence why if dispatching hunted animals is made easier, I would expect hunting itself to overall be made more difficult to compensate. With the current balance, larger animals take multiple hits to kill, but are also quite easy to find and tend to ignore the player's approach, to an extent. If the target can be killed in a single hit though, then I'd wager the animals will become harder to find but occur in larger groups(with herding animals), as well as be more inclined to notice a player's approach much sooner and start moving away to avoid said player.

Overall, I think it's more a matter of...where do most players want to put in their effort, when it comes to hunting. Is it in finding a creature to actually hunt and taking time to set up the perfect killshot, knowing that may be the only chance they have for a while(but a decent chunk of product if they succeed)? Or is it more in having lots of opportunities available at the cost of more hits needed to kill the target, with a slightly lower drop rate? I do agree, there needs to be some tradeoff to hunting in order to help encourage players to acquire at least some livestock, aside from just the dairy nutrition. Livestock's primary strength is having lots of animal products with very little risk or effort, at the cost of requiring quite a bit of effort up front to get going. Hunting's strong point is that it doesn't require much investment up front and can be done almost anywhere/anytime, with the main drawback of requiring more overall investment from the player long term.

[Bruno Willis]

On 2/18/2026 at 6:06 AM, LadyWYT said:

Overall, I think it's more a matter of...where do most players want to put in their effort, when it comes to hunting. Is it in finding a creature to actually hunt and taking time to set up the perfect killshot, knowing that may be the only chance they have for a while(but a decent chunk of product if they succeed)? Or is it more in having lots of opportunities available at the cost of more hits needed to kill the target, with a slightly lower drop rate? I do agree, there needs to be some tradeoff to hunting in order to help encourage players to acquire at least some livestock, aside from just the dairy nutrition. Livestock's primary strength is having lots of animal products with very little risk or effort, at the cost of requiring quite a bit of effort up front to get going. Hunting's strong point is that it doesn't require much investment up front and can be done almost anywhere/anytime, with the main drawback of requiring more overall investment from the player long term.

Yeah, I wonder if domestication could also result in fatter, healthier animals, I.e. more fat and meat off gen. 1+ animals than off wild game, as a way to offset hunting being easier... Although that means the whole game gets easier, which we don't want. 

[KingPandaa]

3 hours ago, Bruno Willis said:

Yeah, I wonder if domestication could also result in fatter, healthier animals, I.e. more fat and meat off gen. 1+ animals than off wild game, as a way to offset hunting being easier... Although that means the whole game gets easier, which we don't want. 

I think that if more progression were added to cooking in the game as a whole, we could find more uses for a mechanic like you're talking about. I think Valheim,, with its health and stamina being food-based progression, or The Long Dark, with its new foods adding things like healing or skill buffs could be good. Or we could look at something like the feast mechanic in Valheim, where you put a lot of work in to make one big meal that can be placed and act as a communal meal and might have a longer satiation-free period. These meals could use something that only can be obtained through domestication, validating that effort.

[Bruno Willis]

52 minutes ago, KingPandaa said:

I think Valheim,, with its health and stamina being food-based progression,

V.S. health is tied to nutrition already, in a very nice, subtle way, using the nutrition bars. The higher each nutrition bar is, the more health you get. It doesn't seem like much, but when you get them all full you really notice the improvement.

I would like an extra "nutrition" bar for something like variety, novelty, flavor, etc. If we had that extra bar, I could imagine adding an extra type of meat, something like a "prime cut," which could only be taken from domestic animals, which would fill the novelty bar faster, as well as be a more filling version of red meat. 

[MKMoose]

13 minutes ago, Bruno Willis said:

Yeah, I wonder if domestication could also result in fatter, healthier animals, I.e. more fat and meat off gen. 1+ animals than off wild game, as a way to offset hunting being easier... Although that means the whole game gets easier, which we don't want. 

To some extent that is already the case, since it's easy to feed domesticated animals until they reach good weight, whereas wild animals will generally be at the weight you find them at, which can be especially low in the winter months (or at least it's supposed to). You'd probably have to set up a trough in the wild to somehow feed them, and most people don't bother as far as I can tell. Some changes with generations would make a lot of sense, though, even if only visual - sheep more wooly, boars less hairy and providing more fat (in part to make them stand out from other animals, over which they don't really anything unique), and so on.

I personally think animal husbandry could be reworked to require more regular feeding and generally more effort to achieve proper results, which could counterbalance an increase to animal yields. And that might require changes to farming as well. As it stands, animal husbandry largely functions as a nutrition type conversion of sorts, but the costs beyond the initial setup end up being almost irrelevant in many cases due to the abundance of food once a good farm is set up, and for the most part it only takes a whole bunch of waiting. And in the case of chickens you don't even really have to wait particularly long for anything.

[Bruno Willis]

On 2/18/2026 at 6:06 AM, LadyWYT said:

Overall, I think it's more a matter of...where do most players want to put in their effort, when it comes to hunting. Is it in finding a creature to actually hunt and taking time to set up the perfect killshot, knowing that may be the only chance they have for a while(but a decent chunk of product if they succeed)? Or is it more in having lots of opportunities available at the cost of more hits needed to kill the target, with a slightly lower drop rate? I do agree, there needs to be some tradeoff to hunting in order to help encourage players to acquire at least some livestock, aside from just the dairy nutrition. Livestock's primary strength is having lots of animal products with very little risk or effort, at the cost of requiring quite a bit of effort up front to get going. Hunting's strong point is that it doesn't require much investment up front and can be done almost anywhere/anytime, with the main drawback of requiring more overall investment from the player long term.

I personally think it'd be more fun to find an animal, track it, and bring it down with a perfect shot, and be done with hunting for a while, than it is to see an animal, hit it, chase it, see it again, hit it, repeat until dead. The second option is not so realistic, but also looses some of the anticipation and risk in taking the shot, which I think is the exciting part of hunting. It's all about: "Do I take shot here, or do I wait for it to step closer to the pool? Should I creep closer? If I do, I might spook it, but if I don't, I might miss."  At the moment you just take any shot that you can, and the worst that happens is you lose your last spear and have to spook the animal trying to retrieve it. 

On 2/13/2026 at 8:29 PM, Bruno Willis said:

Reward instant kills with more meat. If you're hitting an animal with multiple wounds, or god forbid, wailing on an animal with a tool intended to tear into rust-foe, you're going to damage the meat and spoil some of it. If an animal is dropped in one hit, it yields more meat. 

I was thinking about this, and if an instant kill yielded more meat, a guaranteed way to get an instant kill is to kill a domesticated animal with a cleaver. I think it would be a really interesting trade-off if in order to get a full meat yield you could either:

1. Hunt skillfully and drop targets in one shot, or
2. domesticate animals, and then reliably drop them in one with the cleaver. 

In this situation, I'd say the more times an animal was hit before it died, the less meat it would produce. Sort of like how an animal which falls off a cliff is too mangled to offer much meat.

[LadyWYT]

55 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I personally think animal husbandry could be reworked to require more regular feeding and generally more effort to achieve proper results, which could counterbalance an increase to animal yields.

I'm of the same mindset, though I'd also extend it to mounts as well. Mounts that are fed regularly(either via trough or grazing) will be in good condition, and thus able to travel faster/sprint longer/have more health than mounts that are in poor condition. Riding mounts should gradually decrease their condition over time, requiring the player to occasionally stop and properly rest after several days of consistent travel.

Granted, I doubt it would be a terribly popular change either, however, it would be a little nice to have a bit of reward for actually caring for a mount, as well as a little reason to stop and camp while traveling(other than to just pass the night). As it stands, mounts can be ridden at full gallop day and night without consequence.