Deer shouldnt have as much health

[Chuckerton]

I can understand other wildlife having as much health as they do because they fight back and arent as skittish but according to the wiki most deer have at least 20 health, which i think is absurd for how much you have to do to actually hunt a deer. A thrown flint spear does 3. Could you imagine our caveman ancestors about to go on a hunt and theyre like "hey grug bring like 30 spears because you gotta stick 7 spears in a deer to kill it and we need to feed the whole tribe"

I just feel like hunting in general should be more... decisive? I feel like if i can sneak within spear throwing (and with better metals and bows, arrow shooting) range, and hit a good head or chest hit, the creature should be dead. I feel like its something you would expect given how detailed and simulated other aspects in this game are. Id far prefer careful sneaking and tracking over chase it across a field for 10 minutes until it gets stuck in a lake or an awkward bit of terrain so you can spear it. 

[Crabsoft]

I don't know what the correct HP value is, but yeah absolutely, groups of guys with quivers or handfuls of javelins would hunt a single animal. Even a crude bow, not properly aged and formed, is going to lack the draw weight to reliably pierce all that moving muscle with a sharp rock. I'm no hunter, so I could just be mistaken, but I never found it that odd. 

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Chuckerton said:

I just feel like hunting in general should be more... decisive? I feel like if i can sneak within spear throwing (and with better metals and bows, arrow shooting) range, and hit a good head or chest hit, the creature should be dead. I feel like its something you would expect given how detailed and simulated other aspects in this game are. Id far prefer careful sneaking and tracking over chase it across a field for 10 minutes until it gets stuck in a lake or an awkward bit of terrain so you can spear it. 

It's probably the kind of thing that will become a little more refined with a status effect system, but otherwise I feel hunting in videogames is a little hard to balance. If it's purely a hunting game, then it's easier to justify killing animals in a single shot, because the entire game is based on the premise of actually finding the animals and then getting close enough to line up the killshot. Vintage Story, however, has a lot more things to do than just hunting, including livestock. Hunting can't take too much time, or else the player becomes frustrated that they don't have time to devote to things other than basic survival; it also can't be too easy, or livestock ceases to have much value. In my case, I know that if I could reliably drop deer and boar with single shots(or maybe two), I wouldn't need to bother with livestock at all, since the only real advantage at that point is dairy(which can be skipped). As it stands currently, livestock is valuable because with a little work, it ensures that players can avoid dealing with dangerous animals and environments, and have clean kills via the butcher knife instead.

[cjc813]

Hunting and animal HP is pretty unbalanced overall, imo.

It shouldn't require a recurve bow and metal arrowheads to 1 shot a rabbit.

3+ iron spears and this moose is still fine?

That doesn't seem right.

[LadyWYT]

13 minutes ago, cjc813 said:

It shouldn't require a recurve bow and metal arrowheads to 1 shot a rabbit.

As of 1.22, it shouldn't require that to kill a rabbit. I've been able to kill them with one shot of a flint spear, as a Blackguard. That wasn't possible before.

[williams_482]

14 minutes ago, cjc813 said:

3+ iron spears and this moose is still fine?

That doesn't seem right.

3 Iron spears probably do less damage than a car, and moose walk away from automobile collisions all the time.

[MKMoose]

2 hours ago, williams_482 said:

3 Iron spears probably do less damage than a car, and moose walk away from automobile collisions all the time.

FYI, a moose has 21 health and will die in 6 melee hits or 4 ranged hits with an iron spear. Which, oddly enough, is actually the same as most deer, and less than the elk which has 30 health - if we were to take the deer as a reference, then the moose should have its health roughly doubled. But I do think that the point seems to be also about lack of reaction to wounds and blood loss, not just about immediate damage.

 

3 hours ago, cjc813 said:

It shouldn't require a recurve bow and metal arrowheads to 1 shot a rabbit.

As of 1.22, the hare had its health reduced to 3, making it possible to one-shot it using a longbow with any arrows or a crude bow with 0+ damage arrows.

 

3 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

It's probably the kind of thing that will become a little more refined with a status effect system, but otherwise I feel hunting in videogames is a little hard to balance. If it's purely a hunting game, then it's easier to justify killing animals in a single shot, because the entire game is based on the premise of actually finding the animals and then getting close enough to line up the killshot. Vintage Story, however, has a lot more things to do than just hunting, including livestock. Hunting can't take too much time, or else the player becomes frustrated that they don't have time to devote to things other than basic survival; it also can't be too easy, or livestock ceases to have much value. In my case, I know that if I could reliably drop deer and boar with single shots(or maybe two), I wouldn't need to bother with livestock at all, since the only real advantage at that point is dairy(which can be skipped). As it stands currently, livestock is valuable because with a little work, it ensures that players can avoid dealing with dangerous animals and environments, and have clean kills via the butcher knife instead.

I would not expect the status effect system to introduce any significant changes, at least not within the same major update in which the system is added. Both because it is more sensible to introduce a large system step-by-step, and because it doesn't seem to me that the devs even have any significant interest in overhauling large parts of the game.

That said, killing animals with a single shot, which in isolation would absolutely trivialize parts of the game, can be easily balanced with two main factors:

• better animal AI - more aware of the player, fleeing easily, requiring skill to approach,
• tracking after the shot - a one-hit-kill doesn't have to make the animal drop on the spot, and having to track the animal could easily take the same amount of time that chasing it frantically through the bushes takes currently - realistically, larger animals like deer will nearly always run at least a couple dozen meters after getting their lungs pierced (even with modern compound bows), while a suboptimal hit, if it's even fatal, often leaves them running for hundreds of meters before collapsing.

This would also mean that animal husbandry would retain its benefits, because you naturally wouldn't need to carefully approach a domesticated animal and then track it after a difficult shot - just walk up to it with a knife and kill nearly on the spot (which shouldn't be done with a cleaver, but that's another matter). In order to make hunting take up a more appropriate amount of time, it would be easy enough to increase animal yields to be more realistic - and doubly so if harvesting and preserving animals is made more time-consuming, instead of a simplistic "pick up, throw in the cellar".

If there are any concerns about it being too complex or anything of that sort, then I offer you: trapping. Primarily snare and deadfall traps, for rabbits, squirrels and birds, to provide the player with an accessible source of meat and small hides in the early game. Trapping pits for larger animals are an option and improvised solutions will always be possible, but keeping hunting as the primary method for killing the larger animals is desirable from a design standpoint. To create a natural progression system - as the player acquires better gear, they would become increasingly better suited at hunting large game - and to facilitate a greater level of satisfaction from a successful hunt, which could be easily lost if trapping pits are too efficient.

[Zazzy]

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

 

• tracking after the shot - a one-hit-kill doesn't have to make the animal drop on the spot, and having to track the animal could easily take the same amount of time that chasing it frantically through the bushes takes currently - realistically, larger animals like deer will nearly always run at least a couple dozen meters after getting their lungs pierced (even with modern compound bows), while a suboptimal hit, if it's even fatal, often leaves them running for hundreds of meters before collapsing.

I really like the idea of having a tracking system like this, or at least something similar to it. A potential way of implementing this that I was thinking about earlier is having sharp weapons apply a "bleeding" status effect to animals that would both cause them to take some damage over time, as well as leave a blood trail that the player can use to track them down. 

2 hours ago, MKMoose said:

If there are any concerns about it being too complex or anything of that sort, then I offer you: trapping. Primarily snare and deadfall traps, for rabbits, squirrels and birds, to provide the player with an accessible source of meat and small hides in the early game. Trapping pits for larger animals are an option and improvised solutions will always be possible, but keeping hunting as the primary method for killing the larger animals is desirable from a design standpoint. To create a natural progression system - as the player acquires better gear, they would become increasingly better suited at hunting large game - and to facilitate a greater level of satisfaction from a successful hunt, which could be easily lost if trapping pits are too efficient.

VS already has a bit of trapping already with the reed basket traps, but from what I can tell they are only really intended and useful for collecting a breeding pair of chickens (or rabbits, if they can be domesticated) for setting up a farm, so A buff to them or an expansion on trapping mechanics for the purpose of hunting wild animals would still be very welcome.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

40 minutes ago, Zazzy said:

A potential way of implementing this that I was thinking about earlier is having sharp weapons apply a "bleeding" status effect to animals that would both cause them to take some damage over time, as well as leave a blood trail that the player can use to track them down.

https://mods.vintagestory.at/bloodtrail

use this until it gets implemented in the base game. Status effects are coming in a future update and I imagine "bleeding" will be one of them.

[cjc813]

3 hours ago, MKMoose said:

But I do think that the point seems to be also about lack of reaction to wounds and blood loss, not just about immediate damage.

I think more nuanced hunting mechanics would fit VS best. I think it would make the most sense for animals to run out of stamina if chased for too long and also slow down/bleed out when wounded.

Barring that, though, reducing the HP of most of the animals would at least make them worth hunting.

As it stands, it's not worth the effort of hunting animals that run instead of attack.

[Chuckerton]

11 hours ago, Crabsoft said:

I don't know what the correct HP value is, but yeah absolutely, groups of guys with quivers or handfuls of javelins would hunt a single animal. Even a crude bow, not properly aged and formed, is going to lack the draw weight to reliably pierce all that moving muscle with a sharp rock. I'm no hunter, so I could just be mistaken, but I never found it that odd. 

I can understand crude arrows not being able to 1 hit a deer but a thrown crude spear should. Have you seen how big those spears are? Thats a lot of mass, and should have no problems piercing a deer hide when thrown close by. Metal arrows and a proper bow should be able to 1 shot a deer though. 

Also, humans are persistence hunters. Animals in this game never get tired. So thats two hunting strategies that humans have historically used and that dont work

3 hours ago, Zazzy said:

I really like the idea of having a tracking system like this, or at least something similar to it. A potential way of implementing this that I was thinking about earlier is having sharp weapons apply a "bleeding" status effect to animals that would both cause them to take some damage over time, as well as leave a blood trail that the player can use to track them down. 

Also i am all for these things, especially crude ones not being IMMEDIATELY fatal but fatal over blood loss that you can track a creature down through bloodstains (that could be more visible to hunter vintarians /:,' ) Alot of people are bringing up blood loss and i agree. It would make early game hunting way less awful. 

9 hours ago, williams_482 said:

3 Iron spears probably do less damage than a car, and moose walk away from automobile collisions all the time.

Well, different mechanics of injury. Modern cars crumple easily and moose are so tall that they sort of just roll over the very easy to crumple top cab part of a vehicle. Iron spears pierce into the skin and can hit vital organs. 

And moose are tanks. Moose can be hard to kill in vs, im fine with that. Those things are scary. 

[Kanenas]

On 5/11/2026 at 6:51 PM, Chuckerton said:

I can understand crude arrows not being able to 1 hit a deer but a thrown crude spear should. Have you seen how big those spears are? Thats a lot of mass, and should have no problems piercing a deer hide when thrown close by. Metal arrows and a proper bow should be able to 1 shot a deer though. 

Also, humans are persistence hunters. Animals in this game never get tired. So thats two hunting strategies that humans have historically used and that dont work

Also i am all for these things, especially crude ones not being IMMEDIATELY fatal but fatal over blood loss that you can track a creature down through bloodstains (that could be more visible to hunter vintarians /:,' ) Alot of people are bringing up blood loss and i agree. It would make early game hunting way less awful. 

Well, different mechanics of injury. Modern cars crumple easily and moose are so tall that they sort of just roll over the very easy to crumple top cab part of a vehicle. Iron spears pierce into the skin and can hit vital organs. 

And moose are tanks. Moose can be hard to kill in vs, im fine with that. Those things are scary. 

i think you are seriously misunderstanding how tough animals are, historically humans hunt in packs because even with massive specialized spears such as boar spears theres a very low chance of 1 hitting an animal

vintage story could definitely use a future trait system, locational damage and improved combat system to make more forms of hunting viable but that same system would most likely increase the danger levels through damage the animals could do to you, bleeding, broken limbs, problems like that

i think the core issue here though is your understanding of weapon(javelin) damage and animal resilience, something like a javelin wont usually one hit a person, and definitely not a deer, to be a confirmed kill in one shot you might need a ballista 

you would need to throw a whole bag of javelins to get to the level of lethality of being hit by a modern car

[HalfAxd]

1 hour ago, Kanenas said:

i think you are seriously misunderstanding how tough animals are, historically humans hunt in packs because even with massive specialized spears such as boar spears theres a very low chance of 1 hitting an animal

Totally agree here...   if you've ever hunted before you'd know that throwing a sharpened rock on a stick is not ideal.  Bow hunting with make shift gear isn't much better.  I've witnessed animals shot with rifles keep moving and take multiple hits.  Hunting should not be easy and in VS it's not.

VS is the only game I know of which recreates one of the most effective hunting techniques used historically... animal pits.   Use them...  thank me later

Enjoy

[LadyWYT]

On 5/11/2026 at 8:51 PM, Chuckerton said:

Also, humans are persistence hunters. Animals in this game never get tired. So thats two hunting strategies that humans have historically used and that dont work

Persistence hunting isn't a good argument to make when it comes to game mechanics, since that requires chasing an animal for several hours to a couple of days in order to tire it out to kill it. Additionally, the player isn't a human, nor does the player get tired; couple that with the fact that the usual complaint about hunting is that the player basically has to chase down and wear out their prey with several shots...

Basically, persistence hunting isn't a very good method when it comes to videogames. Better options would be more trap options, locational damage, blood trails/tracking, prey dying to injuries, or otherwise giving some prey animals a weakness to bows/spears to make them a little easier to hunt.

On 5/11/2026 at 8:51 PM, Chuckerton said:

I can understand crude arrows not being able to 1 hit a deer but a thrown crude spear should. Have you seen how big those spears are? Thats a lot of mass, and should have no problems piercing a deer hide when thrown close by. Metal arrows and a proper bow should be able to 1 shot a deer though. 

Disagree here, at least somewhat. Crude spears are, well, crude, and if they could easily oneshot deer and other larger prey animals there would be no real reason to invest in better spears and arrows, at least when it comes to hunting. I would say similar for even copper spears/arrows. It's not that such things couldn't drop prey in real life, but from a game balance standpoint the player ought to have a reason to upgrade from basic stone/copper, and those upgrades ought to feel like a reasonable upgrade. If an iron spear/arrow is doing essentially the same damage as a crude spear or copper arrow, even for specific jobs, it's just not going to feel very satisfying to invest in.

There's also the factor too that the player is supposed to struggle a little in the early game, with "surviving" switching to "thriving" as the player acquires better tools and weapons to work with. I think if large prey animals like deer could be easily killed with the earliest weapons, Vintage Story would probably start to feel a lot less challenging due to the lack of survival pressure.

[MKMoose]

18 hours ago, Kanenas said:

i think you are seriously misunderstanding how tough animals are, historically humans hunt in packs because even with massive specialized spears such as boar spears theres a very low chance of 1 hitting an animal

[...]

i think the core issue here though is your understanding of weapon(javelin) damage and animal resilience, something like a javelin wont usually one hit a person, and definitely not a deer, to be a confirmed kill in one shot you might need a ballista 

16 hours ago, HalfAxd said:

Totally agree here...   if you've ever hunted before you'd know that throwing a sharpened rock on a stick is not ideal.  Bow hunting with make shift gear isn't much better.  I've witnessed animals shot with rifles keep moving and take multiple hits.  Hunting should not be easy and in VS it's not.

Modern statistics for deer hunting using bows place the kill-to-hit ratio at around 80% (see this study). For traditional equipment it may be less, but data is more sparse (this study reported 65% at 20 hits, but cited a few reports that indicated a much more favorable ratio).

Spears and javelins are a bit different, because they were less frequently used for hunting deer-sized game in the "conventional" way. Their accuracy and effective range are much lower than for bows unless you're using a very light spear or specialized throwing devices (certainly not what we have in the game), which points to the actual reason why spear hunting was often done in groups - to reduce risk and maximize the chance of a successful hit on a driven animal. Their goal was often to wound and weaken the animal (including groups of animals and game many times larger than deer, where group hunting becomes actually important), which would allow to get up close and finish it off.

Experimental archaeology has demonstrated that many primitive weapons can quite easily reach over 20 cm of penetration in animals or animal analogues, which is considered lethal depth for large mammals (mostly taken from this study, where the "Background" section contains a lot of references to other works).

The primary killing mechanism of a bow, as well as a spear or javelin, is exsanguination. Its effectiveness primarily depends on hit location, most favorably a pierced heart, lungs or important blood vessels, which can quite often cause collapse due to blood loss within less than 30 s, while other locations don't tend to produce nearly as deadly bleeding. And that applies to rifles as well - if you're struggling to hit a vital organ, then I can see why you'd hit something multiple times and not kill it, but you really should be hitting vital organs - if you're missing, then I think that counts as user error and not weapon inefficiency. And that's completely separate from cars, which kill primarily through bone fractures and other blunt trauma.

 

15 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Disagree here, at least somewhat. Crude spears are, well, crude, and if they could easily oneshot deer and other larger prey animals there would be no real reason to invest in better spears and arrows, at least when it comes to hunting.

As I see it, the primary balancing lever here is bleedout time. If a crude arrow requires you to track the animal over several hundred blocks but a steel arrow causes it to drop within 10 s, then I think you'd have plenty of reason to invest in better gear - it would just need to be adequately communicated in-game to make the benefit clear. Or if you don't hit a vital organ, then a better weapon would likely weaken the animal more effectively, probably further reducing mobility, making it easier to chase or track to finish off.

Edited May 14 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

5 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

As I see it, the primary balancing lever here is bleedout time. If a crude arrow requires you to track the animal over several hundred blocks but a steel arrow causes it to drop within 10 s, then I think you'd have plenty of reason to invest in better gear - it would just need to be adequately communicated in-game to make the benefit clear. Or if you don't hit a vital organ, then a better weapon would likely weaken the animal more effectively, probably further reducing mobility, making it easier to chase or track to finish off.

Pretty much, though honestly I still figure a system like this would get complaints about realism when the deer doesn't just fall over and die at the first hit.  I'd happily be wrong though.

[Chuckerton]

On 5/13/2026 at 1:12 PM, LadyWYT said:

Persistence hunting isn't a good argument to make when it comes to game mechanics, since that requires chasing an animal for several hours to a couple of days in order to tire it out to kill it.

...

 easily killed with the earliest weapons, Vintage Story would probably start to feel a lot less challenging due to the lack of survival pressure.

True, these things are all true. For persistence hunting, i wasnt really suggesting we get that, but rather that some of the usual methods (as far as i know) that people would hunt in the stone age dont work in this game due to limited hunting mechanics. Mostly just complaining just to complain.

That being said, according to Medieval hunting - Wikipedia this wikipedia page nobles considered hunting by exhaustion to be the most noble form of hunting, so it did happen relatively recently, but they also used mounts and dogs and all these things so it might not be super comparable to vs when youre just one guy by yourself. That being said, persistence hunting is boring

And i understand how making hunting easier would make the early game easier, Im not really advocating for hunting to be easier, just more methodical and more mechanically complete. 

On 5/13/2026 at 1:33 PM, MKMoose said:

As I see it, the primary balancing lever here is bleedout time. If a crude arrow requires you to track the animal over several hundred blocks but a steel arrow causes it to drop within 10 s, then I think you'd have plenty of reason to invest in better gear - it would just need to be adequately communicated in-game to make the benefit clear. Or if you don't hit a vital organ, then a better weapon would likely weaken the animal more effectively, probably further reducing mobility, making it easier to chase or track to finish off.

this 100%, i love this solution. A crude spear landed in an ideal spot on most animals (so, not bears and moose or anything huge) should be fatal, but it wont be clean and it wont be fast. Or at the very least it should slow it down. Even if its not fatal a 4 foot (at least) spear even made of stone is a serious injury. Arrows should do the same (even if its not as extreme damage)

Not to mention a slower time for the creature to bleedout or less severe injuries from crude weapons makes for riskier and more time-consuming hunts, which would keep the early game challenge alive. A creature running from you for hundreds of blocks could fall into a pit or run into a predator. Hitting a creature, even fatally, doesnt guarantee you actually get rewarded for it and more crude hunting equipment increases the possibility that something goes wrong. 

if i had to design this system, it would work as each body part on each creature has an injury threshold. Dealing more than that threshold in one hit (ranged or melee) will cause an injury. Head and vitals causes heavy bleeding, legs causes limping and mobility crippling. The more damage over the threshold you deal, the stronger the effect of the injury. For a deer, a bow would be fine. For a boar, you would probably want a spear for a faster kill, because these injuries should go both ways, so you can be badly injured by animals fighting back. Crude weapons might just barely get to the injury threshold and their effects would be slight but a steel spear or bow would greatly exceed the threshold and cause very strong effects. 

Im starting to take programming classes alongside my degree so maybe ill start making mods for this game. hmm.

Also, being able to get hunting dogs would be awesome. If i wanted to track an animal over a long distance, id want something with a good nose. Or to use a dog to chase an animal towards me to help kill it. I kind of feel like an animals update in general would be nice. Shearing sheep for wool, using horses or cattle to drive mechanical systems or plow fields, i feel like it would truly ascend this game for me. 

Edited May 14 by Chuckerton

[HalfAxd]

On 5/13/2026 at 11:33 AM, MKMoose said:

Its effectiveness primarily depends on hit location

Yep... would love to see that in game. 

As it is, in game, once an animal is hit it runs away and sits down (to recover I assume) and if you picked a good hunting spot (i.e. pushing the animal to a clearing), you can still see it and close in for another shot.  It's a satisfying experience in game to hunt like that.

On 5/13/2026 at 11:33 AM, MKMoose said:

Modern statistics for deer hunting using bows place the kill-to-hit ratio at around 80%

Modern hunting bows are truly amazing...  excellent trajectory at range... 

Enjoy!

[Moa]

On 5/13/2026 at 6:12 PM, LadyWYT said:

Persistence hunting isn't a good argument to make when it comes to game mechanics, since that requires chasing an animal for several hours to a couple of days in order to tire it out to kill it. Additionally, the player isn't a human, nor does the player get tired; couple that with the fact that the usual complaint about hunting is that the player basically has to chase down and wear out their prey with several shots...

Basically, persistence hunting isn't a very good method when it comes to videogames. Better options would be more trap options, locational damage, blood trails/tracking, prey dying to injuries, or otherwise giving some prey animals a weakness to bows/spears to make them a little easier to hunt.

I dunno, I think it could be fun? Not for *every* hunt, but if there were an animal (or a monster) that required purposefully stocking up on food/supplies and tracking/chasing it across unknown terrain for days, in return for an exceptional reward, like TONS of food, lots of bones, and/or a unique item that serves some specific purpose, like a unique pelt (like the golden fleece =P) you can use to make better armor or clothing you can't otherwise. I'm thinking finding the animal in the first place would also be part of it, like trying to find a koalafant in Don't Starve. Make a whole quest of it, essentially.

I think it would fit in pretty well, since this game is already so big on requiring pre-planning and patience for a lot of things. It would have to be more interesting than "just press w for multiple days and nights", but that's doable (and more realistic) with a tracking system.

I feel like I've been doing a baby version of this just trying to hunt these gosh darn deer, anyways. Right now, my seraph is actually lost in the wilderness because I chased a deer =P

If you play without the map (or with the paper atlas mod, before you make a map), it's so easy to get lost chasing animals.

[BlackCDown]

On 5/11/2026 at 11:37 PM, LadyWYT said:

Hunting can't take too much time, or else the player becomes frustrated that they don't have time to devote to things other than basic survival; it also can't be too easy, or livestock ceases to have much value. In my case, I know that if I could reliably drop deer and boar with single shots(or maybe two), I wouldn't need to bother with livestock at all, since the only real advantage at that point is dairy(which can be skipped).

If you could drop them in single shots but they have finite spawns that need replenishment (hint hint fishing mechanics), I reckon you'd still bother with livestock for the reliability. I'd say more in yet another thread on the meat industry but I believe this conundrum is a result of meat yields and the over-simplicity of hunting mechanics skewing the effort : reward ratio for hunting and husbandry. Back when I tried to be a stone age hunter for my gang I found myself basically living day-to-day because I was spending in-game hours searching for and then duking it out with prey only to get 3 meat from it.

I am of the mind that prey should be even tougher. Hell, moose should be bodying bears, not the other way round. But I believe that requires touching up a lot of related systems. Hunting with the Fauna of the Stone Age deer module, Combat Overhaul and Butchering (with modded drop rates) showed me what a more mature hunting system could look like.

FotSA prey species are very tough (the original modded moose had thrice its current health before it was added to the game), very flighty and they were literally over the horizon at the first sight of trouble. And after you go through the hours of hunting them (lots of chasing with spears or traps) you still had to lug it back for more hours of meat processing, and then worry about meat storage. Getting the longbow in the metal age felt super rewarding because it drastically upped the kill rate (you could now kill most medium game in 2 shots and chase them in between) and it felt like you have finally reached a significant game milestone. However, even if you felled an entire herd you were still constrained by 1. how many corpses you can bleed at once back home, 2. that you needed to carry home each kill in a backpack slot and 3. the low shelf life of meat.

The only reason late game hunting with longbows felt remotely overpowered was because one could just hunt entire herds with no consequence. This could be countered with 1. prey population management and replenishment and 2. improving herd AI so the entire bunch runs if anyone is injured or killed. And even then, I still switched to animal husbandry anyway because overhunting was a waste of time for the constraints I listed above and I favoured having a meat source at home instead of having to decide to dedicate a day to gear up and look for prey.

So I do believe that we could buff our damage output, buff prey even more and it would still be a system that favours animal husbandry so long we have the complexities of meat collection and storage.

Edited May 17 by BlackCDown