OrangFriut

Here is the (median) amount of juice you'll be able to get out of every ingot/stone you can turn into either spearheads or arrows. This isn't taking into account that spears take damage on failed throws or the likelihood that you'll completely lose an arrow (quite likely), because both of these factors would just be a matter of 'gittin gud'. Anyways, hunting as it is, is dismal. I really do enjoy this game, but the simple fact of the matter is, I should not have to equip the special Hunter Class, create my Class-Exclusive Best-Bow-In-The-Game, and hammer out Bronze Arrowheads, to achieve what can be done in 30 seconds using a Flint Spear! Bows and Arrows are more expensive, do less damage, and they break or get lost far faster than spears. This isn't even to say that Spears are overpowered, because they're also very under powered compared to their real-life counterpart. I love Vintage Story for its immersion and the emphasis on reality as a main component of the game, even when it comes at the cost of convenience for the player. But it seems when hunting and weapons are concerned, reality is sidelined because it may actually prove convenient for the player! In reality, you can observe modern bow-hunters are able to easily kill an ELK with a single shot to the chest, and even historically Native Americans made their livelihoods hunting massive drives of BISON with nothing but a humble stone tip on a wooden shaft. Despite this fact, a copper arrow from a Longbow, directly into the chest of a small hare, will leave it alive to run off into the brush and be basically untraceable for someone with poor eyesight like myself. The Spear does not have this problem. Whilst it is a bit of a hassle to get close, and its not super accurate, all of this is balanced by the higher burst damage. With the massive amount of shrubs and grass obscuring vision, blocky terrain, and erratic movement, landing another hit on your prey after you've alerted it is very much a game of chance. Being able to kill in one hit is the difference between getting the food and it being essentially lost forever, which is why I will ALWAYS prefer the spear. Not to mention, most larger animals will become aggressive when provoked, in this situation, not only is the spear a MELEE weapon too, you can throw it from up-close very easily to deal huge amounts of damage whilst kiting, making it better for hunting Moose or Oxen. Now, I understand the balancing implications that remedying this would have. An Elk has 30 health, and making the bow kill it in one hit would easily make it overpowered (not necessarily what I want, the Elk is large and should probably survive 2-3). This is why I believe that lethality should generally be increased across the board by lowering the health of the player and the NPCs, particularly the animals, you can even add some difficult by the actual temporal creatures maintaining a higher health pool. This not-only gives the game more of a realistic and rewarding feel (one-shot one-kill is objectively more gratifying than twenty-panicked-shots-whilst-running one-kill) but also incentivizes players wearing armor and playing smart to avoid danger instead of just charging head-first into danger. This applying to the player as well would also prevent you from being OP in comparison to the animals, because just as a single bow shot can kill an Elk, the swipe of a 600lbs Brown-Bear's Razor-Tipped Claws can DEFINITELY kill a person, if not knock them down and allow them to maul them to death. Overall, I desperately want to enjoy this game and live as the town's Hunter, but the crux of my entire class and playstyle is hamstrung by poor balancing decisions. Now, I've seen about three other threads about this, or something similar, so here is the FAQ for the points I've seen raised against it, mostly by one person. "Arrows can stack to 64, 1 Bow & 64 Arrows > 2 Spears" >Why would I ever make 64 arrows when I could craft 7 Spears that will deal more damage and last 6x longer than the equivalent metal cost for arrows? I have never had inventory problems in my time being a hunter that could not be solved by tossing out crap I picked up or just... returning to town and then going back out... "Theres already a weapon that drops Rabbits and Chickens in one hit, the Spear" >Kinda the point, innit? "It would make hunting too easy" >Current hunting is not difficult from any position of skill, it is merely frustrating. Hunting with a recurve bow and steel arrows after a real-time week on a server is exactly the same difficulty as hunting with a flint spear 10 minutes in. You cannot simply 'aim better' because the spread is defined by RNG and the movement of the animals is completely erratic and unpredictable, its just a matter of following it until it sits down and lobbing whatever you have in its direction, scaring it off, and then doing it again. The only exception to this is herding animals into pits or lakes to make it easier, which I consider to be a gimmick that is only necessary because hunting is so poorly handled. You could make animals more aggressive/territorial, you could make them rarer, whatever you want to make it harder would be fine, but right now hunting is just a slog. "It would disincentivize livestock" >Once again, you can make the actual wild animals rarer if you want, but I don't think that even matters. If the only reason people do livestock is because hunting is so unbearably annoying to do, then thats a problem that should be fixed. Hunting as a mechanic should be fun, and the reason people switch to animal husbandry should be for its benefits, not to escape having to hunt. Secondly, Hunters existed for a LONG LONG LONG time past the advent of livestock rearing, in fact, they're still around today, therefore you should be able to subsist off of hunting, rather than have it entirely replaced by livestock. "You can just kite with a spear" >See 2. I'll expand on this one past just the spear argument. I don't want to have to work around mechanics. I don't want to kite animals and throw spears behind me. I don't want to corral them into a pit and throw rocks at them. I don't want to do a gimmick or play whats 'optimal' or 'meta', I want things that are historically viable and fun. When I choose the Hunter class, I want to go out and HUNT. I want to go in the bushes and snipe a deer with my super-cool recurve bow and watch it fall down, one-shot one-kill. Instead, it is most optimal for me to just throw around 7-8 flint spears at whatever I feel like, regardless of the server's game progression, this sucks.

I couldn't agree more! I'm a very new player, so all I can really expect from this is the usual "erm git gud scrub" stuff you see on reddit, but hunting is actually unbearable. I made the mistake of trying to be the dedicated 'hunter' of my friend group, and whilst I do succeed in bringing home the bacon, literally, it comes at the expense of literally ALL my game time. Whilst my friends are building a quaint little village and advancing into the Bronze Age, I'm living like a vagrant in the woods. I have made a recurve bow with the copper arrows, and I still cannot kill RABBITS! I already have poor eyesight, so shooting a tiny little thing with an arrow the size of its whole body, and then watching it immediately bolt off into the brush means I've basically lost it as prey, and the only chance I have at killing larger game like deer is praying to god they try to attack me so I can kite them and turn them into a pin cushion. I do adore this game, so I don't want any of the devs or vintage story purists to take this the wrong way but... are they stupid? I mean, anyone can look up bow-hunting videos on youtube and watch a man take down an ELK with a single shot to the chest from something like 30 yards out!!! All the while, I've taken the dedicated HUNTER class, which does extra ranged damage, has extra accuracy and range, and I'm using the BEST POSSIBLE BOW, and I cannot shoot more than 20 feet out in front of me without the extreme RNG and projectile drop making it basically a coin toss whether I even land the shot, and when I do, IT DOESNT MATTER! Who designed these animals? Who made it so that you'd be better off chasing down the game into a corner with a flint spear than actually hunting with a good bow and metal arrows? It's not fun, and its not realistic, so what is it? It isn't done for "balance" considering its extremely imbalanced in the favor of the animals. Is it just done to be gritty for the sake of grittiness? And we're playing on the official servers that my friend paid for, so I can't just "mod the pain away".