So I decided to play around with hunting to supplement my character's income, and encountered a number of issues. Some of these might be bugs, some of these might be intentional choices - I'm not quite sure! But here are my thoughts, offered up in the vein of hopefully helpful feedback:
Overall thoughts:
- The gametrail system is great, though it's almost too easy to find animals with it;
- Using ranged combat to hunt is problematic to the point of unworkable at the moment, especially when dealing with gazelles - issues with aiming, the combat system, and impossibly high HP make it take literal hours to kill them;
- Animal parts sell for prices far too low to make sense or provide a workable return on time and investment.
Suggestions for improvement:
- Make it more difficult/take some time to hunt an animal from a gametrail;
- Only have aim status break after an action is taken, instead of between turns;
- Greatly reduce animal NPC HP, especially gazelles, or increase ranged weapon damage;
- Consider adding a 'coup de grace' command to finish off a mostly dead animal;
- If possible, have an 'NPC mode' combat without writing breaks and with shorter turns;
- Add some clearer feedback on how close to death an NPC is on look;
- Clarify the difference in use cases between skin, gut, and butcher in the helpfile;
- Make butchering auto-remove any arrows or other ranged ammo left in the corpse;
- Increase the selling price on items butchered from animal corpses.
A little more detail...
GAMETRAILS:
- All in all, the gametrail system works well and is interesting. Hunt seems to reliably produce animals from gametrails, a method I think is far preferable to just having wandering mobs. Super cool stuff. If anything, I'd like to see a tougher check here, perhaps with a thread explaining how one looks for the animal and finds it. I think this would help offset any worry about price inflation from upping butchering rewards.
- I do wish there was a way to examine a gametrail to try and figure out what animal it belongs to before hunting it. (This may exist and just be out of my skill range, of course.)
HUNTING WITH ARCHERY:
At the moment, to hunt a gazelle to death with a fairly competent archer PC takes approximately 2-3 hours of focused and continuous effort. You will repeatedly cycle through aiming, shooting, combat ending, rebalancing, re-aiming, shooting, etc. There are a few reasons why:
- GAZELLES ARE LOVECRAFTIAN MONSTERS: This I figure has to be a bug of some sort, but at the moment it takes over 30 arrows' worth of damage to down a gazelle. I've shot a gazelle into a stupor, walked into the room with it, taken all the arrows from its body one by one and shot them back into it - and still had to keep going. Hares seem to be closer to okay, at least, but they also still require quite a few arrows to kill. So in general NPC HP needs to be adjusted down, I think.
- DEATH CHECKS MIGHT BE WEIRD: Possibly the death check mechanics are too generous as well; I'm not sure how they work, but I see the gazelles resist falling again and again and again. This happens even when they're unable to flee any longer; they're just standing there in the room helplessly as I pump more arrows into them. One of them was rendered asleep (unconscious) for the last few arrows, but I had no opportunity to just, say, cut its throat and had to instead keep going with normal combat. A coup de grace command would be a really big improvement, if this isn't a bug.
- AIM BREAKING: The aiming system in combat does not work well. Aim seems to break at random times, not related to in-combat timing and with no clear trigger or explanation as to why. It is very possible to spend a turn aiming, prep shooting for the next turn, and have your aim broken between turns so your second turn is wasted. It would be much better if whatever check breaks aiming is rolled only after a character takes an action, so a turn isn't lost to removed aim.
- ANIMAL AUTO-FLEEING: The issue with aiming is exacerbated by the fact that animals can freely auto-flee if you are attacking them from the next room. (And if you enter the room with them, they're going to just flee from you immediately, so you might as well shoot at distance.) If you don't get your shot in right away, the combat ends, and you've spent quite a lot of time locked in writing break pauses and the like only to achieve nothing. Probably animals ought to bolt when they flee, too, but I'm kind of grateful they don't at the moment since they flee at every attack!
- POISE/BALANCE: It takes only a couple of attacks to lose your balance. Rebalancing breaks your aim, forcing you to spend two-three turns rebalancing, re-aiming, and only then being able to shoot again. I imagine this would be okay if animals had an appropriate amount of HP where something like 4-6 arrows downed a gazelle, though.
- COMBAT SPEED: Having writing breaks in NPC combat with no other PCs involved creates a lot of awkward slowdowns and pauses in combat. They also occur somewhat unpredictably and at different times depending on whether or not you're in the same room with the NPC or not. A toggle to turn off writing breaks in solo combat with animals would be wonderful. In a similar vein, having turns be so long with NPC combat where no writing is involved really drags out the process. Even hitting continue can't seem to speed things up. 15-20 seconds may not sound long, but when you need so many turns to accomplish actions, it begins to add up. (It's also very difficult for my ADHD brain to handle.)
All in all, right now it's just a very slow and tedious business to hunt anything that you can't neck-snap, but especially gazelles.
BUTCHERING AND SELLING:
- It is unclear what the skin and gut commands are for. I assume skin is if you -really- want the skin? But I tried to skin, then gut, then butcher a carcass and after gutting you can no longer butcher. Butcher on its own seems to do everything, though.
- For my character with low Magnetism and no Mercantilism, everything I butcher off an animal is only worth 1 copper. I'm not sure if this is a bug or intentional, but... considering the bow cost 400, the quiver 50, and the arrows are 15 for 5, I've lost a lot of money on hunting that doesn't seem possible to get back. And I don't think those prices make much sense for, say, 10 lbs of gazelle meat!
- Also regarding losing money - if you butcher an animal before taking the arrows out of its body, the arrows are lost. Granted this is just my stupid brain's fault, but it's a really easy mistake to make. Having the arrows fall to the ground would be really nice, or even saying "you can't butcher the corpse til you take the arrows out".
I know this is a lot - thanks for reading!
