Hunting - Thoughts/Impressions

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! 

This is all hugely helpful feedback on this system!

Not being the codewizard of SoA I can't answer to the feasibility of all of these suggestions, but they definitely sound like things we'll look at for improving the overall experience and utility of hunting. Unfortunately Pilgrim (the coder half of our admin duo) is currently at a point in their life that just keeps them from devoting as much time to big system development as they had earlier on in alpha, so our current emphasis has to be more on fixing critical bugs and back-end stuff. But this is great input to discuss and use for a future expansion and overhaul of the currently pretty basic hunting system.

I'm not sure why everything is selling for only 1 copper -- most animal parts are (as far as I can tell) set up in the code with a copper value of 1, but things like pelts/hides should fetch a little more than that. As I wrote earlier in the Prime Time? thread, we're not really looking for basic hunting to be a huge money-making venture, but more of a way to obtain materials for crafting (which could potentially be sold to crafter PCs for more money than the base value) or a subsistence activity for outdoor-survival type characters.

HOWEVER, there should definitely be a higher potential return for hunting rarer, more dangerous, and/or more desirable animals (such as hunting a leopard for its pelt or claws), and it looks like there's a need to make some adjustments even for common game. This will likely end up being a part of that much bigger overhaul/expansion, as the value system as it currently stands is very basic, where a given part found on a certain class of animal has the same (low!) copper value across the board.

I am really, really interested in making outdoors activities more viable and involved in various ways, so your experimentation with the hunting system is very much appreciated!

Yeah, totally understood re: critical bugs and all! I'm just something of a systems junkie and love thinking about ways to make them a little smoother.

I do think if it's possible to tune down gazelle health on the building side and not the coding side, that'd fix most of the sheer timesink issue, but it's also doable to stick to hunting other animals in the meantime.

Regarding the selling, I do see that some of the items are worth up to 10-15 copper when I appraise them, and when they're resold after I sell them they're going for those listed prices. It does seem possible it's my TRULY awful Magnetism with no Mercantilism to salvage it. Would love to see somebody who's more charismatic and/or a better haggler give it a try.

One big update - sometimes flee simply doesn't work, straight-up. (Not as in 'you fail to flee' but as in 'the flee action is not parsed by the game and nothing happens'.) This could be my misunderstanding of something, but if not this one might be a critical-level bug!

Yes, that is definitely less than optimal. :<

I haven't seen this when fleeing human mobs/PCs lately, so it might be an animal-only issue? Either way I'll pass this on to Pilgrim, and I highly encourage you or anyone else to continue to bug this whenever you see it, along with any helpful details about the circumstances.

Thanks very much for reporting this!

Some updates and thoughts for anybody else playing with this stuff!

AIMING'S OKAYER THAN I THOUGHT: Turns out there's an entirely separate skill for aiming. Ahahaha. With a few ranks in this, aim lasts a lot longer, though it still breaks at seemingly random times between rounds. And this may or may not be true, but it almost seems like the longer you wait after initiating an aim to shoot, the better your odds are of hitting. Hmm!

HUNTING REALLY HURTS, BE CAREFUL: Every animal seems to be much better at combat than I am, and I didn't think I was BAD at combat by the skill/stat scales. I may be overlooking something obvious, though. Either way, I can't seem to dodge their attacks, and they do about 25% of my HP in a single hit, so be very wary if you want to hunt anything at all dangerous. Related...

HELP, TELL ME ABOUT ANIMALS: Is there an ability/command to know if an animal is aggressive before you attack it? Most gazelle types aren't but I got my butt kicked by a bubal, which will apparently hunt you down.

IF FLEE DOESN'T WORK, USE CANCEL: In fights where flee won't process at all (my best guess is because the animal is too much faster than you?), cancel may save you. It almost always ends fights.

EXCEPTION: FLEE FROM CORPSES: In the very rare circumstance where you type 'snap neck' but the animal starts combat while the thread is going, you'll be stuck in combat with its corpse when the neck-snap goes through. Cancel DOESN'T work here, but flee will.

Pretty sure this is a once-in-a-million accident. Gave me a great screenshot, though.

SELL BY THE INDIVIDUAL UNIT: If you get a stack of, say, 10 lbs of gazelle meat, you can take 1 out of a container at a time and sell each for 1 copper, instead of selling all 10 lbs for 1 copper. Much better return on investment.

ZSIMIKS SMELL: The meat man doesn't want zsimik bits. Some kind of reptile racist. But you can still cook with the meat, at least! And the hide may still work for leather purposes, unsure.

PICK UP GAZELLES: If you want to hunt a gazelle, it will end up being significantly faster to pick it up and stab it to death. This may sound silly, but given their high dodge at a distance and the rebalance/aim mechanics, it's a huge time savings. And it's also kind of awesome. NOTE: I think you may need to put them down for them to die, though. I did 16,000 damage before realizing the gazelle wasn't passing out, dropped it, and it died in two more attacks.

I can post this elsewhere, but my feedback going in right now is 'I am not sure how any of this works, and here's why:

Mechanically, what is hunting going to be like? I did some exploring; I wasn't quite sure how far one needed to travel to find a place where using the gametrail ability was possible. Is that fair to ask here? Does one just keep going south? From there...


Mechanically, what is 'snap neck' going to be like? I find somewhere to use the ability, spawn a rabbit/hare/maybe a lizard, and I just...

'get lizard'?
'snap neck'?

How does one find sling ammunition? Any rock on the ground? Are there clay bullets? Lead bullets? I haven't managed to get hands on a sling yet(another issue, for another thread). What about thrown weapons? Are those aimed and shot, or 'used' in a melee sense instead

You will need to keep going south til you find a Desert room - it's a long walk! There's also an Oasis room you can hunt in, but just one, and lots of desert rooms. (Roomtype visible on survey if you don't know.)

Find gametrail generates the trail, hunt generates an NPC from the trail. If it's a small critter (rabbit, zsimik, hare) you can nab it and snap its neck, just as you stated. You CAN pick up larger game, but you can't snap its neck, and it may or may not prove to be a bad idea. I.e. picking up a wildcat just means getting mauled. Which probably goes without saying if you're not me.

On the sling/thrown side I'm not 100% sure, but I would bet it works the same way with requiring an 'aim' maneuver first, then a command to actually shoot/throw/attack. 

There are definitely rocks you can forage, so I bet they work as ammo.

Happy hunting!