RFC: Hunting Exploits

[Ozzy123]

Would be nice if all the luring animals to shallow water and all the "smarter than animal" tactics were still a thing but avoiding mammoth ranged attacks with a hitbox and all the "not fun" tactics weren't a thing. Hopefully this thread will help to balance these out.

[Lyrroth]

cheesing is fun because its risk free i wont believe losing even 80% health from disposable alt is anything bad to anyone while you get the bear skin that you can try to turn before end of the first day into bear cape nad run metal industry by the end of the day1 or have ivory figures that gives you free 4k lp which is better than crafting an army of cone cows for group. trapping any animal with logs isnt problem since what if two characters get wounded in process but not killed, pushing punch on several characters over and over is the same thing as side swipe over and over

[Massa]

cheesing is fun because its risk free i wont believe losing even 80% health from disposable alt is anything bad to anyone while you get the bear skin that you can try to turn before end of the first day into bear cape nad run metal industry by the end of the day1 or have ivory figures that gives you free 4k lp which is better than crafting an army of cone cows for group. trapping any animal with logs isnt problem since what if two characters get wounded in process but not killed, pushing punch on several characters over and over is the same thing as side swipe over and over

Kill a bear with a single naked alt in a fresh world within 2 hours.

Do it. Please, do it.

[Raiga]

Add soak value to animals depending on how "hard" it should be. Bear with 30-50 soak would be untouchable until you get a decent quality weapon and stats which is definitely unattainable at day 1.

[MrBunzy]

I always have a lot of fun finding ways to cheese animals early world. The dead bears and mammoths honestly arn't even that useful, so I don't feel it's a game breaking issue. However, I would welcome an even greater challenge! It would be disappointing to succeed in killing a whale on my first try, for instance. Killing stuff with bows and slings is trivially easy, but it also wrecks the quality so i suppose it is balanced, and the other approaches are much more fun so I usually go with those.

Killing animals in melee relies on the fact that damage is calculated before openings are created. Even if you have 1 uac, if you get hit with no preexisting openings the damage will still be zero for that hit, meaning even a fresh spawn alt can tank a mammoth for a single attack at no risk. You can take advantage of this by tanking a hit on one character, and then attacking the animal with another (or multiple) characters while it is in a cooldown from attacking. This also requires that characters can attack the animal and then quickly get out of attack range, but there are countless ways to do this. You can use deep water, cliffs, boulders, bushes, alts (for non-aggresive animals), burrows/cave entrances/houses, horses on 4th speed, claimed objects, palisades, and probably other stuff that escapes my memory.

A group of freshly spawned naked alts can pretty reliably take down a bear by taking turns tanking the hits and slowly punching it to death. Last time I tried it took a little over an hour for myself and three others to kill a bear, and most of the alts ended up dying due to bad timing or mistakes and had to be re-spawned. The ranged roar attack adds an unpredictable risk, and the insanely low cooldown on enraged bear attacks makes it require near perfect timing to get attacks in between tanked hits. It is perhaps a bit silly, but is actually a lot of fun, and gives a large sense of accomplishment.

If you really wanted to prevent this, solutions might be to have some attacks that create openings before calculating damage, so that the first hit would still hurt. Also, adding faster health regeneration to animals would stop very slow strategies like this, and force you to do more damage in smaller amount of time. Anyway, goodluck jorbo, I have high hopes for my career as an early game whaler.

[Thedrah]

i quit about a year ago but i dont think the exploits i used have been fixed or mentioned so...

my exploits used palisades, boulders, and ridges
if near base, bring animal inside gates then drop agro or use an alt to close gates (my base had a couple layers of palisades from expanding) then drop 2 or 3 boulders (70%-85%, the medium size you can lift) at the gates. which i used a custom client to show bounding boxes which i would attack and back off in and out between boulders. if youre good, you can close a gate on a monster so you dont need boulders to cheese this way, i think ranged didnt work for this but eh

beasts cant break boulders so i also made a couple trap areas nearby, often with the use of a ridge as you can use a bow then. after that, in early world, people usually got in large groups, often with alts, and would circle the beast and as you got high openings, would back off and someone would fill the hole. this cage of meatshields/bodies was fun to watch when i saw it

i suggest increasing difficulty and small amount of quality when a beast is 'cornered' in large groups

[ricky]

Put 60+ arrows into a bear and it takes off in the other direction at Mach 5? Of course we're going to cheese it! I cheese things because of fleeing, not much else. It's such a nightmare to chase something you have no realistic means of ever catching. Animal health should have a real affect on its speed.

This was my biggest gripe when I played actively. Even if i could square up with a bear and kill him in melee combat without luring him into some signpost/bush/rockpile trap, I couldnt tolerate having to "track" the animal down once it fled. I understand the muh realism of having an injured animal flee, but it needs some polish.

I think the easiest solution is giving animals a stamina bar, or forcing them to "rest" between their sprints. essentially what we're forced to do is a fucked up version of endurance hunting where once the animal flees, you chase him down, hit him once (for insignificant damage because his openings have already gone down), chase him down AGAIN, hit him once... and you to this until it dies.

either halve their speed after every attempted flee, or add a timer in between runs.

[Thedrah]

that reminds me, using clover on animals to rope them to an area should drop some quality, maybe half
and early world, big villages would 'collect' mouflon for wool as they could be sheared every 5m with clover if not tethered. so they had fenced in areas with wild mouflon running around, kept an alt nearby so they didnt despawn. made early world village expansion easy

[wafflecat]

If you really want to prevent early hunting just make fleeing animals break boats when they run into them. But give us a heads up haha

[Granger]

Put 60+ arrows into a bear and it takes off in the other direction at Mach 5? Of course we're going to cheese it! I cheese things because of fleeing, not much else. It's such a nightmare to chase something you have no realistic means of ever catching. Animal health should have a real affect on its speed.

This. Animal fleeing speed (especially as they have no stamina limitation) is way too high.

Regarding cheesing tactics: as soon as you have a palisade build a double gate, aggro the animal so it follows, close the inner gate so it stops at it, have an alt close the outer one so it can't flee (not needed when having aggroed multiple ones as they'll block each other), punch through the gate and retreat (to avoid the counter), continue till 'victory'.

What I completely dislike about hunting is that bows and slings are quite useless: at first they reduce the quality to pointlessness, later when you can create arrows that won't do this it's usually easier and quicker to just melee the mobs.

I disagree though with the ones claiming early world (bow-less) cheese kills being (apart from the fun of actually managing it) meaningless. That's IMHO false as these enable way too instant increase in tool and gear quality (even while softcapped by the character) and compost bins allow for instant quality mulch for trees.

If you really want to prevent early hunting just make fleeing animals break boats when they run into them. But give us a heads up haha

The boats would just be replaced by logs - rinse&repeat. And when the animals eventually are able to break nearly everything they'll be used by coles and his merry men to auto-wreck bases (there has been a nice video a while ago where he showed this).