Howdy hunters,

After a short status update break with are back with your weekly dose of news and general musings from our headquarters.

Trophy Lodge update

It’s been exactly two weeks since we released Trophy lodge and your response has been very heartwarming. We’ve received a small mountain of feedback from you and we discussed it all in depth. The hotfix patch was already released last week and more fixes and improvements are being tested right now to be included in the next one.

For one, a lot of you have been reporting troubles with reindeer trophy placement, so we’ve decided to move those from medium wall plaques to large ones instead, which we feel is a more suitable place for their abundant antlers. We also slightly lowered the position of the top wall plaque and tweaked poses for red deer and elk, worst offenders in terms of antler clipping, so after the next patch it will be easier to place your monster trophies.

Secondly, we’ll be adding two more platforms for turkey, geese and pheasants. You said (and we agreed) that one per trophy lodge is not enough.

The last and hopefully the nicest bit, we persuaded Max the Taxidermist to keep his em$ fees at 10 em$, same as during the post-release week. I guess he was pleased that you were pleased with his work and the looks of your Trophy lodges 😉

Armed with more of your feedback, we started investigating the possibility to add full deer mounts for you to be able to showcase your piebalds and albinos in all their full-bodied glory, connecting the taxidermy to shooter instead of harvester, as well as a function to visit friends’ Trophy lodges when playing single player. In general, our feeling is that this feature has been really well accepted (supported by tens of thousands taxidermied animals), so we will continue working on it and adding more bits and pieces to the whole experience.

Trophy shot bonanza competition

It’s time to announce winners for our Trophy Shot bonanza competition! The EW team picked their favourites in two categories, and here are the entries that impressed us the most:

Best Trophy Lodge shots (winners get 1050, 950 and 700 em$ respectively)

1. Riumma

2. Foxtrotter (Max_Firepower)

3. Pittie

Best Trophy shots (all winners get a Trophy lodge)

1. Dilaj

2. Gas56

3. Villkatta

We’ve also decided to give Blendy a consolatory prize of 200 em$, as their trophy shot missed the top three by just one vote.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to everyone for creativity and participation in this community challenge, let’s do more of those!

Latest releases

Last week we put up a new pack of Rocky Mountain Elk missions designed by our community member Dillakiller – get cracking on those and earn some gm$ for your taxidermy wishes!

This week we released four new face scarves in Blazing Orange, Happy Camper, Army and Boone & Crockett styles. They look dandy and the last two also provide camo against deer species. To accompany the release of the scarves, we are running a weekend sale on all the matching clothes and dog gear. Time to get fancy. And while we are on it, is there any particular style or piece that you feel is missing from our clothing gallery and that you would like to see added?

For now that’s all from us, check next week’s status update for the results of our recent player survey and introduction of our new front-end developer Katarina.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Big day today! And not only because spring has finally come to Stockholm. After months of blood, sweat and tears (mostly tears), we are super thrilled to announce the release of one of the biggest features we’ve ever brought into theHunter. Introducing the brand new Trophy Lodge! If you watched our pre-release livestream on Tuesday, you already have a good understanding of what to expect, if not, you can catch the replay here.

You (and us too) have been waiting for this for quite some time, so I won’t be keeping you too long with my rambling. We put together game design notes which detail how to use the Trophy Lodge. In addition we welcome you to indulge yourselves in this detailed dev blog on how we developed this feature. We hope you enjoy!

Trophy Lodge Gameplay

The Trophy Lodge that you can find in the store features a “classy” style and has 21 slots for displaying different animals (4 large wall plaques for elk, red deer, moose and bison; 7 small wall plaques for small and medium sized deer, ibex, sheep and pigs; 5 small round platforms for small game; 1 large round platform for pheasants, turkey and geese; 2 medium platforms for wolves, foxes, coyotes and goats; 2 large platforms for bears and kangaroos).

You can own an infinite number of trophy lodges and you are free to fill them up as you see fit. Some players might opt to have one of two trophy lodges with their absolute best scoring animals, some will have one trophy lodge per reserve, where only species harvested in that reserve will be featured, some will dedicate one trophy lodge to their most special harvests including rares, non-typicals, amazing memories. Go nuts and enjoy!

All your Trophy Lodges are accessible from any in-game lodge that have a Trophy Lodge sign on the outside. You can find trophy lodges on all of the 11 reserves and when you approach the door you will be able to enter by pressing “E” (default key). You can rename your lodges as you wish, and lock them if you want to hide them from the curious eyes of your guests in a multiplayer game.

You can taxidermize every single animal you harvest, from now on. You can do it by paying a small em$ or gm$ fee to Max the Taxidermist (who is in charge of all this malarkey) from the game, right after taking a trophy shot or, if having chosen not to take one, by clicking Resume Game from the harvest screen (the latter prompt can be turned off in your gameplay settings). If you choose not to taxidermize your animal from within the game for whatever reason (no cash, you were not sure that your trophy was a rare one, just not in a mood or pressed the wrong button by mistake) your animal gets sent to Max the Taxidermist’s enormous fridge where it is kept for 24 hours in case you change your mind and want to turn it into a trophy. Please note that the taxidermy option from Max’s fridge costs slightly more than the on-spot taxidermy fee.

All your taxidermied animals can be found in the Trophy Manager, accessible from inside your Trophy Lodges by pressing “I” (default key). In the Trophy manager you can place your trophies in the current Trophy Lodge and check out trophy information. When inside a lodge you can also see details about displayed trophies by right-clicking on them; you can change their poses by left-clicking while the trophy info is visible. Try it out, it is much easier than it sounds. Any editing of the inside of a Trophy Lodge (placing animals, switching between poses) can only be done in your own lodge and in single player mode. Multiplayer is dedicated to showing off your lodges and trophies. When in multiplayer, guests can visit any of the host’s Trophy Lodges, unless locked.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can you taxidermize your old animals?

This is a good question and one which has been asked many times already. At the launch of the development process we were seriously investigating this option, but unfortunately we quickly discovered it would not be possible due to technical limitations. In order to recreate a trophy from a harvested animal we are now sending and saving a whole bunch of new data, which we simply didn’t have any reason to store before. We realize that it is rather sad news for those of you with a bunch of non-typicals, rares and top-of-leaderboard animals under your belts, but we hope you will also see it as a fresh start that will rekindle your passion for hunting animals you might have grown bored of. Plus, who knows, maybe your new personal best is just around the corner 😉

Can I customize the interior of my trophy lodge?

Not right now, but we built our Trophy Lodge with this possibility in mind. If this feature is successful and popular, we are going to work on customization and additional trophy lodge features, so you will have a chance to make it into your very own hunter’s den.

Can I delete my trophies?

No, we wouldn’t like to go down that road, since all trophies are paid for. But we are working on the function that allows you to hide the ones you are not interested in displaying anymore.

Any other question you might have …

… please ask in this forum thread. We will be there to answer them as well as read about your first impressions and feedback.

Time to Kick it Off

We are celebrating the release of this huge feature with the Trophy Lodge Bonanza Competition, in which you can win a trophy lodge and some sweet em$ prizes. And also we bribed Max the Taxidermist with some pulled pork and whisky and got him to lower his em$ taxidermy fees by 50%. That means for the next 10 days, you can taxidermize for 10em$, until the end of Sunday, May 28th (around the time we expect Max to sober up). Today we are also starting a new season, whohoo! So, get out there and get stuffing.

Happy trophy hunting!

Discussion

Hi there hunters,

It’s time for our weekly status update!

Doc’s Desk Mystery revealed in the pre-release Livestream

As we are approaching the huge milestone of 1,000,000 community harvests and Doc’s desk keeps shedding its clutter, with the last two items being expected to be removed by the end of this week, we thought it might be time to break out the big guns and show you what we have been working on for the last months! Today we are announcing the pre-release livestream showcasing the upcoming feature. What exactly? You will (probably) learn very soon, just keep hunting ethically and contributing to the Doc’s Desk Mystery reveal.

The pre-release livestream will happen on Tuesday, May 16th, at 19:00 CEST on our official Twitch channel. Our own livestreaming aficionados Johanna and Stefan will be leading it and yours truly will join them to tell you about the development of the upcoming feature and reply to any questions you might have. Be there!

New dimension of varmint hunting

Yesterday we released two new items that have been a very popular community request and, consequently, frequent residents of our roadmap brainstorming sessions. Motion Predator Decoys. With this addition we are also introducing a new level of Fox and Coyote hunting. Sure, the good old Jack Rabbit caller gets the job done, but the new decoys brings out a new level of concealment by providing, in addition to strong attraction, a level of distraction as varmints become too preoccupied by the erratically moving furballs to notice the hunter in concealment. To add to that, Coyotes and Foxes tend to come back to the decoys after some time, so after having smartly arranged your set-up you can enjoy a relaxing cup of java while working on your Fox and Yote Ranks and Achievements. Our client programmers Roberto, Linus and Robin have done a great job on gameplay mechanics for the new decoys, the glorious models brought to you by our art intern Johan and those brilliant animations you can watch forever were done by our one and only animator, Moe. Hope you enjoy this new addition!

As I’m writing this, I got a heads-up from our client programmer Roberto that we released a small patch (2017051201) fixing the bug related to foxes, motion predator decoys and the Jack Rabbit caller that sneaked into the game yesterday.

Sneakathon 2017

Together with the motion predator decoys we launched our annual event to celebrate one of the most vital skills of a hunter – being able to stay unnoticed. Sneakathon 2017! Like last year, we are featuring five of our most skittish species in a set of missions that will give you a coveted entry ticket for the competition to get the fame and glory of the sneakiest of the EHR in pursuit of the turkey on one of our most challenging reserves, Settler Creeks. For the duration of the event, we are running a sale on all Sneaky 3D camo clothes, so it’s a good chance to stock up on gear.

Player survey – last week!

Finally, a reminder to those of you who haven’t filled in our player survey yet – please do, we are very curious to hear what you think about the game and what you want to see next. The survey closes in one week, on May 19th midnight CEST – take it now!

Happy sneaky hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters

Time for another status update from us and boy, have we got some sweet news for you today!

Dall Sheep

For one, we released a new species this week – the Dall Sheep! It’s our 39th species, can you believe that? The release went well and many of you reported the smoothest patching in a long run. That’s really heartwarming for us to hear, as we know this has lately been a pain for our players who use the launcher. Although it’s a good progress, we don’t stop and continue investigating the murky waters of our launcher patching code and we hope to fix it once and for good, for all of you.

Coming back to our sheep, from the feedback we’ve gathered so far you have been enjoying our new snowy residents. I for one think they have brought lots of fun to the around-mountainous areas of Whiterime Ridge, with their lovely furs and rather entertaining calls. If you haven’t seen one yet, check out this video HooCairs made on our beta server, showing off their dazzling beauty:

With the amazing animal variety we have in theHunter now, we would like to know where your preferences lie – tell us what your all-time favourite animal is and why? Share it away in this forum thread – looking forward to your replies!

Doc’s Desk Mystery

If you’ve been following our communication closely, you must remember that we’ve mentioned some big feature our team have been working on for months now. I know you are all super curious and we can’t wait to tell you more. But our beloved Doc, being a grumpy fellow he is, is not very keen on revealing anything to anyone before “the time is right”. To all our pleas he would only go like: “Make them wait”, or, ”Good things come to those who wait, Doc says”. And a whole lot of other clichés only he himself finds amusing. But after quite a bit persuading on our part, we came up with a compromise – today we’re launching a campaign, in which you, our community, will influence how fast the mysterious new feature gets unveiled and, at the same time, make our Doc happier. You’ll have to do what you are best at – hunting and harvesting animals in EHR (no unpermitted hits though, otherwise this whole thing might go down in flames). If we do well, Doc will remove clutter from his incredibly messy desk, slowly revealing something hinting to the upcoming feature underneath. You can find more details and discuss all this mysterious stuff in this forum thread.

Lock&Learn with Lead programmer Roberto

Our Lock&Learn will happen today, at 16:00 CEST, and in this episode you will get a chance to follow Johanna and Stefan to Whiterime Ridge, joined by our Lead programmer Roberto. We will be running our traditional Friday Dev competition at the same time – don’t miss, we’ll see you there!

See you in the woods and happy hunting!

Discussion

Hey all you good hunters,

Have we got good news for you? I think we do!

Overhauled gameplay for feeders and bait barrels

After some weeks of blood, sweat and tears, we are finally ready to introduce the simplified and improved baiting system. From its initial implementation, the system has been a complicated interplay of client and server code which made it not only prone to breakage, but also difficult to troubleshoot. Our primary goal was to simplify it to make it easier for players to understand and for us to maintain, all while keeping the hunting fun in check and not throwing game balance out of the window. Not the easiest task but hopefully we succeeded. We are curious to hear you feedback! Please make sure to read this detailed developer blog from David (caledonianblues) who worked closely with Roberto, our lead client programmer. Together they have been responsible for the server and client-side sorcery of this project.

It’s time to bait dem goats!

On that note, today we are also adding a new player in the baiting gallery of theHunter. Meet the Mineral Feeder for Feral Goats! It works in the same way as bear barrels and hog feeders, you place the feeder in a location where the goats are likely to roam, put a special mineral block in it (you can buy it for both em$ and gm$), put up a tripod or a tower and wait for billies and nannies to come by to lick the delicious salt. Have fun with new feeders!

Hunt-a-thon to win theHunter: Call of the Wild

We’ve teamed up with the theHunter: Call of the Wild team to bring you a special Hunt-a-thon competition in which you can get a piece of both games. Not only it will be our first Feral Goat challenge, but we are also going to raffle 5 copies of theHunter: Call of the Wild (and 5 special theHunter: Call of the Wild t-shirts) among all players who will get a score in it! The competition starts tomorrow, but you can already join it on the competition page.

Reserve load-out bundles

We’ve just put a couple of freshly baked load-out bundles from the winners of our community competition in the store. Here is the Rougarou Bayou one from Moohy55 and here is the one for Bushrangers Run from Takedown87. You can find the previously released bundles for Val-des-Bois from waiora, Hemmeldal from SloNeZ, Redfeather Falls from holliday50 (Hawkeye), Logger’s Point from WNorton.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Here comes your weekly batch of news from the theHunter headquarters!

Here we goat again…

Earlier this week we released our awesome Feral Goats onto Bushrangers Run and, judging by your feedback, you’ve been enjoying hunting them a lot! We also think the goats bring a special touch to a reserve that has been lacking a fulfilling hunting experience for a long time.

Piebald Black Feral Goat harvested by community member lowby

The diversity of fur, colours and horns is something that makes this species unique and fun. Here is the thread for you to check all of them and how about post one of your own trophies? The “melanistic” ones that you could see in your hunt history post-release are actually the common black variation. Earlier today we released a patch fixing it and your hunting expeditions should now show the corrected info.

Right now there is also a pretty high ratio of piebalds and greys of different kinds, which are supposed to be slightly rarer than (think three times as rare) common ones. You can regard this as a release gift, we will tweak the ratio slightly in the next patch. 😉

Currently our goats can only be hunted using the good old spot-and-stalk method, but we are soon going to introduce mineral goat feeders (together with nifty salt blocks) to add an additional level to their hunting gameplay. Stay tuned!

Baiting System Review

Together with the new mineral goat feeders we will also be releasing the overhauled version of the baiting system for bear barrels and hog feeders. The new system features significantly simplified gameplay which we believe will offer players a more consistent experience. It also makes the system a lot easier to work with in the future. Upon release, David is planning to share background info about the changes to the system and technical specifications in a developer blog similar to the one Luna created for HS 2.0.

Deployable towers and scent hounds promotion

Today is the last day you can take advantage of our bonus gift promotion during which you can get a scent hound (female, light coat) and Deployable hunting towers Bare Wood when buying em$. There are a couple of hours left of the promotion, so hurry up while you still can. We’ve also added some heavy discounts to a lot of items in the store for you to spend your newly acquired em$ on.

Last but not the least, say hello to our new team member. His name is Linus and he has recently joined us as a Client Programmer. Read his intro below and say hello in the forums. You know the drill.

Welcome Linus!

Yo \o

My name is Linus Sköld, I recently joined theHunter Classic team as a programmer after having worked on theHunter: Call of the Wild. I started my internship at Avalanche Studios back in the end of August 2016, this is part of the last year of my education at The Game Assembly where I (obviously) studied programming.

Some of my favourite games are World of Warcraft (huge lore nerd), Star Wars Jedi Knight Jedi Academy & Outcast, most (not 13) of the Final Fantasy games, Bravely Default & Second, Fire Emblem . There simply are too many great games to count that I have as favourite, but if you need to have a strong defined ONE game it’s World of Warcraft, 10 years of my life has gone into that game and I ain’t stopping now.

Other than playing tons of games in my spare time I do a lot of programming on my own to learn more about how things work and how to come up with smarter solutions, I also read manga, watch anime, and go to the gym to not have my back destroyed.

I hope to get along with you all, see you in the wilds!

That’s it from us for today, happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Time for a status update!

Hunter Score 2.0 and Dev Blog

In case you missed it, last week we released Hunter Score 2.0. You can check the game design notes here. In addition, Luna has written a technical overview document about working on the feature in which she shares some details about the whole backend infrastructure of theHunter. If you want a better understanding of how the infrastructure of theHunter is built and how your hunting data is being moved and stored, please do have a read (TL; DR It ain’t a piece of cake).

With Luna’s blog post we would like to start (or resume) our Dev Blog. We’ll try to share more details about the murky waters of game development and behind-the-scenes of the development of theHunter. You can expect similar write-ups from different crafts when we bring out bigger features, for example the upcoming changes to the baiting system.

In general, the release of Hunter Score 2.0 went smoothly from a tech perspective. There have been some minor issues which we fixed last week. We also released a small patch fixing the infinite download loop for our launcher and game opening with Steam at launch. Luna continues monitoring the forums and jumping on issues as soon as they arise. We’ve just fixed the display glitch in the achievements panels, when all achievements would appear as if they were earned today (we thought about you stancomputerhunter).

The feedback we received about the new Hunter Score so far has been various and the discussion thread infinite and very interesting. Your engagement and passion about this feature has been fascinating to observe. I’ve responded to some criticisms that were being brought up in the discussion, but would like to iterate some of my points here to reach more community members. This change was made because of the community feedback, this time about “reskins” that we have been receiving for years and that we believed was fair. Everything we do we try to base on your feedback, but of course the design went through many iterations, mostly because of the technical and game balance requirements.

Following the post-release feedback, we increased the Ranks cap to 1000 and kept it consistent regardless of species, weapons or collectibles. If we were to introduce more Ranks in the future to make the system more versatile, which ones do you think would make sense to have?

Very feral and very cute

Our lovely feral goats are already jumping and kicking on our beta server, sometimes kicking it over in the meantime, but all within the scope of the testing phase. We are happy with the progress and we like what we see. With Feral Goats we will be introducing a species variety that we have not seen in theHunter yet. Not only will they have different textures and fur, but also different types of horns with different scoring! Here are two sneak peek screenshots for you to catch a first glimpse of what is coming.

Bighorn Sheep Missions

Yesterday we released the first pack of missions from our last game design competitions. Bighorn Sheep missions by freck1es! We also put together a small but great bundle in the store with some stuff for your Timbergold Trails adventures. More missions and competitions for Timbergold Trails animals are coming soon.

St. Patrick’s Day Event

Tomorrow our traditional St. Patrick’s Day event is starting, don’t miss the announcement and make sure to join us for some shamrock-inspired hunting.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting

Discussion