Hello Hunters,

How has everyone’s week gone? Anyone managed to bag any good animals? I managed to get a new PB Mule Deer which scored 243, it was a nice surprise as I seem to be lucky with the rares, but never any top scoring animals. Anyway, enough about me, let’s take a look at what’s happening with the game this week!

Was that a cannon I heard?

New .405 Lever Action Rifle

A lot of people have been requesting a new rifle to deal with the stronger animals in the game and we have just released a classic that perfectly fits the bill!

The .405 is a classic rifle and traditionally it never had any optics. This is because of where the breach is located, how it is loaded and how the shells are ejected. So to keep it as true to the real gun, currently there are no scopes for it. In saying that, it is designed for the biggest of animals and these tend to present a much bigger target and are generally easier to get close to. I took it to the range before and can hit the bulls eye at 100m with ease, I might have also shot a few clays with it 😉 There is a great discussion taking place at the moment on our forums, take part Here.

New Competition: .405 Big Medicine Gun

As traditional with any new weapon release, we have a competition to complement it. This time it’s a combination of your heaviest Moose, Banteng and Water Buffalo. More details can be found Here.

What’s on the Lathe?

We have been working on some new competition ideas here at EW and the first one that I can hint at is our first ever live eSport-style event, where people will compete live on stream for a currently unreleased in-game item. If this sounds like a bit of fun to you, keep an eye on the forums next week for your chance to participate.

The WRR sound issue is nearly fixed and all going to plan you can expect it in a patch very soon, we understand how frustrating it is and we appreciate everyone’s patience.

We are still working on individualising the bear behaviour, more research is being done and then the programing will be tweaked to get their behaviour as true to real life as possible. Surprisingly enough Grizzly bears are more cautious than people (including myself) tend to think.

Albino Ambition

The new albino textures appear to have gone down a treat with everyone and the community competition is still running. This week’s winner is TalonLePineapple for this very nicely composed trophy shot.

But I also must congratulate Gaffi for this lovely photo as well, it was very hard to pick between the two.

There is still three weeks of the competition left, for more details and the correct post to enter them head Here

Rare and Trophy of the Week

The new weekly social media competitions are going well and it’s great to see so many new people coming into the forums. If you have shot a rare or high scoring animal from this week and want a chance to win, then share them in the correct thread on our forum. Rares go into this thread Here and trophy animals into this One. We currently don’t have a competition for Non-Typical’s, but they go into this Thread.

This Weeks Winners

The ‘Rare of the Week’ is this stunning albino Wolf which was shot by haldar and would you believe it? It was his first ever Wolf harvested! Congrats!

And the ‘Trophy of the Week’ goes to Granti for this W-I-D-E Blacktail with a massive score of 195.5. Great stuff!

New Staff Member

Introducing Silvia Scalisi, who is our new FullStack Developer. Please give her a warm welcome.

A little introduction from Silvia,

Hej Hunters! My name is Silvia Scalisi and I am a FullStack Developer working with the theHunter Classic in the Stockholm office. As a FullStack Developer, my goal is to build robust servers and appealing user interface for our players.

On the personal side, I am a Sicilian girl who moved to northern Europe two years ago. I enjoy cold temperatures so Sweden is a perfect fit for me 🙂 I love playing retro games (Tetris is my favourite), going to Zumba classes, eating and preparing Japanese food and spending a lot of time laughing with friends! I am really happy to have joined the team. Ciao!

Free Rotation

This week’s free rotation lets our guest hunters have a shot at Brown Bear and Moose. So load up your bear barrels and bring out the heavier guns this week!

Best of luck out there and I hope you all have a good weekend!

Discussion

Hello Hunters,

I hope you are all having a good week. Winter has slapped us in the face hard (finally) here in Stockholm. It has been snowing since Tuesday and the snow is actually a nice change, as it illuminates everything at night and brightens up the short, dark, winter days!

So what’s new?

Updated Albino Textures

So the term ‘deeper not wider’ gets thrown around from time to time and we hope that these updated Albino textures prove that we are still committed to making the game a more immersive experience and that we do listen to you guys and gals, in case you weren’t sure 😉

The new textures have been updated for Whitetail Deer and Moose and they were remade by our talented character artist Cecilia. If you are lucky enough to bag one, we have a competition running at the moment, to read more and enter Click Here. 

What is in the chamber?

We have been working on a lot already this year and as per usual we can’t talk about most of it just yet. But what I can tell you is that we are working on another new rifle, and if you are interested in an early look you should definitely tune into the stream this afternoon! We will be giving you all a sneak preview, 4pm CET Watch Here. We are also going to be trying our luck at getting some of the new Albinos.

Scent sprays are in the works for Sambar and Rusa, they are currently with the Beta testers making sure they smell… ahh, I mean work properly.

We are still working on the WRR sound issue and we have worked out a good long-term way to fix it. The nature of the fix however does mean that it is taking a little bit longer than originally expected, sorry for the inconvenience.

New Weekly Competitions

We have started two new weekly competitions which feature on our social media networks. ’Rare’ and ‘Trophy’ of the week are the two new competitions, and all the details are in the title really. As long as you have shot a Rare or Trophy animal from the past week, then put it in the Rares or TruRACS thread and we judge it as the most impressive of the week, you win some sweet em$. Here are this weeks winners.

The ‘Rare of the Week’ is an amazing Piebald elk with a score of 394.487 by Radukukiller90

And the ‘Trophy of the Week’ goes to xOEDragonx for her amazing Banteng with a score of 154.405

Free Rotation

This week’s free rotation lets our guest hunters have a shot at Roosevelt Elk and Grey Wolves. Keep your ears open for that spine tingling Elk bugle and scan the river banks carefully for those Wolves!

Best of luck out there and I hope you all have a good weekend!

TK

Discussion

Hello Hunters!

It’s the end of the week, and therefore time for another Status Update! The office is very calm right now as everybody is back, rested after the holidays, and hard at work creating new content and game improvements.  On Wednesday we added some new backpacks for your hunting dogs and the team is getting up to speed on lots of other goodies to make 2018 a year to remember!

Wish You Were Here…

We recently wrapped up the Piccabeen Postcard competition that TreeKiwi has been running on our forum.  We’ve had a lot of great entries to choose from and finally settled on the top three, feel free to check them all out on the above linked thread, but for convenience here’s our winning entry from DarkHunterxx (big congrats!):

These Missions are the G.O.A.T!

I hope that pun “worked”, but in any case, we have new missions!  This week we added a whole new series of activities for you to do based around our agile Feral Goat population.  These missions certainly raised a few chuckles when we showed them off on stream, we hope the rest of you enjoy them.  The concept itself came from forum member Tanngnjost, many thanks!

Our Bags are Packed…

Or well, our ever-faithful hunting dog’s bags are!  This week’s new content consisted of two stylish, and very functional, packs for your dogs to carry supplies in.  The two new colour options consist of the Summer Forest and Winter Forest patterns and are sure to look great on any occasion!  Or well, I guess the purpose of camouflage is not to be “seen” at all…but you get my meaning. 😉

Free Species Rotation

To aid everybody in their feral goat missions they are of course on free rotation this week, along with one of our newest arrivals to the EHR, the Sitka Deer.

Back to Goats…

To complement our new missions we’ve discounted a whole bunch of goodies that’ll come in handy.  Please do drop by the in-game store and take your pick, I highly recommend that 7mm Bullpup if you didn’t have one already!

Until next week!

/Graham

Discussion

TK

Hello Hunters,

Welcome to the last Status Update of the year! As you’ve likely noticed we’ve been progressively getting more festive, and soon marks the time when the Devs will go away for a well deserved break, and lots of holiday food!

On the Subject of the Holidays…

A quick update on our Holiday Event!  We still have plenty more to go and we are seeing some excellent participation from all of our fans.  Best of luck grabbing some prizes!  The prizes themselves you can count on receiving in the New Year at the very latest, although all being well you should get them on the 25th (that 9.3x74R O/U sure makes for a great gift for the lucky winners!).

Don’t forget that our very own Mat/TreeKiwi/TK (he goes by many names, can get confusing…) will be continuing with some streams and assisting with those missions during the break, so please do check in and keep him company! twitch.tv/expansiveworlds

The Holidays Came Early!

We had some VERY happy Devs recently when this aid package arrived all the way from Vienna!

Community member D3AKUs sent us a box containing all kinds of delicious Austrian goodies, my stomach was pleased, my bathroom scales likely not so much!  D3AKUs, thank you SO much, it’s really appreciated and we hope that in return we can give you the gift of an awesome game, all throughout 2018, and for many more years to come!

Deck the Halls (or Trophy Lodge…)

We highly recommend you take a peek at your “Classy” style trophy lodges before the holiday period ends.  We’ve sprinkled some seasonal magic around and feel that it’s now really the place to be to really get into that festive spirit!  Sources say that the red in the decoration really sets off that in Rudolph’s nose quite nicely. 😉

Free Rotation

Our current free rotation for our guest hunters bring the Feral Goat and Arctic Fox into the mix.  Extra-stealthy tactics will be needed to get past the heightened senses of these two creatures, good luck!

This sign’s me out personally until next year, but keep your eyes peeled for a Holiday farewell from the rest of the team very soon!

Discussion

Hi Hunters!

Or maybe we should say “G’day”? Today marks the unveiling of Piccabeen Bay!

The team has been hard at work over the past months creating what we hope to be  one of our best reserves to date. We set the bar pretty high when we created Timbergold Trails, and we have aimed to maintain that same standard of quality, love and attention to detail with Piccabeen Bay. As well as all-new flora and species, there’s been some technical changes we’ve rolled out for the first time. Read on or the full run-down!

A New Reserve, With New Inhabitants

When stalking the tropical woodlands of Piccabeen Bay. we’d recommend you bring out the “big guns”. This reserve features our biggest animal to date (also, the biggest horns – a real treasure for your trophy lodges), the mighty Water Buffalo! This sedate-looking bovid, as its name suggests, can often be found wandering around swamps or rivers. But be on the lookout, the Buffalo’s calm exterior gives way to fearsome charges should it feel threatened. No hunter wants to be on the receiving end of 600 kg (1,300 lb) of charging horns and muscle!

On the subject of big bovids, we move on to our next inhabitant of Piccabeen Bay, the Banteng. Although at a glance similar in appearance to the Buffalo, a Banteng can be easily differentiated by its high, almost upright, curved horns. No need to panic should you meet one, these are a lot more docile than their Buffalo cousins! Originally introduced to Northern Australia by the British as a livestock animal, the Banteng fast adapted to its new home and spread prolifically.

Moving away from the big lumbering beasts above to the more delicate Rusa and Sambar deer. These two deer species are biologically allied but can be differentiated by their size. Whilst a big Sambar can weigh up to 546 kg (1,204 lb) the Rusa is much more diminutive with around 135 kg (300 lb) being more common. Both animals however sport a fine rack of antlers that will be sure to look great in your trophy lodges! We’ve also equipped Rusa and Sambar with some lovely new behaviours and animations, and hope you’ll enjoy the new level of realism and immersion they offer. You can grab the new Rusa Deer “Grunt” Caller in the store, however hunting Sambar Deer will require extra skill and patience. We plan to release urine sprays for Sambar and Rusa deer in the not-too-distant future.

Now for our last inhabitant of Piccabeen Bay, we shouldn’t forget the Feral Hogs! Unlike the Wild Boar, this animal has clear lineage to domesticated livestock and tends to either be an escapee of farms, or a direct descendant of said freedom-loving suidae. Pigs of all kinds are lets say… very enthusiastic feeders. Their foraging and digging of roots can cause extensive damage to plants, even resulting in serious erosion issues around rivers and such. Save the world, hunt a Feral Hog! 😉

Things Are Hotting Up!

Inspired by the hot tropical forest region of Australia, we wanted to differentiate the feeling of the reserve with more than just new plant life and animals. Similar to Whiterime Ridge, we have introduced a map-wide mechanic which takes into account the punishing nature of the climate.

The new warm weather mechanic is something that will begin to take effect as you progress into long hunts. Your screen edges will start to blur and your aim will not be as true or steady as it was before. In order to combat this, we’ve introduced a new Water bottle item (you’ll receive three of these for free, and they replenish automatically at the beginning of each session) which you can take a sip from to stave off the effects from the heat. Like in real life, you slowly recover when standing still and overheat faster when running. You also need to be smart about the clothes you are wearing (all the basic clothes you received for free when registering for an account at theHunter will work great, and you can find the new warm weather resistance parameter in the store description for each clothing item). The new Sneaky 3D Tropical Forest camo gear with its high-tech synthetic materials will keep you protected not only against the heat but also from animals’ eyes. On an average-length hunting session, you shouldn’t feel overly impacted by this effect, but we would NOT recommend wearing arctic gear or bringing your heated tents!

In addition to Piccabeen Bay, the new warm weather gameplay mechanic has been rolled out to Bushrangers Run, given the similar climate. The Outback outfit, a common choice for hunters of Bushrangers Run, will also help keep the warm weather effects at bay.

What’s Special About This Reserve?  A Word From Alena.

The tropical forest environment was the clear winner of our last player survey and we were happy to take this opportunity to add something new and unique to theHunter Classic.

For one, our programmer Patrik took a stab at something we wanted to implement for a long time – running water. You can find small rivers with running water throughout Piccabeen Bay.

Secondly, we’ve also added thunder and lightning, to add a special touch of atmosphere to this reserve when it rains. Like Timbergold Trails, released last year, Piccabeen Bay won’t support low settings. This means both Timbergold Trails and Piccabeen Bay are forced to medium scene complexity, even if you set this to low in the launcher. For more information on this decision, please check this status update.

Since technology development doesn’t stand still and we keep receiving conflicting reviews on how the game plays on some computers, today we are introducing “recommended settings”.

Recommended settings:

• Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit
• Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz or Higher
• Memory: 8GB RAM
• Graphics Card: GeForce GTX760 or Higher

Discussion

Hello Hunters,

Weekend is fast approaching, and what better way to wrap up your week than with a read through our Status Update? We have the name of our new reserve to share, some behind the scenes chat with our art team, and new seasonal goodies have been dug out from the back of Doc’s Shed.

What Sounds Better than Tropical Forest?

Piccabeen Bay!  As Alena announced on-stream yesterday, we now have a name for our new Australia-inspired reserve!  We took a lot of inspiration from the suggestions that were made on the forum but didn’t quite find “the one”, as such we thought why not ask our resident in-team Aussie, Bethany?  The name itself comes from the Piccabeen palm, a.k.a Archontophoenix cunninghamiana, which you’ll find growing abundantly throughout  the reserve.  Here’s an example:

Seeing IS Believing

Yesterday marked our first look at Piccabeen Bay as we played some of the new reserve live on stream.  Mat, myself (Graham), Alena, and special community guest, HooCairs took us through some of the sights and got face to face with the reserve’s inhabitants.  We even had a brief visit from an albino Buffalo, which we promptly lost in the foliage…lets hope one of you can find it for us when the reserve is live!

If you weren’t able to make the stream then please do take a look at the VOD (that’s what the cool kids call “video on demand” dontcha know?).

We should mention that we’ll be streaming most days on the run-up to the holidays taking you through the Holiday Event Missions, but our next Piccabeen Bay stream will be on Tuesday 12th December.  Catch us at 16:00 CET at twitch.tv/expansiveworlds

Meet Some More of the Team

Of course the whole team is very busy putting in the final polish to the reserve, but I managed to grab one of our 3D artists, Mattias, and pitched him the same questions Moe and Carolina answered last week.

First-up are some examples of what it is that Mattias looks at, and creates, all day.  We have a view of Piccabeen Bay followed by some of the textures that went into the reserve itself.

And some quick Q&A with Mattias himself:

What has been your favorite part of working on the new tropical forest reserve?

Mattias: I really enjoyed the opportunity to add new features, as well as cooperating with the programmers to improve things across the reserve.

What has been the trickiest part to get “just right”?

Mattias:  Getting the feeling of a dense tropical forest but still thinking about performance was a real challenge! 

What part of community interaction helps you most with your job?

Mattias: Getting feedback on plants, density, crossings are all very useful. (Graham: We had a great live example of the latter in our stream yesterday)

Tune in next week for some more art team behind the scenes with our 2D/3D artist, Johan.

What’s Up Doc?

Doc is feeling festive and taken time to bring out some seasonal goodies from the back of his shed.  Feel free to drop by the store and pick out a nice holiday sweater or some accessories to make those hunts a little more “jolly”. 😉  On the subject of jolly…here’s some of the Marketing and theHunter Classic team today:

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to the status update! It comes slightly belated this week since a lot of things have been happening at and around theHunter, but let’s hope that the old saying about all good things coming to those who wait, is true in this case. We’ve got a bunch of stuff to share with you, so sit back and enjoy.

Server downtime compensation

This Thursday we suffered server downtime. The servers were unstable for about 10 hours and the game was to a large extent, unplayable. We did a thorough investigation of what happened and discovered that the culprit was an old piece of code causing certain queries to run for far too long. Luna has now rewritten that code snippet and made sure that this would not happen again. We sincerely apologise for inconvenience and the game disruptions that it caused you! To compensate you for lost membership time, we’ve added 1 extra day to all current memberships. Thank you for your continuous support, in this matter and always!

Tropical forest animals and more

Are you ready for more news about our new reserve? We hope you are, ‘cause we’ve got some and then a little bit more. For one, there seems to have been confusion regarding the actual location, so here’s a reminder. It is inspired by the Australian tropical forest. However, as always with reserves in theHunter Classic, we allow ourselves creative freedom when it comes to flora, terrain, fauna selection and other reserve details, to make sure that the location provides fun and enjoyable gameplay and fits well in the existing theHunter-verse.

In this reserve you can expect to see some swamps with the mighty grumpy Water Buffalo splashing in the shallow waters, dense forest areas with Rusa Deer and Banteng, open beach for an occasional skittish Sambar Deer and, to mix up this antler and horn feast, we’ve also added some Feral Hogs for you. All in all, our intention is to create a location with rather challenging gameplay, due to the thick forest, and an array of unique species to make that challenge gratifying (and worthy of your trophy lodges). You will be our judges on whether we succeeded.

In the next status update we will be telling you more about the upcoming animals and the unique features we will be bringing with them. In the meantime, here are a couple of the WIP screenshots of the upcoming reserve. Enjoy!

Also, it’s a time for us to start thinking about a name for the new location! And as always, we are turning to you, our community, who not only always know better but are brilliant at these things (remember Rougarou Bayou and Timbergold Trails? <3)

So, there you go, come up with a great name that will go with the existing EHR reserves and represent the uniqueness of the location we showed you in the screenshots. We are looking forward to your suggestions. Please share them in this thread!

Doc’s Shed opening

You might remember that some time ago Doc started clearing up the store of all the items he deemed as “chuff”, and putting them into his Shed. This week he took a stab at the store again and marked a couple of weapons to go there as well. On Monday all weapons and other items with the “Limited” tag will become unavailable and moved away, so grab them beforehand before it’s too late. On a brighter note, following many a community request, we managed to sneak our moustaches and the “Trapper hat – Skunk” out of the Doc’s Shed for a little while. It’s Thanksgiving time and Doc has been in an ok mood these days.

Events, events, events

It’s holiday season again, and time for all the special fun that comes with it. This week we are running a Thanksgiving event with tiered Turkey competitions and missions, together with savoury trophies and yummy sales to go with them. Please note that competitions run until the end of this week and missions will be available until the end of the next one, December 3rd, to give you more time.

One of the greatest Thanksgiving attributes – Black Friday sale – is already alive and kicking. We’ve discounted by 20% all items in the store (except for the recently released ones) for one day, until November 25th 11:00 CET, and all memberships and membership bundles (including membership bundles on our Steam store page)  until November 27th, 12:00 CET. So, if you’ve been drooling over for that shiny 10GA Shotgun, it’s now or never!

And finally, next week it’s happening. Our traditional Holiday Event with festive missions and competitions, trophies and other exciting stuff. Something you can not and should not miss. Truly the highlight of the year in theHunter Classic. Check back on December 1st to learn more about it and kick off your December with some glorious winter hunting!

That’s it from us for today.

Happy Turkey and bargain hunting!

Discussion

Time for our weekly status update – enjoy!

Loadouts are here!

Today we are thrilled to present something which many of you have been suggesting and waiting for since the game first came out. Luna has done an incredible job on this feature and she even threw in some sweet extra inventory management stuff, including a smooth search function for your lodge inventory, stacking of duplicates, and the option to pre-select a saved Loadout directly from the launcher before starting a game. The latter will come in very handy when spawning at a non-heated tent in Whiterime Ridge 😉

Saved Loadouts are released as a premium feature, since they are not required to play or enjoy the game. You may continue to set up your equipment the gold old-fashioned way, like everyone has been doing for years. But if you are looking to shave some valuable time off your hunt setup and avoid having to check the wiki for camo and permitted ammo lists, then head to the store and purchase yourself some Loadouts. They are available separately or in bundles. For bundles we have introduced a small one, containing 5 Loadouts, and a large one which will be enough to get you covered for all the existing reserves. As promised, today we are also giving 1 free Loadout to all our current members, as a little thank you for your loyalty and support.

And more on that topic, we are also giving large bundles of Loadouts to the three winners of the “Share your favourite loadout competition”. Congratulations Askrobert1234, Seifer and J_Birdman! Not only are you the winners, but your winning entries will be added to the store as bundles for the rest of our community to make use of. Thank you!

Meet you in the tropics!

Since we announced last week that a new reserve is in the works, you kept us busy with your speculations, guesses and ruminations. There have been a few of you that have been absolutely spot on. Very impressive! This post was probably my favourite, since indeed, the 12th reserve in theHunter Classic is inspired by the Australian tropical forest. In the next weeks we will be telling you more about the gameplay details of the new map, as well as, of course, the fauna. In the meantime, who would you like to see which animals will be residing there?

Anti-virus false positives

We know that a number of players have been experiencing alerts from their anti-virus software following a recent game patch. We are still trying to establish which piece of code is responsible for triggering the alert, and we are also working closely with the relevant anti-virus software developers to ensure this does not happen in the future. In the meantime, please be assured that there is nothing suspicious about any of the executables included in theHunter. This is a false-positive alert that can be safely ignored.

Personal bests anyone?

With the Personal Bests function on our site undergoing re-evaluation, in case you would like to know what was your best scoring Moose ever, UHC Apps is a fantastic website developed by our community members caledonianblues and Tod1d, dedicated to all things theHunter, with a primary focus on hosting quality community competitions. In addition, the website includes some great tools for displaying theHunter stats, and the most recent addition is a very cool Personal Bests function that allows you to view your best trophies from any season, completely with CSV download for anyone who wants to manipulate the data in Excel or other applications.

We encourage you to check it out – please note that you will need to create an account. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it’s free.

Happy hunting!

Discussion