Hello Hunters,

I trust everyone is well and that all your shots have been on point. I have been looking through the forum and there have been so many amazing animals harvested, well done team!

Feta Be Accurate! – New Feral Goat Competitions.

Get it??? Feta? Like goat cheese and ‘better’?… I crack myself up… Anyway I am pleased to introduce to you all the new pack of goat competitions, they are now part of the regular competition cycle, there are 7 unique competitions and 11 in total:

Competition Details:

• Biggest Feral Goat (Starter, Intermediate, Elite).
• Top Feral Goat (Starter, Intermediate, Elite).
• Outsmarting the Goat – Highest scoring Feral Goat with a shot to the brain.
• Right on Target – Longest shot Feral Goat with any Crossbow.
• Stealthy Job – Highest scoring Feral Goat with any Bow.
• Loud and Clean – Highest scoring unspooked Feral Goat at 100% Harvest Value with any ethical shotgun.
• Weigh it Well – Heaviest out of your first 6 harvested Feral Goat shot with a SxS shotgun.

Seeing as Feral Goats are a species that I have shot thousands of in real life, I am super excited about these competitions and you can watch me try my best at today’s competition live on stream this afternoon, 4pm CET www.twitch.com/expansiveworlds

What’s on the Lathe?

I mentioned last week about a new style of competition that we are working on, this is still happening, but it has just been pushed back a week, so check the forums early next week for your chance to enter. But here is a little more information to mull over:

• The competitors will compete live on Twitch.com.
• Competitor numbers will be limited to four.
• Anyone can enter and competitors will be drawn randomly.
• The event will last two hours and consist of two, one hour competitions.
• Competitions will be Handgun themed.
• The winner gets a currently unreleased item.

Smarter Than The Average Bear?

There has been some confusion over recent bear changes, mainly I think it is around peoples’ expectations of how they think they should be. So let me try to explain what has changed with them.

The original Grizzlies and Polar Bears were missing some stages in the AI cycle, which is where all the confusion starts.

Let me explain. In their original super aggressive state, they were missing a stage in their AI, the ‘look and listen’ stage that happens when you get within range of an animal. Because the bear was not running any ‘surrounding checks’, this was allowing users to run straight up to the bear. Then once you got up to the bear there was the chance that it charged you or fled.

We added the ‘look and listen’ stage back to their AI, but they had an issue which meant as soon as you went into the ‘look and listen’ range they automatically went to ‘fleeing’, which is why nobody could get close to them.

So now the bears are alert, like they should be in real life. But like all animals in the game you can now stalk them and if you get close enough to them, they will either attack or flee. So they are actually working as originally intended now and not too easy to kill like they were on release.

But if we now compare bear species, Grizzly and Polar Bear are much more likely to charge rather than flee than the other species. If you want to do tests I would try walking around, not running. Like mentioned in the last status update Grizzly Bears are not as aggressive as people think and only attack when startled or they have cubs, but if you run around in the woods and they hear you, they will avoid you.

I hope this helps to explain what was fixed and why it has been fixed. It is now finally working as intended. It should be fun working out how to hunt them now. I hope you enjoy the added realism.

Albino Ambition

Today we enter week three of this competition. But this week’s winner is Fegenhampe for this amazing Whitetail that actually makes the Super Rares Gallery, scoring 175.707. Congratulations.

But I also must congratulate Jonatas_Vitor for this amazing Moose, It must look amazing in your trophy lodge.

There are still two 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, don’t forget to mention the score! Rares go into this Thread and trophy animals into this One. We currently don’t have a competition for Non-Typicals, but they go into this Thread.

This Weeks Winners

The ‘Rare of the Week’ is this amazing melanistic pheasant which was shot by felipepipo. A beautiful rare that many of us can only dream of harvesting! Congratulations.

And the ‘Trophy of the Week’ goes to piomarvado for this very nice Whitetail and trophy shot. It has an impressive score of 188.543. Great stuff!

Detailed hunt analytics

Do you spend a lot of time looking at your hunt history? Or are you a profile stalker that enjoys looking into other players’ hunt histories? Either way, UHC has created a great tool that allows you to dive deep into the stats behind any hunt, and we think you’re going to love it. Meaningful data, graphs, charts, heatmaps and interactive harvest maps are just some of the cool features on offer with the UHC Expedition Analyser. Whether you just want to look at your hunts in more detail, or look at hunts from the pros and figure out the best spots for finding animals, this tool has something for everyone.

To read more about this feature click here. To get started, all you have to do is create a UHC account. It’s fast, simple and FREE, and UHC offers a bunch of cool members features, including personal best data, competition hosting, free TeamSpeak servers and even a chance to earn em$ through participation!

www.uhcapps.co.uk

Free Rotation

This week’s free rotation lets our guest hunters test their skills against Coyote and Red Kangaroos. I have a feeling, treestands, scent eliminator and quick reflexes are need this week!

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

Discussion

Features:

• Functional sunglasses – Sunglasses and tinted glasses now have an actual effect. It can be turned off in the gameplay settings and / or toggled on the fly with help of Z key (default)
• New sunglasses – Round, Ace and Speed
• New trophy shot filters – Warmth and Glacier

Changes

• Eyewear and facewear now have different inventory slots, so you can have both glasses and a scarf / moustaches on at the same time
• A new pose for pheasants added to the Trophy lodge
• The sound should be lower when inside the Trophy lodge when it’s raining
• Reindeer is now placed on large wall plaques in the Trophy lodge (please note that all your previously mounted reindeer are re-set to Trophy manager)
• The top large wall plaque in the Trophy lodge now has a slightly lower position to accommodate for larger antlers
• A new trophy pose added for reindeer, small adjustments made to red deer and elk poses – should eliminate / make better antler clipping
• Filter and sort buttons added to the Trophy manager, as well as tooltips to the various buttons in the Trophy lodge selector and editor (now you can hide your trophies)
• Fix for swapping trophies in the Trophy manager
• New soundmix fix for the bear moaning sound (bears should now sound less loud)
• Two more large bird platforms are added to the Trophy lodge
• Help button added for when inside of the Trophy Lodge
• Change to the roaming animals AI which should eliminate the situations when players are not able to catch up with roaming animals (bears, deer, goats, wild board etc.)

Bug fixes:

• Fix for Happy Camper, Blazing Orange, Army and B&C scarves showing as green in the camo app
• Fix for the 16GA white barrel issue
• Fix for rabbits and hares always showing “roaming” tracks
• Fix for the game crash / freeze during the trophy shot
• Fix for distance calculation on the map
• Fix for wrong distance showed for mineral feeder position
• Fixed an issue where the harvester would get a trophy instead of the person who killed the animal

In progress:

• Graphics issue on WRR
• Digging into slow loading times for inventory

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

Welcome to another, slightly belated, status update from us at theHunter Classic team.

Baiting overhaul – review
Last week we released a baiting overhaul together with brand new mineral feeders for Feral Goats. We’ve been closely watching the conversations and metrics around this big update and are happy to see that the baiting has been reinstated in its realms again. Awesome. You can see a video from HooCairs comparing hog baiting after the update to the old days here.

As always, we filtered all the feedback we received through the internal sieve of game design, technical and resource limitations and what not, and there will be some minor changes to the system: for one, we will be increasing the amount of feeders / barrels per reserve, after the next patch you will be able to place four of those. We think that this will be especially beneficial in Bushrangers Run, but also in Settlers Creek.

Secondly, we are currently testing a slightly different penalty system, which has probably been the most discussed aspect. While we won’t get rid of it completely in order to balance the benefits that baiting offers, we’ve decided to try to find a compromise and make the penalty a tiny bit more forgiving and dynamic. More details about this in the next game update.

We saw that some people complained about the goat mineral feeders not yielding enough goats. The attraction radius of those is smaller than that of bear barrels and pig feeders by game design, which means you have to be very careful about the location of your mineral feeder to find that perfect spot yielding you tons of different-horned trophies.

16 GA Shotgun & Comp 16 Gauge Lockdown

This week we saw the release of our new unique shotgun. The 16 GA side-by-side. It’s a gorgeous piece of weaponry which the team has poured a lot of love into, starting from the design by Patrick, followed by the 3D model by Mattias (who you should have seen in our Lock&Learn yesterday), excellent animations by Moe, sound by Greg and client code by Patrik. Oh, and there are two multispecies competitions running right now, in case you want to level up your new shotgun AND compete for some fame and glory.

New species? Again?
Yes! Our animal team has been on a creative streak lately and we’ve been working on yet another new species. It’s been one of the most requested animals for Whiterime Ridge and we’re now certain that we are bringing this guy (or gal) to your arctic landscapes hopefully very soon. Now, who shall that be? 😉

Hunt-a-thon Winners
Last week we ran a competition Hunta-a-thon to win theHunter Call of the Wild. 646 players have gotten their scores on the leaderboard and, as promised, we raffled 5 copied of theHunter: Call of the Wild and 5 theHunter: Call of the Wild T-Shirts amongst them. And the winners are:
*Free games:*
seagull653
sleepycarp
OldMM1966
Nimrodfuchs
Ande644m

*T-Shirts:*
MaxJorma
abstandshalter
m0nngis
LongBowDano
Velja1234

We will be in touch with the winners to discuss the logistics. Congratulations and thank you everyone who took part!

Goodbye to David and Dick
Finally, we are sad to announce that our support manager and long-term veteran David Lucas aka NAOutdoors, has left the team and will not work with theHunter anymore. David has been with the game since the very beginning, he is an absolute veteran of theHunter and we can truly say that it won’t be the same without him. Thank you David, for everything, and happy hunting wherever life leads you!

Today is the last day of another long-term team veteran, animator Dick Sjöström. He has shared with us his first and last commit on theHunter:

*First Submit (Rangefinder):*
Changelist: 324121
Date Submitted: 2010-06-09 16:38:12

*Last Submit (XXX – something exciting yet secret):*
Changelist: 1189820
Date Submitted: 2017-04-07 09:49:24

Thank you Dick, for your wonderful scent hound animations, among others, and the bottomless well of honesty and one-of-a-kindness.

On a final short note, as yours truly will be away for vacations in the next week and around Easter, our community manager Stefan will take over the status update for next week and let you know what’s cooking.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Howdy hunters and huntresses,

Time for another status update!

New landing page & sign-up is live

Yesterday we released the new landing page and sign up process which will hopefully make it easier for new players to join theHunter family and get started with hunting. It didn’t go as smoothly as we had planned (as many of you know) and we are still experiencing some issues with launcher and browser access. You can read more about these issues and how to solve them in the interim, on your end, in our producer Philipp’s post here. We are continuing to work on fixing the remaining issues and will keep you updated in the respective forum thread. Thank you for bearing with us!

The mystery of the .243 Carbon Rifle

Many of you noticed (some within nanoseconds) the non-buyable but sleek-looking .243 Bolt Action Rifle – Carbon in the store, and started speculating as to what was going down. Well, I’ve got two pieces of news for you. One good and one bad. In keeping with tradition, let’s start with the bad. It won’t be buyable. The good news however, is that you can get it for free by verifying your email via Settings. If you do that, in addition to the rifle you will also receive 3 membership days (which will be added to existing memberships) as well as some other items, including a ground blind. Please note that you can only receive those rewards once, even if you change your email address afterwards.

Win the Beretta backpack from My Hunting Shop

Today we’re launching a new competition in collaboration with one of our partners, My Hunting Shop. An online marketplace for all things hunting and outdoors. The competition will take place on Hirschfelden and will last for 15 days, and the winner will receive the super awesome Beretta Modular Backpack 35 l, kindly supplied by My Hunting Shop, sent directly to wherever you live. You can see the bigger brother of our prize backpack “in action” in the video below, and I bet it’ll make you want that bad boy! Top three players on the leaderboard will also get unique trophies. So, go activate the competition and make sure to check My Hunting Shop, they’ve got a bunch of cool stuff there.

Rockies update

As the work on the new reserve continues, we thought it would be a good time to name our baby. So as tradition dictates, we delegate this task to you, our creative community who not only always know better but are brilliant at these things. Think of such masterpieces of names like Whiterime Ridge and Rougarou Bayou.

The rules are the same – come up with a great name that would fit with the existing EHR reserves nicely and represent the uniqueness of the location we showed you in the screenshots and video before. We are looking forward to your creative outbursts – share them in this thread!

Warning! The following announcement may be too graphic for some computers 🙂

On a final note, throughout the development of the new reserve, a lot of time has been spent debating the question of low graphic settings. Each reserve we have made to date has supported low scene complexity. This means every tree, shrub, rock and so on, requires a low-poly model to be created. As everyone knows, graphics technology has advanced leaps and bounds since the release of theHunter, and this is an area that continues to develop rapidly. Unfortunately we cannot afford to be held back by older hardware or system configurations any longer, and we have taken the hard decision to release this reserve with medium, through to very high graphics settings only. It is hoped that this decision will assure a more aesthetically pleasing and polished gameplay experience for the majority and, from an internal development perspective, optimise and streamline the process of creating new reserves and associated assets.

That’s it from us for today.

Happy hunting!

Discussion

Hello hunters,

Time for a short status update from the EW headquarters.

Summer Fiesta

The Fiesta is gaining speed and volume as more and more animals are being added. This week Turkey and Coyote have joined the competition, with more animals to come. Important information for players competing – the rules have recently changed. Now the best score of all your harvests of each species counts towards your leaderboard result, not only of the first three as originally announced at the beginning. The reason for this change is that our system is currently not able to handle such a condition in multispecies competitions, which was, sadly, only discovered after the start of the Fiesta. The good thing is that the table is still open and you can improve your scores even for the first added species. Just be mindful of your attempts and be strategic. Good luck!

Also, starting from this week, it’s no longer possible to activate a competition while in the middle of a hunting session. This change was implemented to prevent people from manipulating the (previously) existing loophole, and gaining an unfair advantage in competitions.

Cable-backed Bow

On Wednesday we released a new weapon, probably the coolest-ever addition to our archery arsenal. The cable-backed bow. It’s a primitive weapon inspired by the bows made by native people of America. It’s not our easiest weapon to handle and certainly takes some practice to get the knack of it but placing that perfect shot from this sophisticated bow is so much rewarding and enjoyable. Well, try it yourself if you want to experience something different.

Duck Game Design Competition

Finally, a small reminder that the deadline of our game design competition is approaching. You have three days left to come up with a great mission or competition pack and write your name in the chronicles of theHunter forever. You can find the details here.

That’s it from us for today. Next week we’ll have more news to tell about the new big thing in the making as well as a game patch with something new, and fixes for something old. For now, enjoy the weekend and see you out there in the EHR woods!

Discussion

Howdy hunters,

The summer is here, the short time when it’s actually bearable to be in Sweden 😀 The EW team members are slowly drifting off to their vacations and it’s getting quieter in the office. Having said that, the work on developing and improving theHunter continues. Earlier today we released a patch with fixes and a GPS pin for your dogs and you can find a technical update from our producer Philipp about our ongoing work and plans below.

Tomorrow it’s the big holiday of Midsummer in this part of the world, during which the whole Sweden will be drinking spicy snaps and eating strawberries in the midnight sun. To celebrate it theHunter style, we are throwing in a weekend membership sale, so you can renew your membership at up to 30% off. Check the image below for the codes and please note that the sale runs until Monday, June 27th. There are also some great weekend discounts on duck equipment and weapons, up to 50% off – check them out.

Game Improvements Update

Hello Hunters,

with the continuing work on game improvements, we want to update you about our efforts, what has been done since the last announcement and what is to come.

This time we are taking a more general look at both server / database and also gameplay improvements. The goal is to get to the next level in terms of communication for game improvements and to give you a better overview about what is being worked on instead of repeating ourselves that game health is the main priority for us.

Improvements for server stability

Calle and Emil are monitoring our performance and stability around the clock, looking for slow and stressful processes and queries. After identifying the main offender, they released a major update to how the inventory system responds and is updated yesterday. There are no perceivable changes for players but we hope to improve stability and connectivity significantly. Releasing a fix is of course only the first step so we will collect data over the next days and then decide how to move on.

In the meantime they look for the next biggest offender, rinse and repeat and also help the client programmer by improving our crash reporter to be more detailed which helps us to prioritize what to fix next.

Next to that we are working on a bigger plan to relieve our database making better use of the Google service that we use. We might share the details of this in the next update or a later one.

Improvements for gameplay

Our client programmers have not been lazy either. After releasing the Scent Hound, they fixed several random crashes that slipped our testing and analyzed the main problems (crashes, bugs) we currently face in-depth.

We can’t share any specifics yet but we have our eyes mostly on graphical performance and memory, user interface and system memory used by sounds.

While we work on solutions for this (which will be shared in the next update or a later one) we released a patch today with fixes for Turkey and Pheasant scoring issues.

We hope this gives you a better impression of what we are working on and of the improvements to come. Stay tuned for the next updates as we share more specifics, fixes and the plans how to tackle what is left to do.

All the best and good hunting,

Your Phil and the rest of theHunter team

Discussion

Nach unzähligen Stunden der Arbeit freuen wir uns, euch nun endlich das neue Huntertalk Forum präsentieren zu können.

Für alle neuen deutschsprachigen Spieler möchten wir uns kurz vorstellen: Huntertalk.de ist die offizielle deutschsprachige Community von deutschsprachigen Spielern für deutschsprachige Spieler. Wir sind für dich der Anlaufpunkt #1 wenn du dich mit anderen Spielern austauschen, diskutieren oder zu einer Jagdrunde verabreden möchtest.

Huntertalk richtet sich vor allem an all jene Spieler die so ihre Probleme mit der englischen Sprache haben. Hier findest du alle Spiel- und Status-Updates komplett auf Deutsch.

Huntertalk nicht nur im neuen Design

Viel Zeit und viel Arbeit hat es gekostet, aber es hat sich gelohnt. Neben bekannten Forenfunktionen findet ihr nun auch kleine praktische Helfer die euch z.B. das Einbinden von Bildern direkt im Thread oder Post erleichtern ohne es erst auf einer externen Seite hochladen zu müssen. Das Portal versorgt euch mit den neuesten Infos aus dem Forum. Die Shoutbox ermöglicht euch eine kurzfristige Verabredung zur gemeinsamen Jagd oder einfach nur einen kleinen Smaltalk.

Du hast einen Youtube-Kanal zum Thema theHunter? Auch dafür gibt es bei uns einen Platz. Zeige der Community deine Videos und mit etwas Glück bekommt dieses auch auf unseren sozialen Medien seinen Platz.

Wie gewohnt übersetzen unsere Übersetzer alle neuen Infos für euch. Das Eventteam konzeptioniert neue Wettbewerbe und richtet diese aus.

Du hast ein (technisches) Problem? Kein Ding. Für fast jedes Problem findest du bei uns eine Lösung. Musst du doch einmal dem Support schreiben und bist der englischen Sprache nicht mächtig, wird dir auch dabei gerne geholfen.

Profitiere vom Wissen erfahrener Spieler und gehe mit ihnen gemeinsam auf die Jagd.

Und noch einiges mehr…

Huntertalk jetzt auch bei Facebook, Instagram und Twitter

In den sozialen Medien möchten wir euch ausschließlich mit den aktuellsten Informationen versorgen. Neben den Game-Informationen findet ihr außerdem Ankündigungen zu den Huntertalk.de-Wettbewerben, Siegerehrungen, Videos von Usern für User, Einsteiger Guides und noch einiges mehr. Natürlich wieder komplett auf Deutsch.

Neues Wettbewerbs- und Newslettersystem

Unser Eventteam hat, in Zusammenarbeit mit FumarPorros, die Huntertalk-Wettbewerbe auf eine neues Niveau gehoben. Dank des kraftvollen Tools sind die Wettbewerbe für den Einsteiger genauso interessant und fair wie für den Veteranen. Messe auch du dich mit den Großen und sahne den ein oder anderen em$ ab. Eventuell schaffst du es auch auf einen der Plätze der Jahresbesten und erhältst nochmals tolle Prämien für deine Arbeit!

Verpasse keinen Wettbewerb mehr, weil du vergessen hast dich zu informieren! Melde dich für den Wettbewerbsnewsletter an und erhalte den kompletten Wettbewerb als E-Mail und PN im Forum.

Tools von FumarPorros

FumarPorros stellt euch seine praktischen Tools für das Spiel zur Verfügung.

• Waidgerecht auf einen Blick:

Seht auf den ersten Blick, welche Waffen/Munition für ein Tier zugelassen ist oder schaut welches Tier ihr mit welcher Waffe bejagen dürft.

• Map Placementtool:

Dieses Tool soll euch dabei behilflich sein, etwas auf einer TH-Map zu veranschaulichen. Das kann die Darstellung eines vollständigen Equipment-Aufbaus oder aber auch nur eine einzelne Markierung oder Text sein. Das Besondere daran ist, das man die Bearbeitung nicht nur als Bild, sondern auch als Textdatei abspeichern kann. So kann die Karte bei Bedarf immer wieder editiert, mit euren Freunden geteilt und verglichen werden.

• Vorkommen:

Mit diesem Tool könnt ihr ganz schnell sehen, wo ihr welche Tiere auf der Map finden könnt.

• Organ Tool:

Klein aber fein. Schaut mit nur einen Klick nach wo ein Tier seine Organe hat und tragt einen sauberen Schuss an.

Sei ein Teil der offiziellen deutschsprachigen Community und finde bei uns deinen Platz. Wir hoffen, dich bald bei uns begrüßen zu können.

Euer Huntertalk.de Team