Before we start, I'd like to note that this guide is very old now, and I have not played the game in a long time.


If you have or write a new beginner's guide - make it friends only, notify my in comments, I'll add you as a friend and look at the guide - if it's up to standard, I'll make you a contributor to this one and we can merge the guides, work on it together with links to new resources and improve it, before I remove myself as a contributor - it will mean your guide has the rating and position of this one, but the Hunter community will have a more up-to-date guide they can use with the guide authour able to answer the questions and assist new players better than I can.


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Please note that I am not up to date with the latest Hunter developments, as I haven't played it since my subscription expired and have since uninstalled it since none of my friends want to keep paying all the time either! We don't have any money! We work for a living!

I'm Cap'n Saccade and this is my intro guide for newbies to The Hunter!

If, after reading this guide, you'd like to know more about in-game money (gm$, not em$ which you buy) and how to earn them in order to get a shotgun and licenses - you can check out this great guide by Mows: http://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=302918708

Thanks Mows!!!

Also for all you trophy hunting trophy hunters, here's Ghuffball's guide to doing just that:

https://cs2bus.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1393870906

TL;DR - just keep restarting til you start a big one spawns at the start ;)

Loggers point is this one ^

• I joined your game, where is my stuff?
  I for inventory - you can change your inventory only at hunting lodges or tents.
  
  
  
• How do I run?
  You press C to toggle between walking and running, indicated by an icon
  X toggles free-look and Q auto-moves. These are all very important things to know.
  
  
  
• Can I shoot other humans?
  No. You need a license.
  
  
  
  
• WTF?! I played for 5 hours and saw no animals!
  Are you running everywhere? Because you are pretty noisy when you are running, you know...
  
  
  
• Yeah, I am totally not running, and I still see nothing!
  Did you play the tutorials..?
  
  
  
• What tutorials?
  You can find the tutorials from the Hunt Now drop-down menu in the launcher.
  
  
  
  
• I played the tutorials, but I still don't find any animals.
  Now that you know how to track, stalk and hunt an animal – with some time and patience, you will no doubt be racking up the spots.
  
  The huntermate is not 100% accurate. Do not rely on it to show you the next tracks. Use your real life tracking and hunting skills to look at the tracks and determine where it may have gone.
  Sometimes, the animals will run back over their incoming tracks, and you can easily get confused.
  
  If in doubt – go back and check – if still in doubt- give up and try again.
  
  (...and BTW, I saw you running past me earlier, and your path on the map tells everyone you've been going pretty fast compared to the people who have the scores.)
  
  
  
• WTF?! Why can't I shoot this animal?
  As it says, you need a license to hunt – if you had been tracking it, you may have noticed it saying that many times already... There is more on licenses later in this guide.
  
  
• Okay, what can I shoot if I can't shoot bears?
  As an unlicensed guest and not a licensed hunter, you are allowed to shoot only Mule Deer and Rabbits.
  
  
  
• Where can I find Mule Deer and Rabbits?
  You can find Mule Deer and Rabbits in the Logger's Point reserve.
  
  Multiplayer servers for this map fill up quickly, because it is the only map in which guests are able to shoot (one species of) the deer.
  
  Joining any server running a different map – unless you are merely exploring, tracking and spotting – will only result in disappointment, as you can't shoot anything :`(
  
  
  
• It says it is illegal to hunt rabbits with the rifle I was given as a guest, what's the point?
  Didn't you have fun shooting that illegal bunny in an illegal way..? You're such a badass, you don't even care about the score! Don't worry about the angry emails from Doc – he is not a real person. He is not even a chat-bot.
  
  
  By "confirm the kill with your huntermate", he means you have to bludgeon it a few times with your gameboy GPS, else it doesn't count. But - you shot it, it's probably dead and - if it's not, well it will be when the server closes...
  
  (incidentally, if you leave the game and someone finds your animal and harvests it, Doc won't apologise... he won't even let you have the harvest, it's like it never happened... what a cold, mean, unfair and uncaring man Doc is...)
  
  
  
• I got no score for my deer!!! What does the score mean?
  The scoring can be a little confusing... I don't understand it, either – you can find explanations on the Hunter Wiki, but they just confuse it even more, for me...
  
  All I know is:
  
  Cross Species [CSS] score is the good one, and the higher that is the better.
  Harvest value has no bearing on the CSS score, and relates how quickly and ethically you ended an animal's virtual life.
  
  Competitions are sometimes scored differently, and this is explained in the individual competition text.

• I really liked walking so much, and looking at the scenery, and tracking animals. I even shot a few deer and one was a buck! How can I get a license.
  The easiest way to get a license, is to pay for one with money that you have in real life, through your steam wallet, directly to the hunter store.
  
  
  
• Which is the best license to get?
  I went with the Wayfarer package, which gave me guns to shoot any animal in the game for 3 months. However, I also spent about 5,000em$ on game items that I didn't pay a penny to earn.
  
  If I could do it again, I would get the Pathfinder package, and also buy a few thousand em$ to spend on additional items I wanted, spending about £25-30 in total. That's a fair price for this game.
  
  You can see a confusing table of stuff to do with license at the hunter wiki:
  http://www.thehunterwiki.com/?title=Guest_Hunting
  
  
  
• Wait! How did you get that stuff for free?!
  By agreeing to have my email account filled with over 900 spam emails a day, playing more browser games than I have ever done in my life, answering opinion surveys on advertising and watching adverts online.
  
  As of the latest update, the "Earn em$" button is now available only through the "Buy em$" menu in the launcher.
  
  
  
• Is earning em$ worth the effort?
  No.
  
  I would not suggest going through a pay-to-play hell in order to get a longbow and england cap. Unless you really, really don't want to spend any money or are doing it for SCIENCE! Like I did, then I really don't recommend doing anything other than watching the videos.
  
  You can get 50-80em$ a day from “watching” the videos in the launcher, while alt-tabbing back to the game or writing guides for people on the internet :)
  
  
  
• I see can buy or “earn” em$ to spend on game items and day/week/months licenses for individual species, but what are gm$?
  Gm$ are “game money” that you earned through activating and completing missions that are found in the launcher menu.
  
  You can earn enough of these, as a guest, to buy some consumables (such as camping supplies, scent eliminator or deer piss) or licenses. However they can be completed only once - it costs 800em$ to reset the missions.
  
  To go through the missions in order to be able to have hunted every animal in sequence requires a lot of dedication and planning and time. If you do it this way – you are a true hunter, and also incredibly tight-fisted.
  
  There is one weapon you can buy with gm$, which is a single-shot shotgun. It is possible to complete the number of missions required to earn the gm$ without a license.
  
  
  
• I bought a license and some em$, but what weapons should I get..?
  This is all down to you. I chose, first, to buy a Kar-98 and a Longbow, so I could hunt everything and have some fun.
  You can hunt everything with a shotgun, and everything with a bow. Bows have a higher skill level demanded from the player, but result in higher levels of satisfaction/rage-quitting.
  
  Also check out the caller bundles and the clothing bundles – if you want to see more animals and get closer to them, these things are a necessity.

• Alright, so I know now that I am able to hunt deer and rabbits (and I've even managed to do so!) on Logger's Point as a guest, but am welcome to track and spot and play on other maps.
  
  I know how to get myself a license, and even how to buy or earn em$ to get other items and guns for “free”.
  
  
• But what if I need to ask someone something in game, or I want to yell at someone for scaring off the deer i was stalking, or if I wanna tell my friend only that i'm gonna fast-travel or that i'm gonna take a break so don't kill me and steal my weapons, ok..?
  
  Well, to chat - you press "Enter" and then type your message. There are other commands too, here:
  
  
• Is there anything else I need to know..?
  
  Yep – Anything else you need to know about the game is at the hunter wiki, which you can find by googling, “the hunter wiki”.
  
  The only other thing you need to know is, don't be a smeg-head.
  If someone asks you to stop following them, because you are a new player with no clue – don't chase after them shooting off your rifle, because you will get banned.
  Go back and learn to play the game, then goto Logger's point and play there. When you know what you are doing, you too can experience the joys of your perfect hunt going south, because someone is running up to you, firing their lazer.
  
  Basically – if you treat other players the way you would like them to treat you in the game, you will do okay. Just like in real life... This is a simulator, after all.
  
  
  
• Okay, I will try not to be a smeg-head. Thanks very much for all your help, Mr Saccade.
  
  You are welcome, mates.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  If you have other questions that you think need to be answered, then please list them in the comments and perhaps I can add them in the sequence somewhere.
  
  
  Have fun and Happy Hunting!