Sensible Hunting

Sensible Hunting

Adds a Hunting skill to Valheim. The better you hunt, the better you read the woods: nearby wild game shows up as an indicator on your screen — over the animal when it's in view, pinned to the edge pointing the right way when it isn't, including directly behind you.

Crouch to sense. The instinct only works while you're sneaking, and it comes in pulses: a blip flashes up where the animal was when you sensed it, fades, and the woods go quiet again for a few seconds. Low skill means one brief glimpse every seven seconds or so; at 100 the pulses are long and the gaps short.

This is not a radar. It reaches 90 metres by default, blips fade with distance, and it only ever shows wild animals — never monsters, never players, never your tames.

What it looks like

Same spot, same evening, same two boars and a deer — only the Hunting skill changes.

Hunting 10 — pulses, no numbers, and the bearing is deliberately off. One blip is pinned to the left edge: that animal is behind you.

Hunting 40 — the bearing tightens and you get a ballpark distance: ~20 m, ~25 m.

Hunting 80 — you know what it is. Two boars at an exact 18 m and 27 m, and a deer off the left edge.

What the skill unlocks:

| Hunting | What a blip tells you |

|---|---|

| 0–24 | roughly where — the blip can point as much as 10° off, double that at midday |

| 25–49 | closer to the truth, and about how far (~15 m) |

| 50–74 | the true bearing and the exact distance (12 m) |

| 75–100 | what it is — the animal's head, in gold |

Detection range grows from 30 m to 90 m as the skill rises, and near game shows as a bigger

blip, so you can read distance before you can read numbers.

Your eyes beat your instinct. If the animal is on screen and you have a clear line of sight to it — no terrain, building or tree trunk in the way, and not hidden by the Mistlands mist — the blip drops the bearing error and follows the animal itself. Behind a rock, or in the mist, you are back to the instinct, which is where it earns its keep. A Wisplight clears the mist for it, same as for your eyes.

Night is the hunter's hour. The bearing error is worst in broad daylight and sharpest after dusk.

How you level it:

• Stalking — sneaking while game is within your detection range. A slow trickle, and it only pays again once you've moved on or the nearest animal has changed, so camping a pen does nothing.
• Hitting an animal — scaled by how much of its health you took off.
• Killing one — the biggest share, multiplied by its star level.

Client-side only. Nobody else needs it, and neither does the server.

Configuration

BepInEx/config/com.mous.sensiblehunting.cfg (or in-game with ConfigurationManager, changes apply live):

Upgrading from an older version? BepInEx never overwrites a setting that already exists in your

config file, so species added in a later release (Wolf, Seagal, Moose, Seal) do not appear in a

GameAnimals line written by an earlier version. Add them by hand, or delete the GameAnimals line

and restart to take the new default.

• Enabled, GameAnimals (prefab names of animals that fight back but still count as game — Boar, Neck, Lox, Asksvin, Wolf, Seagal (the seagull), Moose and Seal by default; flying creatures are only sensed while on the ground; passive animals always count), RequireCrouch, MinRange, MaxRange, MaxBearingError, DaytimeErrorScale, SightRadius, BallparkStep
• VisibleAtSkill0, VisibleAtSkill100, GapAtSkill0, GapAtSkill100
• EdgeMargin, NearSize, FarSize, Opacity, Glyph, EdgeGlyph
• StalkFactor, HitFactor, KillFactor, StalkMoveDistance

License

MIT — source at