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:

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 https://github.com/EnyMan/valheim-mods

Changelog

1.2.1

• New Asksvin locator head: the old one read like the Neck at icon size.
• README now shows the skill stages in-game, and documents the line of sight, day/night and SightRadius behaviour that shipped in 1.1.0.
• If seagulls, wolves, moose or seals are not being tracked on an upgraded install, check your config. BepInEx never overwrites a setting that already exists, so a GameAnimals line written by an earlier version keeps its old list. Add the missing names by hand, or delete the line and restart.
• New hidden console command sh_probe: prints every animal in range with the reason it is or is not sensed, every ambient bird the game has loaded, and the live config list. sh_probe <name> also dumps the components of any matching object.

1.2.0

• Stage 4 now names the animal with its own gold head silhouette instead of borrowing the trophy icon. Species without art still fall back to the trophy, or to anything else the animal drops.
• Seagulls are sensed at last. Seagal is not a creature - it is a re-skinned crow with no Character component, so it could never show up however the config listed it; it now comes from the ambient bird registry instead, while it is on the ground.
• Young animals use the adult's head: Boar_piggy, Wolf_cub, Lox_Calf, Moose_calf, Asksvin_hatchling and Chicken.

1.1.0

• Fixed blip placement: positions were in screen pixels while Valheim's HUD canvas works in 1920x1080 units, so at any other resolution or GUI scale blips drifted away from their target and edge indicators on the right vanished off screen.
• Animals you can actually see now get a truthful blip: on screen, clear line of sight from your head, and not hidden by the Mistlands mist (a Wisplight opens the view back up). No bearing error on those, and the blip tracks the animal instead of the spot it was heard at.
• New SightRadius: the line-of-sight probe is swept with a radius instead of a hair-thin ray, so a tree trunk actually hides an animal. Raise it for more cover, 0 for the old behaviour.
• New DaytimeErrorScale: the bearing error is worse in broad daylight (2x at midday by default) and sharpest at night, ramping across dusk and dawn. Below skill 50, where the error exists at all.
• Wolf, Seagal (the seagull), Moose and Seal added to the default GameAnimals.
• Flying creatures are only sensed while on the ground - no blips on circling gulls. Hitting and killing them still pays XP.
• Fixed the stage 4 species icon being shared between creatures that have no name of their own.

1.0.0

• Initial release: crouch to sense, pulsing blips that lengthen as the skill rises, Hunting skill in four stages (rough bearing -> ballpark distance -> exact distance -> species icon), indicators for game on screen and off, XP from stalking, hitting and killing animals.