Hunter's Instinct

Track animal footprints and reveal nearby creatures with a spectral hunting instinct, powered by a dedicated Hunting skill focused on tracking.
Follow your prey after releasing the activation key, improve your detection abilities, and customize progression for your Valheim world.

Features

• Animal Tracking
  Passive creatures leave footprints after being detected. Also compatible with creatures from mods.

• Hunting Instinct
  Reveal hostile and passive creatures through a soft spectral halo. A pulse repeats every second, with smooth fade-in and fade-out transitions.

• Hold to Locate
  Hold the action key, Left ALT by default, to fill a golden charge bar. Complete the bar to detect creatures. Releasing the key before completion or running out of stamina cancels the charge.

• Skill Progression
  Improve detection range, footprint lifetime, tracking duration, and instinct mark duration while reducing localization time and stamina consumption.

• Posture-Based Localization
  Crouching, walking, and running have configurable charge time multipliers. Changing posture adjusts the fill speed without losing bar progress.

• Persistent Tracking
  Detected animals continue generating footprints after you release the action key. Each footprint fades individually according to its own lifetime.

• Local Visuals in Multiplayer
  Your footprints, auras, and localization bar are visible only to you. Each player has independent tracking; visual effects and trail history are not shared.

• Server-Synced Gameplay
  Gameplay settings are synchronized through ServerSync. Only the activation key and the footprint and instinct colors remain local preferences.

Configuration

• Configuration file
  Generated after the first launch:
  BepInEx/config/radamanto.HuntersInstinct.cfg

• Skill-based settings
  Set values for level 0 and level 100. Intermediate levels are interpolated linearly between these two values.

• Separate timers
  Footprint lifetime controls each individual ground mark. Tracking duration controls how long a detected animal continues generating footprints without renewal. Instinct mark duration controls how long its aura remains visible after the last successful detection.

• Tracking renewal
  A tracked animal renews its timer while within the valid detection range, through a successful detection with the action key, or when the passive creature enters a new alert/flee state. Remaining in a continuous fleeing state does not repeatedly renew the timer. After it expires, the charge must be completed again to detect the animal.

• Detection range
  Passive creatures can be detected within footprint range or the enabled instinct range. Previously tracked animals can continue leaving footprints outside the range until their timer expires. Only creatures currently loaded by the game can be tracked.

• Stamina consumption
  Stamina is consumed while the action key is held. Releasing the key immediately stops consumption. Persistent footprints and auras do not consume additional stamina.

• Tamed creature tracking
  Controls footprints and auras for tamed creatures. Disabled by default. Footprints remain restricted to passive creatures.

• Tamed creature experience
  Allows XP to be earned from these creatures. Disabled by default and requires tamed creature tracking to be enabled as well.

• Excluded prefabs
  Enter internal names separated by commas, for example:
  05 - Excluded Prefabs = Deer,Boar,Neck
  These creatures do not generate footprints, instinct marks, or XP. Matching is exact and case-insensitive. Exclusions also apply to existing marks.

Experience Gain

• Active localization
  XP is awarded with the charge completed and the action key still held, by following nearby visible footprints or detecting marked creatures on screen and within range.

• Movement and interval
  You must travel at least 2 meters since the last gain and wait 5 seconds between rewards.

• Footprints and creatures
  A footprint must be within 3 meters, with no obstacle blocking your view, and can only grant XP once. For instinct detection, the same creature has a 60-second interval between rewards.

• Configurable amount
  Experience Per Use controls the amount of experience per reward.

Translation Support

Producers supports custom translations through an external YAML file.
A sample YAML file is included in the mod package as a template for creating additional language translations.

Console Commands

First enable the vanilla cheat commands with devcommands:

devcommands
raiseskill Hunting
resetskill Hunting

Manual Installation

• Install BepInExPack for Valheim.
• Place HuntersInstinct.dll inside BepInEx/plugins/.
• Launch the game to generate the configuration file.