Hunterborn
Changes animal looting into a process of dressing, skinning, harvesting, and butchering. Adds hunting knives, many new alchemy ingredients, animal meat, recipes, and foraging. Requires SKSE / MCM.
Hunterborn changes the simple routine of kill-and-loot on animals into something more immersive. This mod has its origins in Realistic Wildlife Loot, but I wanted something more in-depth for the actual process of dressing down a kill, skinning it for its pelt, taking material from it for alchemy, and finally butchering its meat – based on the animal’s weight, not just a single cut of venison.
Hunterborn is more than just a “realistic meat weight” mod, though. It is highly configurable (thanks to the awesomeness of the MCM), and is particularly suited to work with Frostfall and Realistic Needs & Diseases, for a primitive survival style of gameplay.
The most significant change Hunterborn makes to the game is taking away the loot window from most wildlife. Instead, you must first choose whether to dress it (clean the carcass and prepare it for processing) where it lies, or pick up the carcass and take it back to your camp / lair / nearest vendor.
When you drop the “carcass” from your inventory, the original animal’s body will appear at your feet, where again you have the choice to dress it, or pick it back up. After dressing a carcass, you’re able to skin it, harvest it for ingredients like antlers, eyes, teeth, even hearts, and also butcher it for meat.
Field Dressing – the first step in rendering down an animal for its goods is to “dress”, or “clean”, the carcass. This is a simple process that eliminates the most common causes of meat spoilage, and usually involves exsanguination.
Skinning – after dressing the carcass, usually the next step is to skin it – though you can choose these actions in any order, and skip any of them as well.
Harvesting – Besides the pelt and the meat of the carcass, all animals will have valuable materials that you can harvest from them. Most of these materials are alchemy ingredients, and Hunterborn adds many new custom ingredients for you to harvest and use in the creation of poisons and potions – and the effects on these custom ingredients have been designed to be specifically useful for hunter-style play.
Butchering – Hunterborn adds new custom meat types for all of the hunting game in Skyrim – and even for monstrous creatures like chaurus and dragons, if you have Monster Hunter enabled. Elk will have a distinct kind of venison, foxes and wolves have their own meat, and even mudcrabs and slaughterfish can now be a source of sustenance.
When first started, Hunterborn assumes that you are a novice hunter with no experience, so the first time you field dress a carcass, it will take a lot of time, especially if it’s a larger carcass. You’ll get faster at dressing, skinning and harvesting every single time you complete the action and you will get better (higher quality, and more) results as your skinning and harvesting level increases. Turning on the hunting knife requirement in the MCM will also make a difference in your yields.
There are a plethora of other features for hunter-style play: Hunting knives that can give bonuses to skinning and harvesting; 47 new alchemy ingredients that you can harvest from animals (and monsters), some with unique effects; new meat types and cooking recipes for Skyrim’s wildlife; Scrimshaw crafting for animal bones; storage-where-you-need-it in the form of hunter’s caches; and even foraging with location-specific results. A detailed readme and an additional spoilers readme are included.
Scrimshaw is a crafting system unique to Hunterborn intended to provide multiple uses for the bones you harvest from animal (or monster) carcasses. Use it to craft bone weapons, hunting knives, arrows, armor and jewellery. Polish animal eyes for new ingredients. Engrave Bones to cure diseases. Create cache markers to store your stuff. New recipes are unlocked as you increase your Harvest skill.
Forage – search the surrounding terrain for useful materials which can include edible plants, local alchemy ingredients, animal bones, and some miscellaneous items such as firewood. The materials you find will be based on the environment – herbs and edibles are plentiful in the south, while north and at higher elevations it will be difficult to find much of anything. Level Foraging to unlock Bounty and Botany perks and improve Sense Direction.
Sense Direction – immersively discover the direction you are facing. Accuracy improves as you level your Foraging skill.
Bounty is automatically unlocked with Forage level 5. Bounty provides a chance for extra materials when harvesting ingredients from plants, similar to the Green Thumb Alchemy perk. It is disabled by default in the MCM.
Botany allows the player to learn extra effects from ingredients by consuming them. This works identically to the Alchemy perk Experimenter. Improve Forage to level 6 to unlock the first rank.
Strange Brew can be brewed with a wolf eye and nord mead. When drunk, you gain access to a new series of recipes that only remain available while you’re drunk. Some are at the cookpot, some are in Scrimshaw. Additionally, there is a hidden levelling system for Strange Brew. Get brewed up, make one of the hidden recipes, and after you sober you’ll level up. Then the next time you have a quaff, you have access to more recipes. I won’t give any spoilers suffice to say that you can craft poisons, potions, meals, animal lures, bone idols and jewellery.
Animal Lures are crafted while drunk on Strange Brew. Smelly Meat lures a nearby aggressive wolf. Tasty Carrot and Chicken, however, will tame Rabbits, and Foxes (including snow foxes) making them permanent animal followers.
Primitive Cooking is a new crafting skill allowing the player to sear meat over an open flame. It needs no furniture, although you must be standing close to a heat source, and it recognises all fire’s in the game.
Monster Hunter is an optional module in Hunterborn that extends the same basic idea – you must take time and work on a slain monster’s carcass to acquire material components, including meat – to the basic monster types. Monster Hunter is off by default, you can enable it in the MCM as well as toggle on or off each monster type and set some options.
Blood and Venom – with Monster Hunter enabled, you’ll be able to extract either venom or blood from monsters. Chaurus and (Frostbite) spiders yield venom; dragons, trolls and werewolves yield blood, though dragons do not yield blood unless the “Corporeal dragons” option is checked, in the MCM.
Potions and Poisons – Troll and werewolf blood can be used to create either a beneficial potion or a poison. The strength of the result is determined by your harvesting level. Dragon’s blood is different. Rather than using ingredients and your harvesting level, you gain access to different recipes by learning new dragon shouts.
Rites of Hircine – What does this Strange Claw do? Hunterborn includes a set of three hidden quests that unlock unique abilities. These quests don’t show up in your journal and they don’t give you many hints on how to proceed. Unless you happened upon a hunter NPC selling a certain book, it can be very challenging to solve the three quests on your own.
MCM Settings – Some things you can do with the MCM settings; toggle off the time component to process animals, change the default action when you click on an animal, alter meat and ingredient yields, change pelt values, remove the manual loot option, enable the hunting knife requirement, turn off animations, enable the Botany Perk, set hotkeys, check and reset your stats, enable Monster Hunter, use other mods custom pelts and meats for greater compatibility, enable the taxonomy power to recognise new animals from other mods, toggle on the Hunting in Skyrim skinned animal textures, turn on Fur Plate crafting recipes, plus lots more…
Dawnguard DLC, Dragonborn DLC, SKSE and the SkyUI MCM are required files.
Download and enable any extra patches you want to include:
Campfire – Highly Recommended – Forage for deadwood, branches and kindling. Use CF campfires for primitive cooking. Craft Hunterborn arrows with Deadwood.
Complete Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul – Highly Recommended – full integration with HB ingredients, potions, poisons and food.
Realistic Needs and Diseases – compatibility patch for all HB food and drinks.
Requiem – The roleplaying overhaul.
Wearable Lantern – use Animal Fat to craft lantern oil.
Lanterns and Candles – render Animal Fat into tallow.
If you have Hearthfire, Hunterborn will detect it and automatically provide goat horns and mudcrab legs, no patch needed. If you have SkyRe, Hunterborn will detect it and give you an alternative to the Gatherer perk.
Hunting in Skyrim is fully compatible. The option to use HiS skinned animal models can be enabled in the Hunterborn MCM.
Frostfall has inbuilt compatibility and no patch is required.
iNeed has inbuilt compatibility and no patch is required.
Complete Crafting Overhaul and Weapon and Armor Fixes Remade keywords and conditions have been added to crafting recipes including WAF_FingerlessGauntletsBracers to the Bone Gauntlets. Fur Plate Recipes crafted with Hunterborn pelts can be toggled in the MCM (Fur Plate is a common item used for Campfire, Immersive Armors and CCOR recipes).
If you use Animations – Disable the Loot animation.
If you use Clean Up Your Corpses – Disable the Poaching feature.
And what about conflicts? Hunterborn doesn’t change any levelled lists or NPC’s, so it needs no bashed patch / merging. However, because Hunterborn does change *how* you loot animals and *what* loot they have, it is functionally incompatible with other mods that change animal loot; see the MCM options section in the readme for suggestions on combining Hunterborn with such mods as SkyTEST, Immersive Creatures, Harvest Overhaul, and the like.
This is a major release with many new features. A detailed list is at the bottom of the Tips and Spoilers doc if you’re interested. Here’s a summary: New models and textures for weapons, ingredients, bones and jewellery. Lots of inbuilt compatibility and new patches for Campfire and Complete Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul. Inbuilt Frostfall compatibility. Addition of new globals, CCOR and WAF keywords. Added Bone Armor, Northern Hunter Armor and Fur Plate recipes. Some changes to Scrimshaw crafting. 19 New Hunterborn loading screens to further explain some of the hidden features. Patch updates.
