Kill a bear, by myself in Haven and Hearth

I’ve killed three bears so far.

The lp is good, the meat is useful. But the wilderness has pushed back so now I am very seldom in territory where bears can be found. They don’t come around my farm.

All three of the bears I’ve killed have been by archery, from the water. One was actually in my yard, and one upstream a little way from my farm. Then all the animals slipped down to level I and II and there were no more bears. The third bear I shot and killed while exploring the lake’s edge near a village I was visiting.

This was worth it.

The delay was lack of opportunity -lack of bears. It actually wasn’t too difficult.

Someday I would like to kill a bear with unarmed combat…

Not likely to be soon!

I started playing again with an entirely new character after the map reset. Eight days after I started my new character she found a bear near the edge of the river.

I fired one shot and then ran madly for the water. I wasn’t fast enough. One or two swipes from the bear shredded my armour and eroded my hit points to minimal. But I did make it into the water. In the water I was safe.

So I stood waist deep in water and emptied my quiver into the creature. It was wounded badly, probably not as badly as me. And my quiver was empty.

What to do next?

I was going to sneak downstream wading until I was far enough away, then come ashore. The bear would then have rushed down the bank towards me. I would have nipped back into the water, snuck back to where my arrows were, reloaded and gone back to shooting. That was the plan.

Pop up: The server is being reset in one minute

So… well, normally you can’t log out when something is aggro’ed on you, but server resets are special. They throw you out of game willy nilly. Arrows on the ground during a server reset decay and are eradicated. Animals also are eradicated and a new batch are respawned. So wham, I can only log in at home hearth half a mile away, my arrows are gone, the bear is gone…

So close!!

H & H has devolved into a terrible mess of pvp. Something Awful and 4chan arrived en masse and they like to clear cut and play at wars. This makes simple homesteading rather problematic. I haven’t been playing H & H lately at all.

There is supposed to be a map reset soon where a brand new map -with trees -will be generated. That’ll solve the problem of no firewood but not the problem of teams of archers looking to exterminate other players.

I’m not sure I will go back to H & H. The game had a lot of promise but the devs are definitely not into peaceful pastoral. They are making it clear that you should plan on running dynasties since any one character is just a murder-victim waiting to happen and should be regarded as the latest incarnation. The next character you generate can inherit property and stats from the first, so for many players this is a fun variation. It’s not like you lose everything. But I’m just not amused by a game with so little scope for character development.

However the game is in alpha, so it is possible eventually the exasperating level of conflict will dampen down a bit.

I killed my second bear this morning. I still haven’t killed one alone, of course. This time it was me and another archer, both of us with the arrows alone.

I lured it out and got chased and got it stuck behind a rock where the pair of us peppered it until it died. It was the first animal I had killed with the bow.

This time interestingly although I made it chase me I did not get mauled. I don’t think I even damaged my armor. Instead of using “shield” for defense I used “dodge”. I think a lot of the damage I have been taking lately is because of using shield. It just doesn’t seem to be as effective as Dodge. My unarmed combat stat is 70 which is pretty high, and that is what effects Dodge, so I think that I am starting to get the technique.

On my way alone through the woods laden with bear-meat and bear teeth I spotted another bear! It was in heavily wooded territory too which would be the best place to get it. But I didn’t even try. If I had succeeded I wouldn’t have been able to carry any of the meat or skin home. It was tempting but I was sensible.

Okay, so I went up against two level four foxes at once and survived but got mauled. My stamina was tanked badly and I promptly ran into three level four foxes several seconds later. I killed one and hid from the other two behind a rock… It was an unglorious story, but anyway before I got out of the level four fox zone I tangled with four more of them and damaged my chainmail.

Conclusion: If I can’t handle level four foxes decently and have to keep running away and hiding I am not nearly ready to handle bears.

Two quivers of 40 arrows got griefed today too, so it will be awhile more before I can work on archery skills.

If I ever do get up to bear hunting it will be as an archer.

Haven and Hearth is an on-line game.
http://www.havenandhearth.com/portal/

It’s in alpha right now, so subject to server crash and development glitches but also keeps getting interesting new features.

I am running a character who blunders around in the woods killing boar and deer and rabbits and foxes and does a bit of farming. When I started playing I spent about a third of my time dead, lying in a pathetic pool of blood with x’s whirling above my eyes because foxes had killed me. That was then. Now I relentlessly hunt the lower level foxes to get the lp.

Bears begin at level 4 and are nasty suckers. They have major combat skills and if they corner you… well, you are pretty quickly dead, at least if you are me. So far I am a melee fighter which means in order to fight a bear I have to let it corner me.

Earlier this week an archer and I went out and killed a bear together. Ooh, the lp I got for my share of that, getting mauled by the bear to distract it while she peppered it full of arrows and killed it.

Now my ambition is to get out there and kill a bear all by myself.