Hunting

Hunting refers to attacking wild creatures and bandit NPCs using combat, either alone or with a party of NPCs, droids, or creatures.

Hunting cannot kill you or knock you unconscious. Your HP can only reach 1 HP at which point you will become stunned, and then you must heal and either wait for the stun timer to finish, or have someone use a stimpack on you before you can continue to attack.

Locating Your Prey

Wild creatures and bandits will spawn on any terrain square that is not occupied by a city slab or by another player. The spawning occurs once you enter the terrain square, and leaving the square either by crossing terrain or by ascending will start a despawn timer if there are no other characters in that terrain square, at which point at the end of the timer it will despawn any wild creatures and bandits that had spawned. Returning to the square will force a new spawn after either 7 days after the last despawn finished, or 7 days after the last creatures and bandits were killed and the last character left the terrain square. The number of wild creature and bandit squads to spawn varies widely and is random. You may see one group, many groups, or no groups at all. Many players like to use Bait to force bandits and creatures to spawn on an empty terrain square. Others like to try to hunt specific creatures that only spawn on specific terrains.

Scouts

How much of a terrain square you can see is limited by your sensors (if on board an entity) or your perception skill (if standing outside). Perception can be increased using macrobinoculars. The visibile squares outdoor are equal to the Perception value +1 (i.e., it varies from 1 to 6 max). Macrobinoculars add 5 squares to the current Perception range (i.e., the total range becomes 6 to 11 squares max).

Many hunters purchase 4-8 scout NPCs to distribute across the square so that they can share the scouts' visual range and don't need to fly around the whole square to search for squads. The number of scouts required varies depending on the Perception skill you assign them and where you place them on the square. Most hunters equip their scouts with macrobinoculars to increase their range, and a sensor pack so that they can share sensors. You will need to equip a sensor pack in one of your utility slots in order to share sensors with scouts, or you can share sensors with them while you are on board your ship.

A cheaper alternative to scouts and macrobinoculars is purchasing K-4 Security Droids from an NPC shop and placing them around the terrain square to use as scouts. These have the advantage of being relatively inexpensive at about 14,000 credits apiece. However, you cannot increase their perception range as they cannot be equipped with macrobinoculars, so a larger number of droids is needed for full coverage. Similar distribution to sensor beacons (below) can be used. Your droids automatically share sensors with your ships and vehicles.

Note: Bandits and creatures can and will attack your scouts, and any droids that you place.

Sensor Beacons

If you are going to hunt for a long time, then you could use sensor beacons. They have the advantage that occupy cargo hold but not passenger seats, and do not suffer atmospherical damage and can be left outside as long as you like, provided nobody steals them.
To cover one terrain grid 16 (sixteen) beacons are needed. They should be placed at the following coordinates:

Column 1	Column 2	Column 3	Column 4
(2,2)	(7,2)	(12,2)	(17,2)
(2,8)	(7,8)	(12,8)	(17,8)
(2,13)	(7,13)	(12,13)	(17,13)
(2,19)	(7,19)	(12,19)	(17,19)

Afer deploying the beacons, equip yourself with a Multiple Sensor Package and you can share sensors with the beacons. Anyone in your party can carry the MSP. Beacons share sensors also with ships and vehicles.

What You Need

At a bare minimum, you only need a weapon to hunt. However, you cannot continue to attack if you drop to 1 HP. If you drop to 1 HP you will enter a stunned state, and will need to either wait 10 hours for the stun to wear off, or have another player to use a stimpack on you. You can heal up using any medical item, or you can wait until 17:00 server time each day to regain 10% of your total HP. (Bandits and creatures also regain 10% of their HP at that time.) Healing can be performed during a fire delay, so you can use a healing item immediately after performing an attack.

The recommended items needed will depend on your hunting strategy, so you will need to customize your gear to your own style. Two options to consider are hunting for XP and hunting for loot, and of course you can combine aspects of these to create your own strategy.

Hunting for XP

Note: This is no longer recommended with the addition of aggressive bandits and creatures, as they may hunt you and attempt to stun you.

If you choose to hunt primarily for quick XP gains, you will need to maximize your two primary sources of XP gain: combat hits and healing. The simplest strategy for this is to hunt alone with a single weapon equipped. The reason for hunting solo is that a party will kill creatures more quickly, meaning you will lose time traveling around a terrain square or between terrain squares to locate the next group of creatures or bandits. For this reason, it is also best to use weaker weapons, in order to kill each group more slowly to avoid unnecessary travel time. The reason for using only a single weapon is that an off-hand weapon will suffer a penalty to hit rating.

You can acquire 40 XP per attack round at a maximum, and you only receive the percentage of that XP proportional to your attacks that hit. If you fire four shots and three hit, you will only receive 30 XP. If all four hit, you will gain the entire 40 XP.

Target creatures, or use a weapon that is powerful enough per hit to penetrate most armour. Attacking at close range is ideal because this will cause you to take damage, which you can then heal each round. Invest in bacta refills and a medkit. With a medical treatment skill of 5, a bacta refill will heal for 60 HP, which will award you 30 XP per usage. When coupled with a combat round, this means you can gain up to 70 XP per half hour.

Hunting for Loot

All wild creatures and bandit NPCs have a 5% chance of dropping an item when they are killed. Creatures may drop a trophy or a Mysterious Egg, which can be taken to a ranch, zoo, or wildlife preserve and hatched into a creature of the type from which it was looted. The larger the creature, the less likely it will drop an egg. Colossal creatures do not drop eggs at all. Bandit NPCs will only drop one of the items equipped to them, so you can click each NPC to inspect its equipped gear if you want to see what it might drop.

If you choose to hunt primarily for loot drops, you will want to maximize your damage output. This means you should bring along a full party of creatures, droids, or riflemen/melee trooper NPCs, depending on what you have access to. NPCs have the highest potential damage output, but this depends on the weaponry with which they are equipped as well as the skill points you assign them. Naturally you will want to look at the stats of the weapons or entities available to you and choose those with the highest damage output. Consider the racial bonuses of your riflemen and melee trooper NPCs if you are selecting NPCs to use.

You will also need to avoid your party dying, so if you are hunting primarily for loot, it is best to keep your party out of your enemy's range if possible. This is simple for creatures, which have fairly narrow attack ranges, and most creatures can even be outranged at range 4-5. If you are attacking longer range creatures, use longer range weaponry, or ensure your NPCs have a high dodge rating or that you have plenty of replacements available for them. While you cannot die, your NPCs, droids, and creatures can. If your NPCs die, their equipment will vanish with them.

Bandit NPCs have a variety of equipment fitout possibilities, so it is difficult to outrange an entire squad. Inspect them by clicking on their portrait in your Scanner display, and determine from their weaponry the best range from which to attack them. It is a good idea to carry medical items to heal any of your party members that take unavoidable damage.

Hunting for Droids

From time to time, bandit squads will have droids in their party. If you want to capture those droids, you need to use ionization blasters and restraining bolts. The method is to wipe out bandits with standard weapons first, then switch to ionization blasters and drain the ion shields of the droid. After that, the restraining bolt will capture it and you can add it to your party.

Movement and Attack

On all planets across the galaxy, bandits and creatures will roam around inside of the terrain square they spawned in and will attack and pursue players, NPCs, or droids that come into their range.

Useful Skills

• Dexterity: This is the most useful hunting skill to have at least a few points in. Dexterity improves your ability to hit with any weapon. If you miss, you will not do damage and you will not receive XP for the shots you missed.
• Weapon Skill: Projectile, Non-Projectile, and Heavy Weapons skills each slightly improve the damage output of their weapon type. They also improve your ability to hit with your weapon, but only with half the effectiveness of Dexterity. This means that boosting weapon skill from 0 to 2 is more effective in terms of skill point cost than boosting your dexterity from 4 to 5.
• Dodge: This is your ability to avoid taking damage. If you intend to fight at close range and wish to avoid taking damage, you may want to assign a few skill points to Dodge. It is also a good skill to assign NPCs if you choose to fight with a party of NPCs.
• Strength: This increases your total HP and also increases your carrying capacity.
• Medical Treatment: This improves the effectiveness of medical items you use. As medical item usage awards you XP equal to half of your HP gain from the item usage, this is a good choice if you intend to do a lot of healing, or to maximize your XP gains.
• Perception: This increases the area of the map visible to you. Can also be increased with macrobinoculars. Perception is a great skill for scout NPCs.

Bandit Fitouts

On death, bandits have the chance to drop an item they are carrying, which you can pick up and claim. What bandits are carrying is determined by their fitout, and there are a number of different fitouts available with which bandits may spawn. These can be viewed here (you will need to click the Full Resolution link for the image to load properly).

Creatures and Terrains

Below you can find a list ordered by terrain type.

Creature	Size	Terrain
Draigon	Huge	Cave
Duracrete Slug	Huge	Cave
Gundark	Medium	Cave
Kell Dragon	Large	Cave
Kintan Strider	Large	Cave
Space Slug	Colossal	Cave
Spice Eel	Huge	Cave
Spice Grub	Small	Cave
Varactyl	Huge	Cave
Vulptex	Medium	Cave
Wampa	Large	Cave
Duracrete Slug	Huge	Crater
Granite Slug	Small	Crater
Mynock	Small	Crater
Bantha	Huge	Desert
Corellian Sand Panther	Large	Desert
Dewback	Large	Desert
Eopie	Large	Desert
Geonosian Massiff	Medium	Desert
Kintan Strider	Large	Desert
Krayt Dragon	Colossal	Desert
Sarlacc	Medium	Desert
Slashrat	Medium	Desert
Womp Rat	Medium	Desert
Eye-snatcher	Tiny	Forest
Akk Dog	Large	Forest
Boma Beast	Small	Forest
Geejaw	Tiny	Forest
Gizka	Tiny	Forest
Gundark	Medium	Forest
Howlrunner	Medium	Forest
Katarn	Large	Forest
Nexu	Large	Forest
Quizzer	Small	Forest
Purrgil	Colossal	Gas Giant
Streaked Velker	Colossal	Gas Giant
D'oemir Bear	Medium	Glacier
Howlrunner	Medium	Glacier
Tauntaun	Large	Glacier
Wampa	Large	Glacier
Acklay	Huge	Grassland
Akk Dog	Large	Grassland
Bantha	Huge	Grassland
Boma Beast	Small	Grassland
Common Thranta	Medium	Grassland
Corellian Sand Panther	Large	Grassland
Falumpaset	Huge	Grassland
Gizka	Tiny	Grassland
Great Thranta	Huge	Grassland
Kaadu	Large	Grassland
Nerf	Large	Grassland
Nexu	Large	Grassland
Reek	Large	Grassland
Squall	Tiny	Grassland
Acklay	Huge	Jungle
Crystal Snake	Small	Jungle
Eye-snatcher	Tiny	Jungle
Gundark	Medium	Jungle
Katarn	Large	Jungle
Physallis Berry Monster	Tiny	Jungle
Rancor	Huge	Jungle
Vornskr	Medium	Jungle
Draigon	Huge	Mountain
Howlrunner	Medium	Mountain
Kell Dragon	Large	Mountain
Varactyl	Huge	Mountain
Cy'een	Huge	Ocean
Dianoga	Huge	Ocean
Draigon	Huge	Ocean
Cy'een	Huge	River
Dianoga	Huge	River
Fambaa	Huge	River
Kaadu	Large	River
Duracrete Slug	Huge	Rock
Granite Slug	Small	Rock
Hawkbat	Small	Rock
Mynock	Small	Rock
Varactyl	Huge	Rock
Vulptex	Medium	Rock
Dianoga	Huge	Swamp
Falumpaset	Huge	Swamp
Fambaa	Huge	Swamp
Kaadu	Large	Swamp
Nuna	Small	Swamp
Rathtar	Huge	Swamp

If you are looking for variety, Grassland is your best choice. The number of different species for each type of terrain is as follows:

Terrain	Species
Grassland	14
Cave	11
Desert	10
Forest	10
Jungle	8
Rock	6
Swamp	6
Glacier	4
Mountain	4
River	4
Crater	3
Ocean	3
Gas Giant	2