Hunting for Success: Hunt Events #1 to 10 (Patreon)

OK, so it's time for us to really drill into the hunt events and see what's what! We're going to move through these in batches in order to try and be somewhat pacy. But in truth, despite being a relatively mechanics light section of the game, it is densely packed with a lot more factors than one would initially realise. 

We're going to look at each individual hunt event separately here, often there's not going to be much more to consider than what the optimal choice is (there is rarely a split choice), but we'll also keep a record of all the various useful bonus options and we'll also keep a running total on where they turn up, adding onto that with each additional article, so by the end you can see how often each particular gear, principle or innovation helps on the hunt. Knowing the odds lets you make more informed decisions.

1. Broken Lanterns

A simple event where the event revealer can choose to investigate or move on. There's no penalty for moving on, but investigating gives you +1 courage and the following odds:

• 50% Monster level event damage to legs
• 30% +1 broken lantern
• 20% +1 broken lantern for each survivor (straight to settlement storage) and insanity set to 0

This is one of the events that foreshadows the truth behind the Lantern Horde and it's an "always" investigate event. Suffering 1-3(4) points of damage to the legs in exchange for gaining resources is a great risk vs. reward proposition. The situations where you would not investigate are where you are running insanity builds (Immortal, Clarity of Darkness) or where you are already flush with scrap and have no need for more of it (very late game).

Corpse - Cannibalize/Graves & Memento Mori

A Principle/Innovation based event. This gives you +1 basic resource for cannbialize, +1 courage & understanding for Graves and 1 random fighting art if you have Memento Mori (a rather late game innovation). 

Overall this event should just be +1 courage and understanding for the event revealer, as discussed elsewhere, there is no reason to pick Cannibalize over graves. However, as we'll see when we move forward, Memento Mori might be worth picking up for the Hunt bonuses.

3. Cancer Pigeons - Whip, noisy

Everyone mentions hunt event 10 as to a reason why you shouldn't bring instruments on hunts, but Cancer Pigeons is another one that you can't overlook. It is, thankfully, neutered by the combination of having survival plus a whip, and having a whip puts you in a position where this one gives you a random basic resource 60% of the time, but without that it's a scary proposition because the Dead Inside ability is pretty much the end of that hunter's career - being unable to replenish your survival is a very difficult situation for a survivor. They might manage 1-2 more hunts if they need to complete a mastery, but more often they'll just be retired and used to pass on what mastery points they scored via Family.

So yeah, bring a whip.

4. Famine

Another one where you should pretty much "always" push on and roll on the table. The +1 courage is a good trade off because the worst result here is only a -1 speed token. That has zero impact on slow weapons and 3+ speed weapons don't mind. Which means it is just 2 speed weapons that have to be taken into consideration. Most of them operate just fine with one speed if you have sufficient defense. Also because of the consumable word bonus, you're likely to have +4 or better on this roll.

5. Flesh Fields - Sickle

No choice but to roll on this particular table, it's simply an argument for bringing along a sickle as soon as you're able to make one. There isn't much more to say about this, except you probably want to lifetime reroll that 1 result if it occurs. But if you can't reroll it, pick a survivor who can afford to lose a limb, like your support, or a one handed weapon user.

6. Faceless Statue - Sculpture

It is very rare that you are going to want to rest here, because for the most part the event phase doesn't strip that much in the way of armor points. However, on particularly long hunts, this event turning up late can be a real help. This is an argument for trying to keep all your damage to the same location (if you can, typically you don't have an option on this).

7. Hungry Ground - Whip

Score one more for the Whip. This is one of the reasons why PtY settlements need to run two whips, because if the event revealer happens to also be the whip carrier, then you're going to need to reroll this one if you hit that 1. It's not the best situation to be in, and the only other mitigation is to try and avoid having your whip survivor be the event revealer on basic hunt events.

8. Wailing Smoke

If you were not aware, the Wailing Smoke comes from the Holy Lands (home of the Manhunter, Lion Knights, White Knights, Forge God, Mother, Grandmother, Forge Priest, Blessed, Others and the Golden Entity). It's apparently generated by the burning of people and the place is pretty steeped in it. 

This is one of the precious few places where it is beneficial to have noisy gear, but it is still not recommended that you do this because the downside of rolling on this table is way lower than the downside of being caught by #10

9. Golden Light 

Oh, hey, look. It's a Sunstalker on the horizon!  (Or the Great Golden Cat).

There's not much to say about this one, there are no real mitigation strategies, though it is  interesting that use of the Eyepatch from the Sunstalker expansion will protect you from this because it makes you blind.

10. Harvester - Noisy Punishment

Yay. Harvester.

Well by now we all know what this one does... It's knocked instruments almost entirely out of the meta because of the unavoidable clauses in it. Yes... We get it. It's a reference to Dune. The  Shai-Hulud  are attracted to sound, they make melange which was harvested. So yeah, I get why this is what it is.

But more than any other hunt event, this card dominates the metagame for KDM, it's eliminated 3 pieces of gear from non-nemesis fights because the occurrence of this event (1% per roll on the table, not even 1% per hunt, it's much higher than that). Losing an entire hunter, with no way to mitigate it outside of not using noisy gear in the first place, is not good.

I don't really know what else to say, except I look forward to the change in locations (Abyssal Woods, Inverted Mountain) if they mean that this event can disappear from the experience.

I feel sorry for the Smog Singer gear. So many bells.

The basic hunt event cards shown in this article can be downloaded from my patreon at the following link:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/basic-hunt-event-30674187 

Counts

• Whip: 2
• Sickle: 1
• Cannibalize: 1
• Graves: 1
• Memento Mori: 1
• Sculpture: 1
• Drums: 2
• Noisy Punishment: 3
• Consumable benefit: 1
• Investigate: 2
• Straggler: 1