ICARUS Hunting Guide: 5 Important Tips and Tricks

In ICARUS, you’ll explore an alien planet, always fighting for survival. The particularly wild planet with its challenging weather and hostile fauna doesn’t make your stay easy. In this ICARUS Hunting Guide, we’ll give you some important tips and tricks to make your next hunt a success.

1) Which animal species are there?

The animals that you can hunt in ICARUS are divided into different animal species. For example, in the forest biome, you’ll encounter peaceful animals like deer, which are of different sizes. There are female as well as male specimens and if you’re lucky, they are also on the move with their fawns. You can also hunt for them.

In the forest, as in the real world, not only peaceful creatures await you in ICARUS, but also predators. They include wolves, bears, and various predatory cats. Arctic bears, mammoths, and packs of wolves can be found in ice biomes.

Wild desert animals include elephants, sand worms as well as hyenas. The difference between predators and normal mammals is that they will attack you as soon as they detect you, while the latter are very fearful and will flee from you as soon as they hear you.

Among the smallest mammalian creatures are kids and rabbits. Furthermore, you can also hunt different species of fish. You can hunt large goldfish-like fish, sultry salmon, and piranha-like predators with your knife or bow.

2) What kind of weapons can you hunt with?

For hunting animals in ICARUS, as already briefly mentioned, the knife is excellent. The weapon is especially useful in close combat and does the most damage when you strike your opponent in the face.

If you’re hunting from a greater distance, it’s best to use a bow and arrow to kill the game. The weapon is also effective when the prey runs away from you as well as when predators attack you and run toward you. Thus, you can fight them even from a distance before their actual attack.

To increase the damage potential of your bow, you should use bone arrows instead of regular arrows. You can change the selection of your arrows by holding down the R key while you have the bow equipped. However, you must be able to afford these special arrows first. After that, you’ll be able to craft bone arrows instead of standard arrows and do a lot more damage with your bow.

Other ranged weapons include the longbow, the crossbow, and the shotgun. The variety of weapons increases with higher technology level.

With your spear, you can effectively stab animals with the left mouse button. You can also throw it with the right mouse button. The spear is a very practical option, especially in the beginning, to gain first experiences in hunting.

If necessary, you can also use the axe and the pickaxe, although these should be considered more of a tool than a weapon, and you can only use them for defense. Hunting, on the other hand, is rather difficult with these two items.

3) ICARUS Hunting Guide: Combat tactics

To be as successful as possible on your hunt in ICARUS, you should definitely know about the best combat tactics. For example, it’s worth mentioning that projectiles from your ranged weapons are significantly affected by gravity in ICARUS, so they have a bullet drop.

In general, you can say that projectiles will land further and further below the firing point, the greater the firing distance is. So to prevent or plan for this effect when hunting from a distance, you must always aim higher than your target is actually located.

If you’re aiming to kill your prey with only one shot, you should definitely consider this effect and additionally always aim at the animal’s head. Headshots do a lot of damage, and besides, the hitbox on the head of wild animals on ICARUS is quite large, so you can hit it by aiming correctly. Again, bone arrows increase this effect significantly compared to conventional arrows.

Critical hits are also more effective if you sneak up on animals by crouching down. You’ll deal 2.5 times more damage with a headshot this way.

To prevent wild animals from escaping once you’ve injured them, you can chase them into the water if there’s a lake or river nearby. In the water, most of the animals in ICARUS move very slowly and you can shoot them with your bow from the shore.

If you’re dealing with particularly large animals, such as bears, run past it when it runs toward you. Bears from the ice biome are slower than you in ICARUS, so once you’ve run past it, you can fire arrows at it. You should now repeat this a few times and always aim for the head when firing. Moreover, take your time with aiming, as you’ll recharge your stamina in the process.

4) You’ve killed an animal – now what?

Hunting and killing various animals alone will only earn you a few items. To get the maximum number of materials from your prey, there’s a special procedure that you should follow after a successful hunt. Once you’ve killed an animal, you can dissect it and get the important items: bones, fur, and leather.

Dismembering is especially worthwhile for larger animals or animals of higher levels, such as deer, wolves, and bears. For the dissection, you need your knife, which you can use with the F key to disembowel the dead body. Afterward, you simply transfer the dropped items into your inventory.

However, this isn’t the end of the job. You can also use your knife, a hatchet, or pickaxe on the skeleton of the animal and thus gain additional bones. Another side effect is the fact that you clean up the spot where the carcass was, and thus are less likely to attract predators. You can now use the resources you collect to make yourself stronger arrowheads and also sharper knives.

5) How to get fur and leather

To obtain really large amounts of fur and leather, you can place the animal carcasses on a skinning bench and then process them thoroughly by cutting out fur, meat as well as leather. Before that, however, you must carry the killed prey on your shoulder to your camp and not cut it up directly.

To make a skinning bench in ICARUS, you first need some XP and the technology level Tier 2, or level 10. Moreover, you first need a workbench, which you can craft from 20 sticks, 60 fibers, 50 pieces of wood, and 12 stones.

You also need to invest your talent points in one of the talents “Chase ’em down” or “Swift Stalker” from the survival section. Then you unlock the talent “Skinning Bench,” which is absolutely necessary. However, you won’t see this talent in the overview until you reach level 10.

Finally, you only need the recipe for the Skinning Bench, which you can learn in the Tech Tree in the recipes of the Tier 2 area. After learning the recipe, you craft your skinning bench with the exact same materials as you did before with your crafting bench.

Especially the hunted-down rabbits give a lot of fur on the Skinning Bench when you place them on the workspace with F and select the recipe for the rabbit in the upper left area.

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