Hunting Ground outside of Tyr-Anon castle

[ljspence]

Okay this was weird. I finished the first fight with General Gerovitus and escaped from Tyr-Anon castle. The map instructions came up, then I saw a flashing bush to the right. I thought, must be something new, so I walked to it and was able to go to a "Hunting ground". I wasn't actually able to engage the beast there - I probably wasn't supposed to actually be able to walk into the grounds at this point and probably no one had the right requirements. Anyway, I left without fighting the monster and the blinking bush disappeared and another one appeared north of the castle, just south of the north outpost. Well I decided to make sure that the south outpost was still locked and when I came back, the new bush was gone. I thought maybe I had uncovered an error, so I went back to a previous save, refought the general and now - no bushes at all! So, not sure what was going on the first time...

Edit: Okay, so maybe this isn't really a bug so much as I don't know how this is supposed to work. The bushes appear to be random.

[DJC]

This is the correct behavior of the new hunting mini-game which is just a taste of what I had planned to do with individual hero abilities and interacting with objections throughout the world. That was the whole reason the lead hero cycle function (buttons 9 and 0) was put into the game; so you could quickly switch to the character you needed to accomplish something (break a wall, move a rock, shoot an arrow).

The hunting grounds have several locations per region; Tyr-Anon has two grasslands, but other areas may also have snow or beach grounds and many more coordinates where they might appear. Until you get the ship, hunts spawn where you're supposed to be in the plot. When you can access the whole world they will spawn randomly throughout it. Hunting grounds respawn whenever you enter the world map or exit a hunt.

There are five types of hunts: grass, snow, desert, beach, forest. There's also five weather types: rain, thunder, fog, snow, sandstorm. The type of hunt determines which animals are excluded (no turtles in snow hunting grounds) and the type of weather (no snow at the beach). Otherwise, everything is random, from number of animals to strength of the rain.

Once inside a hunting ground, switch heroes (do this quickly using the keys 9 and 0) until the lead hero is one that can hunt. Currently these include: Glen, Sammy, Meredith, Vetu, Willis, Julia. They must have the correct weapon equipped in some cases, for example Glen needs a sword or axe, and Meredith a bow. Then press shift to attack. Glen and Sammy are melee and must be close and facing the target. The rest of the heroes launch projectiles and you'll have to aim. Different projectiles (bullets, arrows, magic) travel at different speeds and different distances.