"You're low on food. Better buy some or go hunting soon."
— Westward Ho!
A hunting minigame allows the player to hunt wild beasts.
It can be for various purposes: procuring meat for healing or feeding, getting drops to sell as Shop Fodder, Experience Points or simply to train one's shooting skills. Can also be done to acquire 20 Bear Asses.
Such games can either be Luck Based Missions, where the probability of success depends on a stat of the player or even on the Random Number God. Other games give a greater role to the player, letting them aim to the animals. Products can be used in Cooking Mechanics.
See also Fishing Minigame.
Examples:
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Action-Adventure
- D: In D2, Laura can use her hunting rifle to shoot wild animals in order to heal herself with their meat.
- David Ahl's BASIC Computer Adventures
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- Marco Polo allows the player to hunt animals for meat while traveling to China.
- Westward Ho allows the player to hunt animals to get meat during the travel to the West.
- The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Link can hunt wild animals, from birds, deer, and boar all the way up to woolly rhinoceroses. Each drops raw steak or bird meat of varying quality, which can be used for cooking or Shop Fodder. Hateno Village has a minigame in which Link can be hired by Dentz to cull deer for money in Retsam Forest.
- Overlord II: There are seals in the Nordland the Overlord is able to hunt. Indeed, there's an achievement in clubbing 100 baby seals to death.
- Rise of the Tomb Raider: Lara Croft can hunt wild animals to get items for crafting.
Eastern RPG
- Breath of Fire: The ability to hunt is a recurring element in the series, and usually occurs by entering randomly spawning patches of grass on the world map, which takes the player to an area with animals they can hunt by attacking with the party leader's weapon (most games have at least one character with a ranged weapon to make this much easier). Slain animals drop meat and similar items which can be used as Health Food or just sold.
- Yo-kai Watch has bug catching. Similar to the fishing in the game, bugs caught can be traded for items at the Jungle Hunter, and be used to fulfill certain side quests.
Edutainment Game
- The Oregon Trail: The player can stop the wagon to play a hunting minigame for additional supplies (assuming you have the ammunition). The mechanics are simplistic and vary by game - in the oldest versions it's a top-down third-person shooter, while later games present you with a prairie scene with animals moving across it that you click-shoot with your mouse-crosshairs. In a nod to realism, if you shoot a bison, you'll be told that you can only carry a small portion of the hundreds of pounds of meat from the carcass back to your wagon, and if you shoot too many of them, don't expect to see many later on the trail.
- WolfQuest: Players play as a wolf living its life out in Yellowstone National Park, where naturally, they must hunt down prey such as elk and hare in order for them or their pups to survive. But in a twist, they may also attempt to acquire some easy food from a cattle ranch but not without the risk of getting shot by the farmer, teaching players some of the tough choices wildlife have to face in order to avoid starvation.
Rhythm Game
- Patapon: You can help the Patapons on their hunts. These will get you meat, wood and rocks, which you can use to create new Patapons or to play minigames that will get you other materials.
Roguelike
- Dwarf Fortress: Both the Fortress and the Adventurer modes allow the player to hunt wild animals to get their meat, bones, skin and ivory.
Stealth-Based Game
- Assassin's Creed III: Conner can hunt animals for pelts, receiving better quality ones using less destructive kills, like the hidden blades. This can bog down traveling, as you have to skin every animal you kill and it is very common to be attacked by a few wild animals running between different locales.
- Assassin's Creed Origins: Animals can be hunted to provide Shop Fodder and crafting ingredients for upgrading your equipment.
Third-Person Shooter
- Warframe has an interesting inversion of this. The Fortuna section of Venus gives the player the option to conserve animals by tranquilizing them with a special rifle and bringing them to Biz to protect them from the Corpus' rampant environmental destruction.
Virtual Pet
- Lorwolf: You can send your wolves hunting as one of the profession minigames. It uses stamina, occupies them for a given amount of time, and after that time, they'll either succeed or fail based on their level and the odds of the mission. If they succeed, they get XP and you get items.
Western RPG
- Little Dragons Café: You can find random meat around the island but the main way to get meat and poultry is by hunting. You can coax Zucchi into hitting rocks, killing them and turning them into Cartoon Meat. Your dragon can also hunt Zucchi after it ages into child form. When it comes to the flying Yaki birds, the protagonist either jumps up and "headbutts" them or can headbutt them while riding an adolescent or adult dragon.
Wide-Open Sandbox
- Cereal Soup: Hunting provides meat so players can refill their stamina bar and help cure illness if the player is sick.
- Far Cry:
- The Forest: Being a (relatively) realistic Robinsonade, hunting the local wildlife for meat and pelts is an important element of the gameplay.
- Grand Theft Auto V: completing both of the missions from Trevor's friend Cletus unlocks hunting in the Chiliad Mountain State Wilderness. To cash in your kills, you send a photo of the animal and send it to Cletus's phonenote ; the amount he pays depends on the animal, weapon used, how many shots it took, and in the case of elk, shot placement. He'll also mail you with certain challenges that usually involve taking out certain animals in unusual ways, or taking some specific photos. It's not a risk-free activity, though, as there are mountain lions that will charge in and One-Hit Kill Trevor if he's not standing on a high place or riding a vehicle, and if one wastes you, you lose the entire day's worth of progress. The other two protagonists, Michael and Franklin, cannot hunt.
- Impressive Title: Players can hunt down animals for Random Drop accessories to decorate their lion characters.
- Red Dead Redemption:
- In the first game, John Marston can hunt animals for their pelts, that he can sell at stores. The game even includes a different animation length depending on the size of the animal you're skinning.
- Red Dead Redemption 2: Hunting is made more realistic, with the values of the catches being dependent on the freshness of the meat and the cleanliness of the kill.
- Valheim: There is very little difference between hunting and playing the game, as every enemy drops body parts used in building and crafting. More enterprising players hang around the borders between biomes, as the mutually-inimical denizens will happily kill each other and leave said resources for you to pick up.
