Hunting & Harpooning

Hunting is a major side activity in Assassin’s Creed IV. You can hunt animals both on the ground and in the ocean. Each one of them, once skinned, yields a specific item (and a single bone – more on which shortly). These unique hunting goods have two possible uses:

You can use them as ingredients to craft equipment upgrades.

You can sell them to general stores or harbormasters to make money (see “Sell Price” column).

Hunting & Harpooning Details

* The white whale only appears during (online-only) community events. Its possible habitat zones are spread across the entire Caribbean region.

Hunting Tactics

Animals can be broadly divided into two categories: aggressive and passive.

Passive animals (such as rabbits and deer) will flee the moment they see or hear Kenway. To kill them, you can use a ranged weapon from a distance or a melee weapon at close range. As a rule, animals will not see Kenway if he is concealed within Stalking Zones, hiding places or situated out of sight on higher branches. They will, however, detect him quickly in the open.

Aggressive animals (crocodiles, and all types of jaguars) will stalk and attack Kenway if they see him. To kill them, you need to use ranged weapons from a distance. At close range they will attack and you will need to successfully complete the timed button-press minigame to survive.

Animals are usually encountered in wild environments. When you are in the middle of a hunting session and feel that you have exhausted all available animals in a location, you can Fast Travel to the closest Viewpoint to respawn them all – but note that this will also restore all enemies in the area to their default state.

Harpooning Tactics

Harpooning as an activity becomes available from the start of Sequence 03. To begin harpooning, simply sail to one of the potential habitat zones represented on our map of the Caribbean (see poster) or in the game once you’ve conquered the fort of the corresponding region. An illuminated circle makes these zones easy to spot from afar on the in-game screen. Enter it and hold to begin the harpooning.

Harpooning naturally requires harpoons, consumables that are used up every time you throw them at your target. Your stock of harpoons is refilled after each hunting session, but you cannot resupply during a session. In other words, you have to kill your prey before you run out of harpoons. You can increase the damage dealt by your harpoons and the total amount of harpoons that you can carry via the Jackdaw Upgrade menu. The three pertinent categories of upgrade are actually fairly affordable, with the design plan for the Elite Harpoon found via a Treasure Map located on Mariguana Island. This leads to a dig site on Andreas Island, so it’s actually possible to maximize your harpooning stats early in Sequence 03.

The actual hunting process is really straightforward. All you have to do is aim with the Manual Aim Button held and , then throw a harpoon with the High Profile Button. Keep your target in sight as best as you can, and throw harpoons whenever you have a clear shot. Each hit depletes the animal’s health bar. When a first harpoon connects, the prey will usually swim away, pulling your rowboat in the process. This tends to make the camera move a little, but is actually helpful: you can aim all further projectiles to the base of the rope, until it breaks and a new cycle begins. For nimble animals, you will often have to take their movement into account and aim a little ahead of them.

The more aggressive animals, such as the great white shark, will regularly attack the rowboat. You can repel them or limit the damage they cause by hitting them during their approach. Your health is represented by the strength of the rowboat: if its gauge is depleted, you are Desynchronized.

You will win the minigame by depleting your prey’s health bar completely. Your reward is one unit of the hunting resource corresponding to the animal you killed.

Bones

In addition to standard hunting goods, successfully hunting or harpooning animals will also reward you with a single bone. These items can be sold for 50R, though this is a waste of a handy resource. Bones have a very useful function: they can be crafted at any time into Sleep Darts, Berserk Darts or, later in the story, Rope Darts. By keeping a large cache of bones in your inventory for tricky situations, this means that you can manually top up these ammo supplies without the need to loot bodies (which actually, as it stands, tends to be an unreliable source of such ammunition).