Hunterborn Deep Dive
What Is Hunterborn?
Hunterborn transforms hunting from a simple “kill and loot” mechanic into a meaningful and immersive system of field dressing, skinning, harvesting, and butchering your kills. Instead of automatically looting animals when they die, you must actively process the carcass if you want to extract useful materials. This creates a true hunter experience where patience and skill matter—and where the weight of your harvest forces you to make real decisions about what to carry.
The mod’s core philosophy is that hunting should take time, effort, and require learning. Your first attempts at field dressing an elk are clumsy and time-consuming, but with practice, you become faster and more efficient, developing real skill as a hunter.
Getting Started with Hunting
When you kill an animal in Wildlander with Hunterborn enabled, the carcass remains in the world. Walk up to it and interact with it to see your options: you can dress the carcass where it lies, or pick it up and carry it elsewhere (to camp, to a vendor, or wherever you prefer).
Why would you move a carcass? Because field dressing a carcass is heavy work. If you’re on an expedition deep in the wilderness, you might want to pick it up and haul it back to your camp where you have time, space, and access to tools like tanning racks. The weight consideration is real—a small rabbit carcass is manageable, but an elk carcass can be impossible to carry if you’re already laden with gear. A bear or mammoth carcass cannot be carried at all. This weight mechanic naturally limits what you can realistically hunt and process in one outing, encouraging thoughtful hunting decisions.
The Harvesting Process
Once you decide to dress the carcass (either in the field or at your destination), you begin processing it. Field dressing removes the organs and prepares the meat for preservation. This first step is always required before you can access the other materials.
Field Dressing
Your first time dressing an animal takes a significant amount of game time. A small rabbit might take 10 minutes, but a large elk could consume an hour or more. This represents your character’s inexperience with the task.
However, with every carcass you dress, you become more efficient. After just a few dozen animals, you’ll notice your field dressing times dropping dramatically. Your character is learning the work through repetition—developing muscle memory and understanding the anatomy of different creatures. This progression feels organic and rewarding; you’re genuinely improving as a hunter.
To dress efficiently, you’ll benefit from a hunting knife. These specialized tools—distinct from combat daggers—make the work faster and yield better results. You can craft hunting knives of various qualities at a forge, buy them from blacksmiths, or find them while foraging. In a pinch, a sharp rock found while foraging works as a crude knife, though it costs extra time.
Skinning and Quality
After dressing, you can choose to skin the carcass to harvest a pelt. Like dressing, this takes time and improves with practice. But skinning also improves in quality as you level up your skinning proficiency. Early on, you’ll harvest “poor” pelts, but with experience and a good knife, you can achieve fine or flawless pelts—trophies valuable enough to sell for serious coin.
Quality pelts can be tanned into leather straps at a tanning rack for crafting, or sold to merchants. A skilled hunter with flawless pelts becomes a valuable supplier of trade goods.
Harvesting Materials
Beyond the pelt, every animal holds materials: bones, antlers, eyes, teeth, hearts, and organs. Hunterborn adds unique alchemy ingredients from animal harvesting that have effects specifically useful for hunters and outdoorsmen—toxins, stamina recovery compounds, and survival aids. These materials help support a nomadic, self-sufficient playstyle.
Your harvesting skill level determines both the speed of harvesting and the quality of materials. With practice, you extract more and better ingredients from the same kills.
Butchering for Meat
The final step is butchering for meat. Hunterborn provides realistic meat quantities—an elk yields a substantial amount of venison, a wolf produces wolf meat, and even unusual sources like mudcrabs and slaughterfish become viable food sources. The amount you receive depends on your configuration, but the “realistic” setting yields approximately 50% of the animal’s weight in meat.
For large animals, butchering happens in sections, each taking up to two game hours. You can choose to harvest just the first section and leave the rest (feeding “the wolves”), or continue butchering everything. As with other tasks, your speed improves with experience.
Managing this meat—storing it, selling it, preserving it for long journeys—becomes a real resource management challenge and part of the hunter’s experience.
Proficiency and Skill Growth
Hunterborn tracks three distinct hunting skills: Skinning, Harvesting, and Foraging. These improve through use, and higher proficiency directly translates to better results and faster processing times.
Your proficiency level is shown in the MCM. You gain experience by completing actions: every carcass dressed increases your overall experience, skinning improves specifically from skinning, harvesting from harvesting, and so on. These aren’t tied to Skyrim’s normal skill system—they’re independent, immersive advancement that reflects hands-on experience.
Foraging: Hunting Support and Survival
When you’re not hunting game, you can use the Forage ability to search surrounding terrain for useful materials. This can yield edible plants, local alchemy ingredients, firewood, animal bones, and miscellaneous survival items. What you find depends on the biome—the lush south yields abundant herbs and plants, while frozen tundra and high mountains offer slim pickings.
Foraging takes one hour of game time and success depends on your foraging skill level. Early on, you’ll find little of value. But as your proficiency grows (maximum level 10), your chances improve. Around level 5, you start finding rare materials. By level 8-10, you discover nourishing edibles sufficient for a completely self-sufficient nomadic playstyle.
Selective foraging unlocks as you advance. At level 1, you can search specifically for firewood. Level 2 adds edibles. Level 3 adds bones. Level 4 adds alchemy ingredients. Higher levels unlock more options and improve your odds of finding multiple items per forage session.
Monster Hunting
With Hunterborn’s Monster Hunter extension, you can apply the same process to creature corpses—trolls, dragons, werewolves, and other supernatural beings. Monsters can yield blood, venom, and treasure in addition to flesh and materials. Dragons, with the “Corporeal Dragons” option enabled, leave physical remains you can harvest, including dragon’s blood, a valuable alchemical component.
This transforms dangerous encounters into meaningful opportunities. Slaying a dragon is no longer just about the fight—harvesting its remains becomes a reward in itself.
Hunting Knives: Tools of the Trade
Not all knives are created equal. Specialized hunting knives improve your efficiency at skinning and harvesting, and some offer unique benefits that go beyond faster processing.
By default, Hunterborn assumes you’re using a baseline iron hunting knife for calculations. If you turn on the hunting knife requirement in the MCM, you’ll need an actual knife in your inventory to get the benefits—but Hunterborn automatically selects the best knife you have, so you don’t need to manually equip it.
Starting Options: If you’re stranded in the wilderness without any knife, forage until you find a sharp rock. This crude tool works as a knife but costs extra time (about 30 minutes) for each dressing, skinning, harvesting, or butchering action. Khajiit and Argonian characters can use their claws as a knife substitute, and claws are actually quite good—equivalent to a steel hunting knife in skinning quality.
Bone Knives: Craft these at a forge using harvested bones. They’re crude but serviceable for a starting character. However, bone knives have a 25% chance to break when used, so they’re temporary tools until you can afford better.
Stone Knives: A slight upgrade from bone. Found while foraging or crafted, stone knives are reliable and require no special materials.
Metal Knives - Iron & Steel: Standard knives available from blacksmiths or crafted at a forge. Steel hunting knives provide a +10 bonus to skinning, making them noticeably better than iron.
Dwarvish Knives: A significant upgrade. Dwarvish knives provide +10 to skinning and +10 to harvesting, making them ideal all-purpose hunting tools for mid-level characters.
Elven Knives: These beautiful blades excel at skinning (+20 bonus) but are awkward for harvesting (-10 penalty). Use Elven knives when your priority is high-quality pelts.
Orcish Knives: The opposite of Elven—these brutish tools are poor at skinning (-10 penalty) but excellent for harvesting (+20 bonus). Additionally, Orcish knives butcher meat twice as fast, making them perfect for characters who prioritize material quantity over pelt quality.
Glass Knives: Masterwork-quality blades with a unique effect: 50% chance to yield doubled pelts and materials from each animal, including rare organs like eyes and hearts. This makes glass knives extremely valuable for hunters looking to maximize their harvests.
Ebony Knives: The prestige of masterwork hunting. Ebony knives provide +30 to skinning and have a 10% chance to summon the Shade of Hircine when skinning, a spectral hunter that assists in the work. This supernatural aid represents your growing connection to the hunt itself.
Daedric Knives: Daedric craftsmanship applied to hunting. These dark blades provide +30 to skinning and +20 to harvesting, with a 5% chance to summon the Aspect of Hircine—a more powerful manifestation—when you skin or harvest. The Daedric prince of the hunt itself takes notice of your skill.
Dragonbone Knives: The ultimate hunting tool, reserved for legendary hunters. Dragonbone knives provide +40 to both skinning and harvesting (the highest bonuses available), and butcher meat twice as fast like Orcish knives. A Dragonbone knife in skilled hands is an unstoppable harvesting tool.
By collecting and upgrading your hunting knives as you progress, you gradually shift from desperate improvisation to masterful efficiency. Your character’s evolution from using sharp rocks to wielding Daedric or Dragonbone blades mirrors their journey from novice to legendary hunter.
Tools and Customization
Hunterborn is designed to work out-of-the-box with reasonable defaults, but the MCM (Mod Configuration Menu) offers extensive customization:
- Time scaling: Turn off time-passage if you prefer instant processing
- Material yields: Adjust meat, pelt, and material quantities
- Knife requirement: Toggle whether hunting knives are required (default: off for performance)
- Animation: Enable or disable character animations during processing
- Realism options: Heavy carcass weight penalties, manual loot prevention, and more
These options let you tailor Hunterborn to match your preferred playstyle, from pure immersion to streamlined gameplay.
Player Crafting with Bones
Harvested bones unlock a unique crafting system. You can create bone bits (a crafting material), bone arrows, crude bone weapons, bone hunting knives, bone rings and amulets, and even engraved bones (religious offerings for shrine-like benefits in the wilderness).
These aren’t top-tier items, but for a starting hunter with few resources, bone arrows and weapons provide practical tools without requiring metal ore. As you level in harvesting, more advanced bone weapon recipes unlock, including masterwork versions suitable for mid-level characters.
You can also roast food over any fire in the wilderness when you have no access to cooking stations, supporting a truly nomadic playstyle.
The Hunter’s Journey
Hunterborn is ultimately about progression. Your first hunts are clumsy, time-consuming, and inefficient. But each carcass dressed teaches your character real skill. Within a few dozen kills, processing becomes quick and rewarding. Within a hundred, you’re harvesting pristine materials and discovering rare foraging finds. The system reflects genuine mastery gained through practice—something few mods achieve as effectively.