How long do carcasses stick around?

[oregonoutback]

Hi all, I am currently in CH on Voyager. As soon as I got here, I encountered a bear in my camp, so I shot it in the face with a distress pistol, and it conveniently died right next to my camp after running for a bit. At this point, my stats show that during this game, I've killed one bear. Fast forward a few days, another bear appears near my camp, so before it can charge, I shoot it with the rifle, and my shot appeared to land just above its heart, it left a huge pool of blood and a very consistent blood trail, but runs off into the hills by the highway before I can find it. A few days later, I'm hunting the bear who has attacked me a few times outside of the Quonset Garage, and I check my stats... low and behold, I show two bear kills, so I figure the 2nd one went and died somewhere. Tonight I killed the bear outside the gas station with one headshot (yay!) and of course my stats now say 3 dead bears. 

Sorry for the long winded story, but that's how I write. My question is, does anyone know how long the 2nd bear's carcass will be around since I haven't harvested anything from it yet? It's not a matter of life or death... I already have about 150lbs of meat from two bears, several wolves, and a deer, so I'm pretty set. I really just want the pelt actually... but 65 more pounds of meat wouldn't hurt either. 

Note: At this time, this was about 10-13 in-game days ago. 

Anyways, thanks in advance! 

 

Bonus: Here's the clip of me exacting my vengeance on Mr. Bear (#3)... 

[UTC-10]

Excepting the animal (generally deer) carcasses that spawn with the sandbox,  animal carcasses will despawn in about 3 days. The meat will degrade at a high rate (33% in 24 hours, more or less) so, typically, if you don't find the carcass in 3 days it is generally a write-off. When the meat's condition gets too low - it is probably approaching despawning -  you may not be able to actually harvest anything off the carcass at all.

There is no advantage to leaving meat on the carcass. It is going to decay even if the carcass is frozen. Better to harvest the meat and just drop it in the snow.

Hope this helps. 

[Guest kristaok]

I also heard it was about 3 days, so if it's been 10-13 days the Bear is probably gone... sorry.  

[oregonoutback]

Bummer, ah well... At least it didn't maul me I guess. Thank you both! 

[Mroz4k]

yea, you wanna go looking for a bear as soon as you manage to down one and it bleeds out  kinda pity not to, unless you are playing on a hard enough difficulty that would prevent you from spending the time to actually do it.

Best way to process a bear, in my opinion: To save as much of the durability on the meat, harvest couple of meat steaks first - I usually cut off 8-10 kg of meat by cutting off 2 kg of meat at once, first with a knife if the carcass is still unthawed, and once it gets frozen, I use the hatchet. Later in the game I would use a hacksaw for the meat. Always remember to hit the bait button to place the freshly cut piece of meat on the ground.

Carving up the bear takes a lot of time, and there is lot to take here... so best way to process it is to quarter it. The benefit to quartering is that these quarters of meat can be moved, they degrade slower then the carcass, can be harvested in a place where there is no wind present, but most importantly they no longer get "frozen" like the carcass does, so in a way, cutting them up is faster then trying to cut off that meat from the carcass.

Edited April 24, 2019 by Mroz4k

[oregonoutback]

5 minutes ago, Mroz4k said:

yea, you wanna go looking for a bear as soon as you manage to down one and it bleeds out  kinda pity not to, unless you are playing on a hard enough difficulty that would prevent you from spending the time to actually do it.

Best way to process a bear, in my opinion: To save as much of the durability on the meat, harvest couple of meat steaks first - I usually cut off 8-10 kg of meat by cutting off 2 kg of meat at once, first with a knife if the carcass is still unthawed, and once it gets frozen, I use the hatchet. Later in the game I would use a hacksaw for the meat. Always remember to hit the bait button to place the freshly cut piece of meat on the ground.

Carving up the bear takes a lot of time, and there is lot to take here... so best way to process it is to quarter it. The benefit to quartering is that these quarters of meat can be moved, they degrade slower then the carcass, can be harvested in a place where there is no wind present, but most importantly they no longer get "frozen" like the carcass does, so in a way, cutting them up is faster then trying to cut off that meat from the carcass.

Yeah, I probably should have chased it down, but it ran up a hill that was too steep for me to get up, and by the time I would've been able to get up and around, the blood trail would surely be gone (they've been disappearing REALLY fast for some reason) and then I'd have to scour the woods possibly for days. The ironic part, and another reason I didn't chase it down, was that I was already loaded down with bear meat from my first kill because I was transporting it from my first camp to the garage. 

Good point on the quartering though, if I'm far enough from camp I definitely will quarter the carcass and store some quarters if necessary. Luckily, both of my bear kills where the bear died in front of me, have been really really close to my camp, so I just harvested the meat 20lbs at a time, transported, came back, 20 more pounds... etc. 

Good point on dropping bait too! I should have, since there were danger doggos lurking about; hence why I had the flare out at the beginning of the clip. 

Anyhoo, thanks for the advice! I'll put it to good use. 👍😎

[Doc Feral]

I'm definitely quarter-oriented when I kill a bear or moose. Two hours may seem a long time, but it allows to relocate everything to a safer location. Not to mention that just harvesting all the guts would take longer than that. Along with rabbits, big beasts are my usual source of guts.

[Guest kristaok]

While it's better to quarter Bears and probably Moose too, never store quarters because they degrade a lot faster than Meat does. So quarter the Meat just for transporting, then harvest the Meat asap. 

Ps. Store all Meats outside they will last a lot longer. Another tip is that when Meats are Cooked their stats are raised back up. You could Cook a 50% Mouldy Meat up to 100% and 1% Rotted Meat up to 50%. 

[Doc Feral]

 

6 minutes ago, kristaok said:

While it's better to quarter Bears and probably Moose too, never store quarters because they degrade a lot faster than Meat does. So quarter the Meat just for transporting, then harvest the Meat asap. 

Ps. Store all Meats outside they will last a lot longer. Another tip is that when Meats are Cooked their stats are raised back up. You could Cook a 50% Mouldy Meat up to 100% and 1% Rotted Meat up to 50%. 

Quarters are basically a movable carcass, so they degrade as fast as the whole thing. They're not meant for storing.

I'll take the storing tips a step further, never store food in containers, indoors or outdoors. 0% items disintegrate in containers, and this may take away the raccoonish pleasure of gobbling rotten trash when you evolve to level 5 cooking. And filling shelves with canned food and candy bars looks good anyway.

[hozz1235]

Good tips from all.  I might expand further by saying when you do have such an abundance of meat, and you cannot use it all at that point, either store it outside safe from predators or inside on the floor.  It will likely rot, but make a note anyways of it's location because once you hit Cooking level 5, you can cook that ruined meat and safely eat it.  Waste Not!

[Mroz4k]

10 hours ago, oregonoutback said:

the blood trail would surely be gone

I dont even use blood trail as an indicator anymore. I believe it is  only there as long as the animal is bleeding - so the moment it dies, the trail dissapears, not to mention it usually is just a drop or two of blood every three meters for me... not really that useful at locating. Not even determining the direction - because the animal runs around like mad, its entirely possible it will pick just a different direction three times before dying. Lately, animals like to die way high up in the mountains, quite often in a place that cant be reached... since animals can run up steeper cliffs then player.

Most usually, Id just hit the animal, go do something else, and wait for the crows to show up to help me locate the carcass. Well, with Bears, it is also possible to reach some high point, and look for it - they are usually a bit different color then rocks so it can be possible to locate it by watching from high point. But the blood trails just seem so unreliable in my opinion.

1 hour ago, kristaok said:

never store quarters because they degrade a lot faster than Meat does.

While true, it is still better to have it in quarters then on a carcass, since carcass degrades about 30% of condition of the meat per day. Quarters take 10% per day, and most importantly - it doesnt matter if they are indoors or outdoors, they degrade the same speed in either. While you are right that its better to turn them into steaks ASAP, it is not that bad if you dont rush it that much.

Actually, one last tip on how to best utilize the harvesting of the quarters: Imagine 5.6 kg of meat on a quarter. How to best utilize it? In this case, I would cut off 4kg of meat, this produces 4 1kg worthy steaks, and leaves 1.6 kg of meat on the quarter. Select to "quarter" all the 1.6 kg. When the indicator circle shows up, wait till its half-way, then hit escape. This will interrupt the process, and you get 0.8 kg steak, with 0.8 kg left on the quarter. This way,  you can get 2x 0,8 kg of steak, this is great because you can cook em both on a fire and they will take roughly the same amount of time to cook.

What happens with 4.2 kg of quarter? Similar suggestion - only this time, Id take 2kg, leave 2.2 kg left. Then select 2.2 kg altogether. This time, I would hit the escape when it is 1 third of the way. This will produce either 0.7 or 0.8 kg worthy steak, and leave behind about 1.4 kg worth of meat, you can repeat the same process as with the 1.6 kg of meat from previous tip. Gives you three steaks of roughly same weight.

This will help you make the best calorie-worth of proccesed meat regardless of what the "excess" weight of the quarter/carcass is. Individually, you can use the 0.2 kg of meat left for baits.

[Guest kristaok]

@Mroz4k That's what I meant lol; quartering is better than leaving the Meat on the Carcass, and it's better for transporting, but it's not good for storing.  

[Mroz4k]

42 minutes ago, Hawk said:

It is a shame Hinterland won't (or hasn't yet) done anything about the blood trail. As it is, it's pretty much useless.

I think I understand kind of why - the blood trail is very minimalistic, because othervise, it could affect their ESRB ratings. At least Im sure that was the original idea - because the blood trail was in the game back when they were trying to get the rating for Teens of 12plus, before they got 16.

Yea, it is kind of pointless. Since it dissapears the moment animal dies, and they usually die out of your sight even if you are tracking them by the blood trail, it can actually even deceive you sometimes, send you running into one direction, while the animal took two sharp turns, and died, erasing the blood trail and the evidence that you were supposed to take those 2 sharp turns.

[oregonoutback]

Well, I took everyone's advice on the quartering... Just bagged bear #4. I was even able to follow the blood trail to where it was so I could put a 2nd round in it to finish it off. Somehow, the blood trail disappeared, then I stumbled across more blood, which I followed to the bear; weird. 

I have been storing all of my meat outside, and it's amazing how slowly it degrades. Luckily, I've achieved rank 5 in cooking, as well as carcass harvesting, so even if the meat "goes bad," I can still cook it and eat it without getting sick, so none of this stuff is going to waste. 

Time to make me a bear skin jacket and a bear skin bed roll! They'll go great with my wolf skin jacket, rabbit skin hat, rabbit skin gloves, deer skin pants, and deer skin boots. Now if I could only get me a moose... 😅

[UTC-10]

If the weather is not bad, i.e. thick fog, storming, or snowing,  you can look for the circling crows that will show up over a carcass within a short time. Make a note of the direction the bear ran in as well as where its normal haunts are. If the bear takes a while to bleed out, it may be working its way back to its normal area. This works with any animal carcass. I recall even seeing crows above a wolf's kill and the wolf was still in the process of eating the deer so they showed up pretty quickly. Of course, bad weather conditions do put a damper on crow activity.

 

[oregonoutback]

18 hours ago, Doc Feral said:

I'm definitely quarter-oriented when I kill a bear or moose. Two hours may seem a long time, but it allows to relocate everything to a safer location. Not to mention that just harvesting all the guts would take longer than that. Along with rabbits, big beasts are my usual source of guts.

Yeah, just out of curiosity, I compared the harvesting time vs. quartering: quartering took 2 hours, whereas just harvesting all 75lbs (big boy!) of meat would've taken around 4 hours alone with a hunting knife (bear was fresh, not frozen at all). 

[oregonoutback]

1 hour ago, UTC-10 said:

If the weather is not bad, i.e. thick fog, storming, or snowing,  you can look for the circling crows that will show up over a carcass within a short time. Make a note of the direction the bear ran in as well as where its normal haunts are. If the bear takes a while to bleed out, it may be working its way back to its normal area. This works with any animal carcass. I recall even seeing crows above a wolf's kill and the wolf was still in the process of eating the deer so they showed up pretty quickly. Of course, bad weather conditions do put a damper on crow activity.

 

I usually also use the crows as a guide to carcasses, just their cawing alone helps me home in on it; however, like you said... conditions pretty much have to be clear for that to work. I've noticed that Coastal Highway's weather tends to be more inclement and unpredictable than some of the other regions, so that doesn't help either. 

[TFA303]

First bear I killed in Survival mode was in Coastal Highway. I looked until dark, and couldn't find the carcass, and gave up. The next day, crows led me to a spot - the bear had run back to his cave by the waterfall (the one with bones) to die. It was a poignant scene,  and I kick myself for not getting a screenshot. It's one of the things I'll always remember from TLD.