Icarus Guide: How to Hunt and Skin Wild Animals

Icarus takes you to a planet filled with many dangers. Survival is of the essence, which means you need to eliminate packs and herds lest they turn you end up at the bottom of the food chain. Here’s our Icarus guide to help you hunt and skin wild animals.

Note: For more information, check out our Icarus guides and features hub.

Icarus Guide: How to Hunt and Skin Wild Animals

The Bow and Arrow

Icarus provides you with several weapons that allow you to hunt wild animals. However, you’ll primarily want to use a bow and arrow. You should be able to shoot mobs from afar, including deer and buffalo that like to scurry away once they spot you. Here are some decent Tier 1 options early in the game:

• Wood Bow – 30x fiber and 24x stick.
• Stone Arrows – 1x fiber, 1x stick, and 1x stone.
• Bone Arrows – 1x fiber, 1x stick, 5x bone.

Note: Later at Tier 2, you can unlock the Longbow, which requires 24x wood, 32x leather, and 4x bone.

Sneak Attacks, Critical Hits, and Luring Enemies

Go to Settings -> Controls and make sure Toggle Crouch is enabled. If you press your keybind, you can stay crouched indefinitely without having to hold the button down. This is really helpful if you’re trying to sneak around to get a clean headshot (which deals critical damage).

Before you check the dead animal, though, you could decide to just leave its carcass. After some time passes, other carnivores such as wolves will arrive. You can continue sniping these new spawns to earn more XP.

Skinning Knives

Before you can skin an animal in Icarus, you must first craft a knife. Ideally, you’ll want to use the Stone Knife, which requires 2x fiber, 2x stick, and 4x stone. Although it’ll break after four or five uses, the required materials are relatively easy to find. Later at Tier 2, you can get the Iron Knife, which requires 5x wood, 4x leather, 6x iron ingot, and 2x iron nail.

The skinning process only takes a couple of seconds. Then, you’ll be able to take all the loot from a creature (i.e., leather, fur, bones, and meat). Leather, fur, and bones are predominantly used for various crafting tech tree blueprints, including weapons, armors, and fixtures/machinery that can create new items. Naturally, meat is used for cooking, and is a great way to prevent hunger and replenish your health.

Note: If you need additional bones, you can use a melee weapon to hit the animal’s skeleton. You should be able to acquire 20 or more bones before the skeleton gets destroyed.

Helpful Talents

Lastly, there are a few talents and crafting tech tree fixtures that can help you immensely when hunting and skinning wild animals in Icarus:

• Survival – Hunting:
  • Fine Butcher I and II – Increased meat yields.
  • Bone Collector I and II – Increased bone yields.
  • Hunting: Careful Skinner – Increased leather.
  • Increased Arrow Damage I and II – Boosts the damage of arrows.
• Combat – Bows:
  • Crafty Fletcher – Chance to craft two arrows.
  • Soft Spot I and II – Increased critical chance multiplier.
• Solo:
  • Very, Very Quiet – Harder to detect while sneaking.
  • Savage Hunter I and II – Increased yields from hunting.
• Crafting Tier 2:
  • Skinning Bench – 60x fiber, 50x wood, 12x stone, and 20x leather; processes animal carcasses for more resources. You need to carry an animal’s carcass by holding “E,” then bring it to the Skinning Bench.

Icarus is available via Steam. For more information, check out our guides and features hub.