The spotting skills are part of the game's Skill System.
Description
Spotting is the players ability to detect and analyze animals within the game. A successful spot draws an outline around an animal for a short period of time allowing the player to easily track it through dense vegetation. Spotting also provides increasingly detailed information, such as gender or estimations for weight and score.
Earning XP
Spotting Whitetail Deer through the Binoculars
Once you have located an animal, look at it through your binoculars or weapon scope. Holding on the animal for a few seconds will draw an outline around the animals body and increase your spotting skills for that species. Spotting success is calculated based on how much of the animal is visible on the screen, this means that the outline only will appear below a certain distance from the animal and that this distance vary with animal size.
You can only get credit once for every animal you spot. Spotting the same animal multiple times, even after time has passed, will not further increase your skill.
Progression
This section describes what happens when individual spotting skills are improved. The system is identical for all species. This information comes straight from the developers. [1]
Stats that are incrementally improved with each level:
- The time required where an animal must be kept on the screen for a successful spot, decreases.
- The time the spotting outline stays around the animal after a successful spot, increases.
Abilities
In addition to incremental stat improvements there are also a couple of major abilities that are unlocked at specific levels.
| Level | Ability | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Species & Gender | The ability to tell the species and gender when spotting an animal. |
| 3 | Weight 1 | The ability to tell the weight of a spotted animal with 60% accuracy. |
| 5 | Score 1 | The ability to tell the score of a spotted animal with 60% accuracy. |
| 8 | Weight 2 | The ability to tell the weight of a spotted animal with 80% accuracy. |
| 11 | Score 2 | The ability to tell the score of a spotted animal with 80% accuracy. |
| 15 | Weight 3 | The ability to tell the weight of a spotted animal with 90% accuracy. |
| 20 | Score 3 | The ability to tell the score of a spotted animal with 90% accuracy. |
Maxing Your Skill Level
To reach level 20, you need around 1425 spottings of the same species. The numbers were evaluated from September to November 2021. Note that over the years these numbers changed. You might have spotted an "old" animal this many times and still not have its skill level at 20. Also there were times were a player could earn double the amount of skill points, e.g. on event weekends, which might also distort the calculation for certain species.