This is a rough guide to trapping as well as is ongoing. Game mechanics are known to changes often and so does player knowledge base. As such I will be adding and editing as I go to improve the guide and keep it up to date. This guide doesn’t rely on trading, nets or fishing rods or even active hunting or murdering NPCs. This is how to survive on trapping alone. I would suggest as starting off as a trapper in Summer as the shovel is so much better than the wooden shovel.
The biggest thing about trapping is where you call your territory. The best spots are near lakes and rivers, they act as natural barriers and drive prey into the traps. The best location is tucked against a series of lakes, connected with land bridges.
There are 3 traps that is best for the early game. The most useful is the Light Lever Trap. It only costs a slender trunk, 2 branches and a stone. You will need a knife as well. It catches birds, hares, pine martens, polecats, foxes, weasels and probably more that I am forgetting.
The next is the Paw Board Trap which only costs a board. You will need an axe and knife. It catches Foxes; regular and arctic. It is cheap to make, unwanted ones can be traded or burnt. Foxes bring in 4-8lbs of meat and a valuable fur.
Finally, the Pit Trap. Most labour intensive and well as costs 3 slender trunks, 10 branches, 10 spruce twigs and you will need to dig a pit first with a shovel. This catches all the big game: bears, elk, reindeer, seals, wolves and boars.
Once you have found a location you are happy with, near a series of almost connected lakes or near a river, build yourself a shelter and a raft with paddle. Stack the raft with slender trunks, branches and twigs and stones. Paddle up and down your shelter square, building lever traps along the shoreline. I would suggest leaving 3-5 spaces between each trap. A good lake trap line will bring in many mallards and ducks. Great for early game food. Do this to all the shore fronts nearby. Check them every day or twice. You can get kills stolen from traps by foxes and goshawks. Use your raft to easily paddle to check them, plus you will scare lake and river birds into your traps.
Once you have a day’s food or two, start building your paw board traps. They will work without bait but not as well. The best location, I have found is open mires and ground tiles to snag foxes. It is easy to check all your traps without moving. I tend to place 7-10 in a rough circle and if I don’t have enough to bait them, I put one bait in the middle, at least as a draw to the trapping area. These should be checked once every 3-5 days.
Now the big earners, the pit traps. If you are near interconnecting lakes with land bridges, you have hit the gold mine. In the little ground between the two lakes, dig a few pit holes and make the traps. Place the fences so anything coming this way would follow the coast and fall into one of your pits. If you don’t have interconnecting lakes, just build one from the riverbank or lake bank out. I tend to do pit traps every 3 tiles. The only herd animals are reindeer, pigs and wolves and even if you catch all the herd then the meat or fur would spoil before you could process all 5-10 animals. I rather lessen the work and grab only 3 animals. I dig about 7 pit traps out, fence it and then leave it, checking as often I do for fox traps.
You can bait with berries, vegetables and meat. Early game when I do not have a sauna, if I get an early big game like elk and cannot eat it all, I only cook what I can eat, and the spoiled raw meat goes into fox traps. Elk love turnips and will happily go into pit traps for one. Berries will drive birds into your lever traps. A smart trapper will set up their lever traps around or on a berry bush to draw game to it. Foxes like meat, they act like dogs and will not take spoiled cooked meat.
Seal trapping is more of a novelty than anything is actually a great way to get early loot. You can trap seals in trap pits and big dead fall traps. The dead fall traps are worth setting up on skerries if you see seals in the area. Trap pits work too but needs to be dug in ground right on the shore.
To live as a Seal Trapper, all you need is a raft with some rope, logs and slender trunks and you can check the east coast tile by tile and live off of seals. I found I can trade 5-6 regular grey seal furs for a bag of salt, which you can then salt 210lb of meat with. In fall you can just dry the meat or if you have a smokehouse built you can smoke the meat. You get 20-175lb of meat depending on the size of the seal and type. Ringed seals are smaller than grey. It very much an active pastime but well worth it actually.
There is also living bait traps. There are people who use bought animals such as sheep as living bait, tying them to a tree and making a double ring of traps around the animal in order to tempt lynxes, wolves and bears into traps. I figure why risk your sheep when a smoked elk cut would do the same. Once a trap has triggered and the animal is dead, animals and NPCs can walk over them so with a wolf pack, the third wolf would get the sheep.
There are of course other traps in the game, the simplest is the snare. It costs 3ft of cord. I rarely use these as require cordage, which early game I rarely have and later game, when I have cordage to spare, I am onto trap pits and have lever traps already set up.
Small and big deadfall traps cost more than light lever traps and require tying equipment. The small deadfall traps may catch badgers and gluttons but they are rare. I usually set these around cellars and dog feeding zones to stop scavengers such as them and foxes. Big dead fall traps catch what small dead falls do and lynxes and wolves which are rare once again. I would use them if I see tracks of those around or see them on the map but I wouldn’t make them otherwise as if they are triggered, they often kill the animal outright meaning you only have a few days to recover the bodies versus up to a week in Pitfalls. You can use withes for these which lower the "cost" of building.
Heavy Dead Fall Bear Traps catch the same animals as Pitfalls but doesn’t need a hole. They do work with fences as well. They do require tying equipment which makes them for mid game or working on over winter when the ground is too frozen to dig.
There is some ritual based things you can do regarding traps. When you bait a Bear Dead Fall Trap, do so naked to increase your chances to get a bear in it. Fox traps should be baited in the evening to increase chances. Another one is to leave fox traps in a doorway so women walk over them. (Anyone tested if female player characters count?) For snaring hares, wear mittens preferably woolen ones to increase chances.
I stress that this is a rough guide; you might find that you do better with snares or maybe deadfalls but I just wanted to provide a little guidance to trapping and how to live off it.
Good luck and happy trapping.
Topic: How to Trap for Pleasure and Profit; A Rough Guide (Read 18883 times)