Last updated: 20 September 2026

KCD2 Hunting Guide — Legal Game, Poaching & Tracking

Hunting in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 isn't just a survival side-activity — it's a legal minefield with its own rules, tools, and a workaround that turns stolen venison into an honest meal. This guide covers exactly which animals you're allowed to kill, what happens when you don't stick to that list, the weapons and tracking skills that make hunting actually work, and how Henry's dog Mutt fits into the picture.

01Legal Game vs. Poaching

KCD2 splits huntable animals into two categories, and the difference matters:

• Legal to hunt freely: rabbits, wolves, and wild dogs. Nobody owns these, so killing them carries no legal consequence.
• Poaching: deer, boar, roe deer, and other game animals are considered the property of the local lord. Hunting any of them is a punishable offense, even out in the woods where nobody seems to be watching.

Kill a protected animal and everything you take from the carcass — meat, hide, antlers — is flagged as stolen goods. That doesn't stop you from carrying it around, but it does mean two things: it can tank your reputation with NPCs if discovered, and guards have a chance to stop and search you when you fast-travel into a settlement. Get caught with fresh poached meat in your inventory and you're looking at a fine or worse.

In practice, poaching deep in the woods where no one witnesses the kill rarely causes immediate trouble — the risk is mostly at the point where you try to bring the goods back to town.

02The Fix: Cooking Removes the Stolen Tag

Here's the mechanic that makes poaching worthwhile: once poached meat is cooked, dried, or smoked, it loses its stolen status entirely. A raw haunch of stolen venison is a liability; the same meat turned into a cooked meal or smoked and preserved at a campfire is just food (or a sellable good) with no flag attached.

This means the safest way to profit from an illegal kill isn't to sell the raw meat — it's to process it first. Preservation is worth doing anyway, since raw meat spoils quickly regardless of where it came from.

03Best Weapons for Hunting

What you carry changes what you can realistically hunt:

• Bow and arrow: the most effective all-around choice, especially for larger game like deer. There's no crosshair while aiming, so accuracy depends heavily on your character's Marksmanship skill — expect to miss a lot at first.
• Crossbow: hits harder than a bow but is slower to reload — a bow with a fast-reload perk can loose four or five arrows in the time a crossbow reloads once — making it a better fit for tougher animals where you can line up one good shot than for anything that spooks easily.
• Daggers and swords: usable on small game if you can close the distance without being noticed, but risky and inefficient compared to a ranged weapon.

Aim for the head or chest for a clean, one-shot kill. A wounded animal that survives the first hit will bolt, which is where tracking comes in.

04Tracking Wounded Prey: The Blood Trail

Not every shot is a clean kill. If an animal survives being hit and runs, it leaves a blood trail on the ground that you can follow on foot to finish the job rather than losing the kill entirely. This is a core part of hunting in KCD2, not an edge case — expect to use it regularly, especially early on before your Bow skill and equipment improve.

Approaching too closely before taking your shot causes most animals to flee before you get a shot off at all, so stealth and positioning matter as much as aim.

05Butchering and Preserving the Kill

Killing the animal is only step one. Approach the body and butcher it to collect meat and other usable materials — this requires a knife. From there, raw meat spoils quickly, so preserve it as soon as you can by cooking, drying, or smoking it, ideally back at a camp or fire.

Beyond the food itself, a successful hunt can yield hides useful for crafting and blacksmithing-adjacent gear, and certain animal parts are useful as alchemy ingredients — hunting is as much a resource-gathering loop as it is a food source.

06Mutt and the Houndmaster Perks

Henry's dog companion, Mutt, obtained through his own side quest, brings hunting-relevant utility once you level up the Houndmaster skill. The "Hunt!" perk (Houndmaster level 6) unlocks a "Sic 'em" command you can aim at wild game, sending Mutt after it directly instead of you doing the chasing. Separately, the "Sic 'em!" perk (Houndmaster level 20) makes Mutt's attacks 20% stronger, which matters more against wolves and wild dogs in a fight than during a hunt.

Houndmaster perks in general improve overall hunting effectiveness — worth prioritizing if hunting is a regular part of how you play, on top of the more general Marksmanship and Survival skills.