Last checked: August 20, 2026

Hunting Season Beginner's Guide – Tracking Your First Trophy, Rifle Choice & Severnaya Tayga

By Money Lord — Founder & Editor | Updated: August 20, 2026

By the end of this guide you will know which of the three maps to start on and why, how to read a track before you ever see the animal, where the four vital organs sit, how rare each of the six trophy tiers actually is, and which of the four real game passes is worth Robux. Every number here was pulled from a live source today.

Hunting Season is an open-world hunting simulator by Josima Studios (verified Roblox group 5086436, owner JOSIMA33, 98,160 members as of August 20, 2026). It went live on July 4, 2020 and is still in beta — the description ends with a bug warning and stamps the build as v0.17.1. As of August 20, 2026 at 08:23 UTC it has 114.7 million visits, 410,515 favourites and 1,766 concurrent players. Do not judge it on a single snapshot: our seven-day radar sample puts the median at 964 concurrent players with a range of 533 to 3,045, and the last server deploy landed on August 9, 2026 at 16:29 UTC. Approval sits at 71.3% (121,030 likes against 48,773 dislikes) — a beta-tier score, and honest about it.

1. Start on Boulder Creek and Learn the Real Map Roster

Roblox's places endpoint is the cleanest way to see what this game actually contains, and on August 20, 2026 it returned seven places under the universe: the root entry, three live maps — Boulder Creek, Thabisa Valley and Severnaya Tayga — plus three internal staging copies marked [TEST], one of which is literally named Router [TEST]. That last name gives the architecture away.

Here is the single most misleading number on the store page. Hunting Season advertises 200 max players, but that cap belongs to the root place, which is a router that teleports you onward. The real hunting servers cap at six. We paged the public server lists at 08:20 UTC on August 20, 2026 and every server on every map reported a maximum of 6:

That ranking is on one axis only — concurrent public servers at that timestamp — and it says clearly where the population is. Start on Boulder Creek. It holds roughly three quarters of the live servers, it is the map with named spawn points you unlock by walking to them (Sage Camping, Pinewood, Theodore's Lodge and Valentino after the 0.6 revamp), and it is where the deer, coyote, red fox, ruffed grouse and grizzly bear live.

Severnaya Tayga is the newest map, and the description still shouts "NEW MAP" about it — but two independent creators covered its launch on March 2 and March 3, 2026, so it is about five and a half months old. It is a snowbound map with frozen lakes, three spawn points to unlock beyond your lodge, and three headline species: Tiger, Gray Wolf and Wild Boar, with Moose alongside them. All three of the new animals fight back, and gray wolves move in packs. Thabisa Valley is the savannah map and carries the Lion, Plains Zebra, Blue Wildebeest and Spotted Hyena.

2. Read the Track Before You Look for the Animal

Tracking is the actual game; shooting is the last two seconds of it. Every animal leaves a trail, and inspecting a track returns four things: how fresh it is, whether the animal is bleeding, which direction it went, and its gait — Walking, Trotting or Galloping. Freshness runs on a six-step ladder: Very Fresh → Fresh → Very Recent → Recent → Old → Very Old. Anything at Recent or worse is usually not worth chasing on foot.

The reason you approach from behind is measurable. The official wiki publishes a field-of-view figure per species, and they are brutal: White-tailed deer 310°, Moose 315°, Coyote 245°. A deer's blind arc is barely 50 degrees wide. Combine that with the noise meter on the HUD and you get the whole stalking loop: stay in the blind arc, keep your movement quiet, and close the distance before you commit.

Distances in Hunting Season are measured in yards and bullet drop is real, which is why rangefinding binoculars matter more than raw magnification — past roughly 150 yards you have to hold above the target. Suppressors exist too and cut the sound of the shot, which matters when the starter rifle's report carries 196 m and the first paid rifle's carries 210 m. Callers are the other half of the toolkit: the Deer Bleat Caller is free and the first one you own, and the developer's own v0.6.1 notes add a Moose Caller and a Predator Jackrabbit Caller.

3. Take the Shot That Scores — Four Vitals, Not Flesh

When you collect a kill, the harvest screen reports gender, age, weight, difficulty, fur type, how many shots hit, who hit it, the range and velocity of each shot, the firearm and caliber used, and which organs you hit. There are five hit zones and four of them are vital: the Left Lung, Right Lung and Heart, all sitting behind the shoulder, plus the Brain. Miss all four and the readout says Flesh, and a flesh-hit animal will run for hundreds of yards. There is also a +5 kill speed bonus for dropping an animal fast, so a clean vital is worth score as well as time.

Species behave differently enough that your first ten hunts should be deer. The Moose has the highest health in the game and weighs 362–667 kg as a male and 243–436 kg as a female — big, slow, forgiving to hit, but it usually needs both lungs. White-tailed deer run 49–153 kg (buck) and 40–183 kg (doe). The Coyote is a 3–10 kg sprinter and is close to impossible to hit while trotting. Ruffed grouse sit in ground cover and spook at close range; hold around 40 to 50 yards.

Fur variants are where the money hides. Each species rolls a variant, and the published spawn chances are Piebald 1.00%, Albino 0.02% and Melanistic 0.01%; a Leucistic variant has also shown up in 2026 footage. That means an Albino is a roughly 1-in-5,000 encounter and a Melanistic is 1-in-10,000, so if one walks out in front of you, take the safest shot available, not the impressive one.

4. Learn the Six Trophy Tiers Before You Chase a Mythical

Every harvest is scored, and the score maps onto six trophy tiers driven by the animal's weight: Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, Ruby, Mythical. Each tier has its own Roblox badge, and because a badge is awarded once per player, the award counts are an honest rarity ranking. These are the live figures on August 20, 2026, ranked on one axis: how many players earned that tier for the first time in the last 24 hours.

Read that table before you set a goal. Roughly one player earns a first Mythical for every 187 who earn a first Bronze, and only 37,766 accounts have ever recorded one against 114.7 million visits. The badge metadata also dates the tier itself: the Mythical badge was created on October 9, 2025, while the other five were created on May 14, 2023 — Mythical is a late addition to the top of the ladder, and all six badges were re-saved on that same October date. All six are still awarding daily, so none of these is a closed limited-time window.

5. Work the Lead Board Across All Three Maps

The game periodically posts "New leads available", and leads are the difference between wandering and hunting. A Hunting Season creator published a repeatable route on April 3, 2026 that is worth copying, and it explicitly leans on the map roster you learned in section one:

• Read the bottom lead first — it is usually the strongest one on the board. If it is good, buy it.
• If it is not, fast-travel to Thabisa Valley and then Severnaya Tayga and read their lead boards too. The board is per-map, so three maps means three rolls.
• Buy the good lead, take that animal, then return to Boulder Creek — it is the best place to keep hunting while the board refreshes.
• Loop your lodge → Pinewood → a watchtower → lodge using fast travel. By the time you are back, spawns have refreshed.
• Repeat each time leads refresh. His reported rate is about one Ruby per hour.

Two caveats we would not skip. The watchtower leg of that loop needs the Hunting Towers pass, and the binocular scan step is far stronger with Enhanced Hunter — so this is a route that partly assumes you have spent Robux. And "a Ruby an hour" is one player's own figure, not something we could measure independently; treat it as a ceiling, not a promise. If you enjoy this kind of weight-and-rarity scoring, Fisch and Fish It run the same idea underwater, and Catch and Tame applies it to live animals.

6. Spend Robux on the Four Passes That Actually Exist

This matters because fabricated game-pass tables are the single most common lie in Roblox guides. We queried the game-pass endpoint for universe 1851087906 on August 20, 2026 and confirmed exactly four passes, all with isForSale true and all created by Josima Studios. There is nothing else. Anyone selling you a fifth is inventing it.

If you buy one, buy Enhanced Hunter at 239 R$. Weight is what sets your trophy tier, so a pass that estimates weight before you take the shot is the only one that changes which animals you choose to chase. Hunting Towers at 149 R$ is the cheapest and unlocks a whole map feature. The Permanent ATV at 399 R$ is a convenience buy that pays off slowly — the ATV otherwise costs in-game cash per outing, and experienced players complain about bleeding money on it. Note also that the newest pass here was listed in December 2024, over 20 months ago: the store is stable, so you are not racing a new release.

7. What We Found Out About Hunting Season Codes

We found no evidence that Hunting Season has a code system as of August 20, 2026. The game's Roblox description — read live today — contains no code, redeem, Discord or Twitter text; the wiki that Josima Studios maintains itself has 17 articles and not one of them is a Codes page; and the code tracker keyed to place ID 5286116071 states plainly that there are none. That is why this guide has no code table, and why we have not published a Hunting Season codes page: our verification standard requires a confirmed redemption box before we print anything.

There is a trap here worth naming. A separate Fandom wiki at hunting-season.fandom.com does carry a codes table — UPDATE019, THANKS41K, ONEMIL and others, all rewarding "Nightcrawlers". That wiki belongs to a different Roblox game, one running version v0.02 with its own sequel called Hunting Season Rebirth. Those codes will not work in Josima Studios' Hunting Season, and any article that lists them has confused two games with the same name. For genuinely code-bearing survival games, try 99 Nights in the Forest codes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Not affiliated with Josima Studios or Roblox Corporation. Player counts, visits, favourites, votes, badge award counts, game-pass prices and the map and server data were read from the Roblox API on August 20, 2026 between 08:20 and 08:23 UTC and will drift. Species weights, fields of view, variant spawn chances and pre-rename weapon stats come from the Hunting Season wiki maintained by Josima Studios; map and gameplay details come from dated first-hand creator footage, credited in-line.