Hunting is the most popular activity in Entropia Universe and the one most new players start with. You find creatures, kill them, and they drop loot. The whole game is in the details of that sentence.
Before anything else: hunting loses money against the trade terminal, structurally and for everyone. What you recover comes from selling loot to other players above terminal value. You are competing with those players, not with the game. This is an economic game explains why that is the only frame in which the rest of this page makes sense.
The loop
- Pick a creature you can kill efficiently with the equipment you have.
- Kill it, spending ammunition and decay in the process.
- Take the loot, which is a mixture of materials, item parts and occasionally something valuable.
- Sell it, ideally to players at markup rather than to the trade terminal.
Everything else is optimisation of those four steps.
Creatures
Creatures come in species, and each species comes in maturities: bands running from the smallest and weakest up to very large variants of the same animal. A higher maturity of the same creature has more health, hits harder, and takes more of your ammunition and decay to kill.
That last point is the one that matters economically. Cost per kill rises with maturity, and so does the loot, but the two do not move in lockstep in a way you can assume. Bigger is not automatically better and it is definitely not automatically worse; it depends on the creature, your equipment, and what its loot is currently worth.
Creatures also differ in:
- Damage types they deal, which determines what armour protects against them. See Armour and healing.
- Health and regeneration, which determine how long a kill takes.
- Aggression and spawn density, which determine how much of your session is shooting and how much is walking.
- What they drop, which is the entire point.
The creatures wiki has the per-creature data.
Cost per kill
The number that governs hunting is the total cost of one kill. It is:
ammunition + weapon decay + amplifier decay + armour decay + healing
New players almost always leave off the last two, which is why their numbers look better than their bank balance.
Once you know your cost per kill, everything else becomes answerable. How much a session costs. Whether a creature is worth hunting. Whether a new weapon is an upgrade. Whether the thing you are doing is working.
Efficiency beats damage
Two weapons that kill the same creature at the same speed can have very different costs, and two weapons at the same cost can return differently.
The stat that matters economically is not damage per second but how much damage you get per unit of cost. See Choosing a weapon for the specific stats and how to read them, including efficiency, which players use for comparison but whose mechanics are not publicly documented.
The other half of efficiency is using equipment at the right profession level. Underlevelled equipment costs the same to run and does less. See Professions and profession levels.
Solo and team
Hunting solo means all the cost and all the loot. Hunting in a team splits both, and the loot distribution rules are agreed by the team when it is formed.
Teams exist for good reasons:
- Some creatures are not solo content at any sensible cost.
- A dedicated healer lets a hunter run a setup they could not sustain alone, and the healer progresses their own profession while doing it.
- It is more fun, which is not nothing in a game you play for years.
The economics need care: a team splits loot by an agreed rule, but each member's costs are their own, so an unbalanced team can mean one player subsidising the rest.
Where the money actually comes from
Restating the point that governs everything: TT return on hunting is below 100% over any real sample. Hunters who do well are the ones whose loot carries markup.
That makes creature selection a market question as much as a combat one. What does this creature drop, who buys it, and at what price? A creature that is comfortable to kill but drops only material that sells at TT is a slow, steady loss. A harder creature dropping something in demand can be the opposite.
The globals feed shows what is being looted across the game in real time, and each creature's wiki page aggregates what has been recorded against it.
Recording it
You cannot manage any of this from memory. Loot is variable enough that your impression of how a session went is systematically unreliable, usually in the optimistic direction.
Entropia Central Tracker reads the game's chat log and records loot, cost and return per session automatically, so the question "is this creature working for me" has an actual answer. Getting started with Entropia Central Tracker covers setting it up.