Need some quick help about killed animals.

[HelveteKommer]

I shot a BT deer and a nice elk they both ran and both good shots to the vitals. I kept hunting in my treestand as the action was nonstop (finally ran out of arrows lol). So, I go to harvest all the animals and once I clear all the animals, I notice the 2 tracks for the 2 runners has vanished. Is there a certain time limit to harvest a runner? Should I still be looking for them? I know the general direction and area they fled, but can't find a single track from them.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

[KnifeSmile]

Yes, unfortunately, tracks do disappear after a while. I'm not sure how long that time period is, but they do go away after a while. I've had that happen to me once or twice in the past. Eventually I had to start just deciding to either commit to tracking down a kill or else let it go. I only stray from tracking if something better than what I'm tracking crosses my path, such that it's worth it to possibly lose the existing kill in order to get the distraction.

[INTIMID883R]

If you identify runner tracks shortly after they are hit, they will stay around much longer. I have tested this several times and it works for me.

[HelveteKommer]

Do the animals disappear or just the tracks?

[HelveteKommer]

Ok, the animals do stay. Just found the BT deer with no tracks lol.

Thank you guys for the help.

[KnifeSmile]

Yeah the animal itself definitely sticks around. I've had experiences where I suddenly stumbled across the corpse of an animal I thought was long lost and had given up on finding it, just because I happened to move into the area where it died in the course of hunting other stuff and was lucky enough to notice the fallen animal or its final tracks (which were recent enough not to have vanished). As far as I can tell, dead animals don't vanish until you log out of the session, or it hits night-time hour and jumps ahead to 5 AM the next day, at which point you also get a fresh spawn of animals (just as if you'd launched a new game session).