Bear Hunt / Hunting Trap Guide | Whiteout Survival

The Bear Hunt/Hunting Trap is the most frequent PVE “event” you will see in Whiteout Survival. Due to the frequency, it is one of the best sources for Alliance Currency and a decent source for upgrade materials for Hero Gear.

Much like other content in Whiteout Survival, a player may assume that the Hunting Trap/ Bear Hunt is straight forward or easy, but nothing could be further from the truth. While yes, the process of calling mass rallies and joining them is simple, I’ve learned through trial and error just how impactful certain strategies are for the Hunting Trap/ Bear Hunt.

At first, I had assumed that the strategy would be simple: Join as many rallies as you can, but as soon as I realized how impactful certain Heroes were against the Bear and the importance of teamwork with your alliance, my damage shot up Millions even without having better troops.

I am extremely grateful for the Alliance I am currently in, as not only will the leaders offer such helpful feedback and advice, but they are also quite particular about strategy to ensure that all players benefit. Whether this means regularly giving Alliance Members a brush-up on strategy or actively kicking members out of Rallies that will risk the success of the team, they are always on top of it.

So, I thought I would share all I know about the Bear Hunt / Hunting Trap with you today.

HOW DO YOU ACCESS THE HUNTING TRAP?

Players will gain access to the Hunting Trap when they are in an Alliance with at least 15 members and are a level 5 Alliance. Unfortunately, only players with a Level 10 Furnace will be able to participate in the Bear Hunt. However, as you need to have a Level 8 Furnace to join an Alliance, it shouldn’t take you very long to be able to level up quickly.

Once an Alliance qualifies to participate in a Bear Hunt, an R4 or R5 will be able to place the Hunting Trap by Navigating to Alliance > Territory > Special Buildings > Hunting Trap. The Alliance will need to work together to construct the Hunting Trap as they would a banner.

The placement of a Hunting Trap is tremendously important. Though I’ll cover the specifics of this shortly, the most significant thing to note is that the Hunting Trap should be placed in a relatively clear area with no Alliance Resources. It should be placed in an area that is surrounded by Alliance Banners.

HOW OFTEN CAN YOU ENABLE THE HUNTING TRAP?

The Hunting Trap has the capability of being enabled every over day, meaning Alliances will be able to farm it 3 times a week. Only R5s and R4s are able to enable a Hunting Trap and will have the option to pre-schedule its activation to let other alliance members know when to plan to be online.

I would strongly suggest that all Alliances pre-schedule their Hunting Traps to ensure that members can prepare for the activation. It should be noted that a Hunting Trap can only be pre-scheduled a maximum of 2-days in advance, so if your Hunting Trap is not completely enhanced, you may want to wait before scheduling.

To Enable the Hunting Trap or to Pre-Schedule it, simply select the Hunting Trap and click “Enable”. Yes, I know, this is horribly designed.

EMPOWERING THE HUNTING TRAP

Though players can run the Hunting Trap every 2-days without buffs, I strongly recommend against it. Essentially, players will collect Explosive Arrows from running Intel Missions which can be traded in at the Hunting Trap by selecting “Trap Enhancement” allowing players to receive an extra 25% damage boost when completely filled.

No matter how strong you are, it is essential that you get this 25% boost, as it can be the difference to take you from one tier to the next. Admittedly, it can be difficult to get a smaller Alliance to fill up the Hunting Trap in a timely manner. Make sure that you are reminding players to fill it regularly, even if you are not an R4 or R5.

If you are an R4 or R5, you can also choose to place a label on the Hunting Trap by selecting the Hunting Trap and clicking the little flag icon. Not only will this be helpful for players to locate the Hunting Trap, but you can remind players to utilize their Explosive Arrows, or leave a note of when it is full or will be active.

Once the Hunting Trap has been filled, players can still keep donating Explosive Arrows to it, though I would strongly advise against this. Since the Hunting Trap cannot exceed the 25% damage buff, it is a much better idea to save your excess Explosive Arrows until the next time, even if your Alliance typically fills it quickly. My main reason for recommending this is because you never know when Alliance Members will take breaks from the game, and you want to ensure that you never complete the Hunting Trap when it is not fully enhanced.

With that being said, it can be a lot more difficult for smaller Alliances to complete the Hunting Trap every 2 days with maximum enhancements. This is especially true if players in the Alliance are more casual or aren’t regularly contributing.

A helpful thing to say to Alliance Members like this is: Try to at least complete all of your intel daily, and you will get 200 Alliance Tokens for each Explosive Arrow, which adds up extremely quickly.

WHAT ARE THE REWARDS FOR THE HUNTING TRAP / BEAR HUNT

There are two sources of rewards for the Hunting Trap. One is based on personal contribution and the other is based on the Alliances’ output.

Players will receive the rewards for Alliance Contribution whether they participated in the Bear Hunt, however, if a player misses the event they will not be able to receive any of the personal rewards.

If the Alliance manages to score a total of 1 Million Damage against the Bear, which is extremely easy and doesn’t take much effort, they will receive 5 Sergey Shards and 3,000 Alliance Tokens. Admittedly, these rewards are not great; but the Sergey Shards are pretty significant since he’s a great F2P Hero and you’ll get them even if you can’t make the event.

As for personal rewards, these will scale based on the amount of damage you deal and will be provided based on tiers of damage. These range from the following amounts:

• Essence Stones (0-17) 
• Enhancement XP Components (20–600 Hero Gear Experience)
• Alliance Tokens (1,100 – 95k)
• Meat (495.5k – 41.4M)
• Wood (495.5 – 41.4M)
• Coal (99k – 8.2M)
• Iron (25k – 2.0M)

Due to the significant number of resources you can get from the Bear Hunt I strongly recommend trying to join each time it is activated.

If you are an R4 or R5, I would suggest you take a vote for what time the most players are active, and always schedule it for the same time and same days each week. This would mean that plays will leave the Hunting Trap inactive for one extra day a week, but it will significantly increase the chances of players being present and aware that it is happening.

HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR DAMAGE IN THE BEAR HUNT

There are two major components to maximizing your damage during the Bear Hunt, and it will require players to communicate as an Alliance. Unfortunately, much like many other elements in Whiteout Survival, without proper communication and strategy among an Alliance all players will suffer, so I strongly recommend you follow this portion of the guide to an absolute T.

If you have any Alliance Members who refuse to follow these strategies, it may be a good idea to remove them from your Alliance. I know that sounds harsh, but it will make a lot of sense soon.

PROPERLY POSITION YOUR ALLIANCE

The most essential component to a successful Bear Hunt is to correctly align your Alliance so that as many members can be squeezed in together. Above is an example of hour our Alliance currently looks.

Important things to note are that the Hunting Trap is a 3×3 square and all bases are 2×2. This means that there is not going to be a perfect way to align your bases.

When assigning spots to Alliance Members, it is essential that you place the most active members in the first and second row. Members that are somewhat active should be in the 3rd row and beyond. As all players head to the base of the player who initiates the rally, players in the front row will have the shortest attack and return time. This is why I suggest you only place the most active players here, as they will be calling the majority of the rallies.

Some players will take it personally if you tell them not to be in the first 3 rows because they are not active enough; so it may be a good idea to let them know that while it means they have more distance to travel, their damage output should not suffer significantly, if at all. I’ll cover the reason for this shortly.

Make sure that all members can be squeezed onto Alliance Territory since it provides everyone with any Alliance Tech bonuses. These will include damage and lethality buffs which otherwise would go wasted.

HOW TO RALLY (1st, 2nd and 3rd Row)

When the Hunting Trap is active, players in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd row will be in charge of setting up rallies. Players beyond these rows should not initiate rallies at all, and should only join them.

First row players should initiate rallies immediately when the Hunting Trap is active.

Second row players should initiate their rallies 1-2 minutes into the Hunting Trap becoming active.

Third row players should initiate their rallies 3-minutes into the Hunting Trap becoming active.

Unlike most other rallies, a Bear Hunt rally does not begin marching until 5-minutes has passed. This means that even if the rally is full, you will be stuck waiting. Because of this mechanic, it’s important that rallies are staggered to “reduce waiting time.” Essentially, by the time the first row’s rallies are complete players should have time to join the 2nd and 3rd rows’ rallies which should only have 1-2 minutes left on their timers.

Rallying does not take a march queue, so you will be able to still join 4-6 rallies depending on if you purchased a march queue and are VIP 6.

When rallying always select 3 most powerful Heroes and either equalize your troops or send 1 troop since you will be joining other rallies anyways. Since your personal rally does not consume a March Queue you might as well leave space open for other players to join since you will also be sending your troops to other player’s rallies.

That being said, the difference between sending only Heroes with no troops and Heroes with equalized troops isn’t much different if there are enough rallies to join. However, if there are not enough rallies being started you will absolutely want to send troops out with your rally.

HOW TO JOIN RALLIES

A lot of the pressure ends up being on players who join rallies as they can completely nuke the damage of their team if they send the wrong Heroes.

You see, when you initiate a Rally the bonuses of all 3 of your Heroes Expedition Skills will be active. However, when you join a rally only top right Skill from the first Hero selected can be chosen. This is depicted by the Flag icon in the bottom right corner.

Of the players who join the rally, the Hero with the highest level skill will be chosen to “boost” the group. So, an example would be:

Player 2 has a level 2 skill, Player 3 has a level 1 skill and Player 4 has a level 4 skill; Player 4’s Hero’s skill will be placed on the whole rally.

The reason this can beccome a problem is because only some Heroes have skill that will actually benefit the whole group as many of the Hero Skills are geared towards Growth instead of Battle. So, let’s say Player 4’s skill was actually a Harvesting Boost, but Player 3’s skill was a damage boost… You’ve just missed out on extra damage.

This will often lead Rally Leaders to kick members from their Rally since choosing the wrong hero is detrimental to the whole team.

Always use the following Heroes in your first slot as they  provide a 5%/10%/15%/20%/25% boost in damage depending on the level of their Skill:

1. Jessie
2. Seo-yoon
3. Jasser
4. Jeronimo

If you do not have these Heroes send troops with no Heroes instead. Though it might seem like a DPS loss, the reality of missing out on a 15-25% damage buff on all your troops is more significant than the loss from not sending Heroes. That being said, you want to make sure both you and your team are scoring as high as possible since all of your power matters in battle.

In the early game chances are you will only have Jessie or Jeronimo (if you got lucky with HoC) maxed out to level 5. That’s fine! I wouldn’t start levelling up Seo-yoon or Jasser until the Heroes you use in Arena are levelled properly since a 5% buff is still better than nothing. Since Hunting Trap rallies tend to go quickly it can be difficult to quickly glance at what Heroes everyone is using.

Note: If you are the rally leader and players are sending the wrong heroes, you will want to kick them out of your rally and explain why in Alliance Chat. Realistically everyone is going to be tap, tap, tapping and since you have 5-minutes between rallies you should have enough down time to hyper optimize your team.

HOW MANY TROOPS SHOULD YOU SEND TO A RALLY?

When joining Rallies and creating them, it tends to be a better idea to equalize your troops rather than send them all in. There are a few reasons for this:

• You can join more rallies and send out more Heroes for a bit of extra damage (as long as they are the right Heroes!)
• You can help ensure that all rallies have a damage boosting Hero
• It’s a lot easier to join rallies with fewer troops since there’s less risk to overcap. Rallies will become streamlined if all alliance members are doing this.

Players may want to use the Squads function to set their teams up in advance.

CONCLUSION

Though it may seem silly that such a basic task requires optimization, I can tell you that this strategy does wonders. For a little idea of how much it can boost your damage, without it I was dealing about 3 Million Damage and with it I am dealing about 8 Million Damage. Unfortunately it will require your whole team to be on board with the strategy since a single teammates can ruin it for all players.

While yes, at the end of the day, Whiteout Survival is just a game, it is a team game and you will want to make sure that you are doing all you can to help support them rather than hinder them. Better teamwork, better rewards, better chances at future success.

If you try this strategy I’m curious what your team’s damage output is! Let me know in the comments below.