Fauna Hunt - Wildlife Spotting Game

There is wildlife all over Flight Simulator 2024, and you have been flying straight over it for years. Elephants, wildebeest, camels, bison, kangaroos, snow leopards. Fauna Hunt makes finding them the reason for the flight.

The hunt

A spotter calls contacts over the intercom, and he is not very helpful.

something very large, on its own — bearing 230 — 1100 m

Fly out that way and he gets more specific.

15 animals — your 7 o'clock, low — 900 m

That is as much as you get. He never tells you what they are. Getting close enough to see for yourself is the whole game.

Every contact carries an arrow showing which way to turn, relative to the nose of your aircraft, and you can sort the list by what is nearest or by what is ahead of you.

Identify it

Once you can see the animals, tap the contact. You get four species to choose from — and that is where it gets interesting, because a Grant's gazelle and a Thomson's gazelle look an awful lot alike at 400 metres in a helicopter that will not sit still.

Get it right and the animal joins your collection. First guess is worth the most, so it pays to have a proper look before you commit.

Then go and get the shot

Identifying it is only half of it. Fly within 150 metres of the herd and you capture it, for the points all over again. This is the part that puts you down on the deck, low and slow, drifting over a river full of hippos — which is where this simulator is at its best anyway.

61 animals to find

From cattle and sheep in the local fields, up to seven legendary animals that live in only a handful of places on Earth. Snow leopards. Giant pandas. Orcas. Rarer animals are worth far more, and you get a heads-up when a legendary one is close.

Plenty of them have subspecies to sort out too — eight different giraffes, seven different brown bears — and they all count separately.

The lifelist

Your lifelist keeps track of everything you have caught. The ones you are still missing tell you where to go looking — "Himalaya: Ladakh, Nepal, Bhutan, Tibet" — which is how a quiet evening turns into planning a trip to Mongolia to find a wild horse.

Most of the good stuff is African. A bush flight across the Serengeti is worth a hundred laps of the local farmland.

Difficulty

• Explorer — detail arrives early. Good for learning what a distant giraffe actually looks like.
• Tracker — the intended balance.
• Expert — you stay in the dark until you are nearly on top of it, and everything scores 50% more.

Installing

Drop the wilem35-fauna-hunt folder into your Community folder and start the simulator. Click the paw print in the toolbar. There is nothing else to run and nothing to allow through anything.

Where to start: HTSN Seronera in the Serengeti, HKAM Amboseli, or FASZ Skukuza in Kruger. Anywhere with farmland will give you cattle and horses to practise on.

One tip: the simulator has its own Fauna slider in its graphics settings. Turn it up and there is a great deal more to hunt. It is set separately for normal and VR, so check both.

Good to know

• No birds. The simulator keeps its flying animals somewhere add-ons cannot reach. Ground animals only.
• In VR you can identify from any direction. The simulator will not tell add-ons where your head is pointing, so rather than make you aim the aircraft at a zebra, that check is off in VR.
• MSFS 2024 only. The animal data does not exist in 2020.

Source code: github.com: Fauna Hunt