Early Access Update V0.8.9.8
Poached : Hunt The Hunter Patch Notes — March 19, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
This update focuses mainly on animal related things, plus some other important fixes.
Animal Updates:
1. New animal: The Kudu - this majestic creature is one of the most requested animals to be added to the game, so I have finally done so. Kudus are typically solitary, but can also be found in small herds. They roam naturally, wander between idle/eating and walking states, and will flee when startled by nearby gunfire or when the player/poachers get too close.
2. Protected animals killed now also save to your save game to prevent quickload exploit for gaining 100% animal protection rating in levels.
3. Goats hunted in a mission now save as progress to your save game, to prevent infinite meat exploit as well as help you keep your progress if you wish to hunt all goats in a mission over time or across save/loads.
4. Goats now feature advanced procedural spinal animation, enabling realistic turning and rotation with natural spine curvature, which helps to realistically animate the erratic behavior they exhibit.
5. Goats now only provide 1x meat when killed with a gun and 2x meat when killed with a knife so that the game is more balanced and that people can't just live the entire game healing exclusively from goats.
6. Zebras now have more advanced animation state trees, that feature procedural spine animations so that they no longer rotate on their axis like roombas, and also stop to eat grass or look around instead of only wandering aimlessly. They also now have improved quadruped alignment for for better terrain alignment.
7. Hippo mission - Improved the visual quality of the incompetent ranger stuck in the tree being hunted by a hippo, and added proper lip syncing and facial expression to the character. Also made him speak more and gave his voice better E.Q.
8. Fixed weird chicken butt feather rendering.
9. Made various improvements & optimizations across the board to various animal's texture/material from goats to frogs to buffalo and all in-between.
10. Crocodile has been temporarily removed from the main map, near waterfall #2. As it's slightly annoying over there being bitten when you least expect it during a harmless exploration. But new mission content based in a new lakeside environment will now feature crocodiles there. More info on that soon!
11. Improved zebra terrain alignment when walking up slopes.
12. Improved quality of zebra hitboxes to only register hits on actual body parts instead of a general box collider around the zebra.
13. Game now provides a written warning when standing too close to Rhino's instead of only via the audio cue of the Rhino growling.
14. Improved zebra ragdoll animation.
15. Optimized Elephant animation state controller.
16. Zebras can now collide with player when moving instead of walking through player.
17. Elephants now crush & kill you if you get too close to the front of them, on either foot or in a vehicle.
18. Fixed some zebra corpses in Mission 3 from disappearing when viewed out the corner of the players eye
19. Fixed chicken death animations from freezing mid-frame if player is not looking at them when accidentally running over them, as well as optimizing the animation culling system for all chickens.
20. Fixed bug causing dead chickens to spawn a new collider after you collect their feathers.
21. Improved hippopotamus stampede algorithm.
Graphics Updates:
1. Improved some terrain textures.
2. Reduced appearance of terrain texture tiling.
3. Made eye & pupil shader for commander in obstacle course more realistic.
4. Improved some terrain textures where areas containing large amounts of small rocks are concerned.
5. Removed one specific grass bush that just straight up looked ridiculously bad.
6. Improved the material quality of metal structures.
7. Adjusted some grass elements around the terrain for better blending with the environment.
8. Improved terrain texture coloring slightly.
9. Fixed more terrain texture seams.
10. Improved the uniqueness of tree layouts in certain sectors.
12. Fixed a graphical pixel artefact on certain grass terrain details with blue flowers.
13. Improved R1 FAL FN rifle on-screen sprinting animation position.
14. Fixed rendering issue that caused grass to change color in response to wind.
15. Improved obstacle course commander clothing materials and pupil size.
Other Updates:
1. Fixed an infinite exploitable meat pickup stash in Mission 3.
2. Fixed issue with some enemies playing silences weapon audio when shooting even when not using a silenced weapon.
3. Improved audio balance of silenced weapons when used by enemies.
4. Fixed some overly sharp areas of the terrain mesh with noticeable polygon spikes as well as some other terrain mesh improvements near the main campsite.
5. "Disable Hud" option now fully disables ALL HUD elements including mission briefing text for clean unadulterated screenshots.
6. Fixed bug that would cause onscreen damage effect to play, even without any damage when player ran into the front of their own vehicle while stationary.
7. Added some more rocks and nature details to various locations in the reserve.
8. Fixed bug causing animal stats to not display in corner after a mission briefing if notepad is selected during the briefing.
9. Rearranged a few items in the advanced graphics options menu for better flow of option types.
10. Made certain crafting and inventory sounds that were too loud softer.
11. Fixed missing spine animation for one of the rhinos in the tutorial when stampeding.
12. Fixed radio stations from repeating themselves too often.
13. Made shotguns not so offensively loud when used by enemies.
14. Fixed bug that would cause game to tell you that you don't have any matches when trying to light a fire if you rearranged them in your inventory from the slot they were in.
15. Fixed exploitable bug causing meat to not be removed from inventory when cooking it on the braai.
16. Fixed issue with mouse scroll wheel not scrolling weapons in the same order as the weapon wheel.
17. Changed weapon wheel default binding to "Q" instead of mouse wheel, but it can still be re-bound to the mouse wheel if you desire, and will only apply to new installations and will not overwrite your current weapon wheel binding if you have already started the game.
18. Internal script performance optimizations.
19. Fixed animations sometimes being caught mid-frame due to CPU spikes on lower end devices.
20. Optimized the memory consumption of grass decals across the map.
20. Fixed rare yet heinous error which caused player to randomly die when getting 100 meters from the edge of the map while wearing a camouflage vest.
21. Fixed missing collider in pole inside herb grow hut.
22. Fixed some internal array index errors with the online stock market
23. Fixed issue allowing you to walk through crafting table.
24. Enemy bullet holes and muzzle flashes now use object pooling for lower game memory pressure.
- And last but not least, have now added full screen borderless window mode to the games options as per user request.
The next update V0.8.9.9 will be out soon after this one, and I have some special stuff planned for the major milestone update V0.9 which will be coming out in April.
As always, thank you everybody for playing - and happy hunting.
- Rob