Hunting Grounds Guide

Horizon Forbidden West is a stunning, massive, open-world game. Aside from the unforgiving dangers you’ll encounter in the wild, you can also test your mettle and improve your combat prowess by clearing Hunting Ground challenges. In this page, we will discuss the basics and trials in the Hunting Grounds.

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Hunting Ground Basics and Tips

The Hunting Grounds is similar to the original game but with varied challenges. There are still three types of challenges per site, and each challenge can have three different reward tiers. Clearing the trial within the best target time will also award you the medals of the lower difficulties. You can only collect the medals once. However, you can still retry the trials to make the machines respawn and for you to farm more shards and materials.

You can loot defeated machines and keep their drops. However, any spent ammo or supplies during the trials are not going to be replenished. Since the machines are instantly spawned back whenever you start a trial, hunting grounds are good training areas where you can farm machine parts and metal shards in a controlled environment, with the convenience of having a workbench and campfire nearby.

The Medals you’ve collected from various Hunting Ground challenges can be exchanged for purple (very rare) weapons in the Arena. These are great placeholder weapons that will last you for a while. They’ll also help you in clearing the harder challenges in the Arena and collect the necessary Arena medals to purchase the gold (Legendary) weapons, armor, weaves, and coils in the game.

Each Hunting Ground has its own campfire, stash, workbench, hunter (merchant), and a carver (for machine strike pieces). If you have the Workbench Expert skill learned, it’s better to replenish your ammo and Traps by crafting them on the workbench to save some materials.

You can review the ongoing trials and earned stripes by talking to the Grounds Keeper or viewing them from the Quests > Hunting Grounds menu. Additionally, if the trial’s objective is not clear, you must talk to the Grounds Keeper and view the trial’s details (the screen before actually starting it). The Ground Keeper’s tips will be listed there, giving more information about the specific conditions that you must meet and helpful insights to help you clear the task.

Hunting Ground Easy Mode

If you’re having problems clearing a trial or you just want to steamroll through the trials to collect the medals, you can always set the game’s difficulty to “Story” since the difficulty will not affect the amount of Medals you’ll earn. You can even prolong the Concentration duration and even enable Auto Heal! (also available in Easy and Custom difficulties) You can always adjust the difficulty anytime by accessing the game’s Settings. You can always revert the difficulty if you happen to kill enemies too quickly that it causes you to fail a trial.

Hunting Ground Locations

There are four Hunting Ground locations across the map and you can find the location of the Hunting Grounds below. You can clear the trials as many times as you want, at your own convenience.

The Daunt

This hunting ground is located directly south of Redhew Quarry and a bit northeast of Barren Light.

Trial	Time Limit (for Full Stripe)	Trial Description
Tear Trial	1:30	Shoot off and loot Scrounger Power Cells
Shock Trial	3:00	Shock machines near a scrounger by overloading its power cell with Shock ammo.
Shock and Trap Trial	3:00	Destroy shocked enemies using the various environmental Traps set up around the Grounds.

Plainsong

This hunting ground is located directly to the east of the Restless Weald relic ruins and northwest of Plainsong.

Trial	Time Limit (for Full Stripe)	Trial Description
Silent Looting Trial	3:30	Loot supply caches without alerting or damaging any machines
Silent Strike Trial	1:30	Kill machines using Silent Strike and Strike From Above while remaining undetected.
Silent Gliding Trial	1:00	Glide undetected towards machines using your Shieldwing and kill them from above.

Sheerside Mountains

This hunting ground is located over the mountain range east of The Bulwark and across the valley south of Stone Crest.

Trial	Time Limit (for Full Stripe)	Trial Description
Frost Trial	3:00	Use Frost Ammo on Bellowbacks to build up Brittle state, then destroy their Cargo Refining Sacs.
Shredder Catch Trial	2:00	Hit a machine 3x with a Shredder. Catch it upon return each time to charge it. When fully charged, lob the shredder’s projectile to a machine to inflict massive damage.
Plasma Blast Trial.	2:00	Use Plasma ammo on a Rollerback to build it up to the Plasma Blast state, which starts a timer. Inflict max damage to the machine to create the most powerful explosion when the timer ends.

The Raintrance

This hunting ground is located due west of Fall’s Edge and southeast of Raintrance Rise.

Trial	Time Limit (for Full Stripe)	Trial Description
Shock and Remove Trial	2:00	Use Shock Ammo on a Tremortusk to build up and trigger Shocked state, then shoot off its tusks.
Mounted Combat Trial	2:30	Override and Mount a Clawstrider then use it to kill other machines.
Heavy Weapons Trial	3:00	Shoot off the Tremortusk’s Cannons and use it to kill other machines.

HG Legendary Weapon

Completing all Hunting Ground trials with full stripes will award you with the legendary tripcaster called the Tinker's Pride. This amazing tripcaster has 5 coil slots, amazing stats, and can deploy shieldwires, staggerbeams, and advanced explosive tripwires. You can receive this weapon as soon as you clear all trials with full stripes, regardless of location.

HG Trophies

There are two trophies related to the Hunting Grounds, as listed below.

Trophy	Rarity	Description
Obtained 3 Stripes at a Hunting Ground	Bronze	Earned at least a Quarter Stripe mark in all three trials at one Hunting Lodge.
Obtained 3 Stripes at All Hunting Grounds	Silver	Earned at least a Quarter Stripe mark in all three trials at all Hunting Grounds.

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That concludes our Hunting Grounds Guide for Horizon Forbidden West. We hope that this information helps you in your exploration and adventure. For more content regarding Horizon Forbidden West, please refer to our online guide here at Supercheats.