Combat & Hunting

Taro Bay is a peaceful shore, but not an empty one. Hunting is how you train the six combat skills — you pick a quarry, equip the right weapon, and let your diver fight one foe after another while you're away. Every kill pays out; a loss ends the hunt and sends you off to catch your breath.

How hunting works

A hunt is just another action. You start it, queue more behind it, and it runs offline exactly like a dive or a harvest — see Action Queue & Offline Progress. The difference is what one repetition means: each repetition is a single fight against one enemy.

• Win and you take the loot and the style XP for that kill, then the next fight begins.
• Lose and the hunt stops on the spot. Your queue halts — nothing else starts on its own — and you enter a short recovery before you can hunt again (more on that below).

Every fight takes a fixed amount of real time — the blow-by-blow happens inside that window, so a faster weapon doesn't finish a hunt any sooner, and a speed buff from food or drink won't hurry a hunt along the way it speeds up gathering. When you come back after being away, every fight that would have happened is fought out for you, and your tally is waiting.

Where you hunt decides what you fight. Taro Bay has four hunting grounds that climb from the open harbour to a locked pirate cove, each with its own quarry and its own boss — they're laid out under The four hunting grounds below. The everyday hunts there are grind hunts, one quick fight repeated for as long as you like; the four bosses work differently, and get their own section. Wherever you go, a single fight follows the same rules.

Three styles, two kinds of damage

The weapon in your weapon slot decides everything about how you fight — which style skill earns the XP, and whether you deal physical or spiritual damage:

• Blades (刃) — close-up steel. Physical damage.
• Archery (弓) — arrows from range. Physical damage.
• Onmyōdō (陰陽) — talisman brushwork that strikes at the spirit. Spiritual damage.

Swing a blade and your Blades level goes up; loose arrows and it's Archery; paint a talisman and it's Onmyōdō. You never split the XP — whatever weapon is equipped is the style that trains.

Know your quarry

Choosing the right style is the whole game, because every enemy shrugs off a flat amount of damage from each hit, and how much depends on the damage type. Steel and spirit are not interchangeable:

• The Wild Boar is a creature of flesh — it barely softens a blow (it shrugs off just 1 physical). Any of the three styles can bring it down at level 1.
• The Restless Spirit has almost no body to cut: it shrugs off a huge 8 physical per hit but 0 spiritual. A steel harpoon barely scratches it — each hit is whittled down to a single point — while a talisman brush lands in full and banishes it with ease. Bring the brush, not the blade.

Two more tricks a quarry can pull, and each answers only one style:

• Parry works only against blades. A parried melee blow lands at half its raw force (it's never negated outright). The Wild Boar parries about 15% of the time.
• Evasion works only against arrows. A dodged shot misses completely and deals nothing. The Restless Spirit slips about a quarter of arrows; the Wild Boar about one in ten.

Onmyōdō ignores both — no parry, no dodge — so a talisman's only obstacle is the enemy's spiritual guard.

Your combat stats

Four numbers decide how a fight goes, and every one grows as you level:

• Health comes from Vitality (命): you have 50 + 10 × Vitality level HP — so a level-1 hunter starts with 60.
• Attack is your weapon's base damage, sharpened by your style level: round(weapon attack × (1 + 0.03 × (style level − 1))) — that's the weapon's base plus 3% for every style level past the first. The three starter weapons hit for 6 (harpoon), 5 (brush) and 4 (bow) at level 1. The bow strikes more often than the harpoon swings, but each arrow bites for less — a fair trade.
• Mitigation comes from Defense (守): you shrug off half your Defense level (rounded down) from each hit, plus any armour you wear. Defense is tracked separately for physical and spiritual blows.
• A hit never deals nothing. Whatever the sums, every landed strike — yours or theirs — does at least 1 damage.

Spirit, your reserve of focus

Spirit (霊) is the fuel your combat abilities burn. Your pool is 10 + 2 × Spirit level points, and it starts full at the beginning of every fight. It does not refill mid-battle — once a point is spent, it's gone until the next foe steps up. That makes a fresh pool precious: your opening rounds are the ones you can spend most freely. And every point you burn trains Spirit itself, even in a fight you go on to lose.

Abilities and your loadout

An ability is a learned technique that fires on its own in the thick of a fight. You never tap a button mid-battle — a hunt runs offline, blow by blow, without you. Instead you decide ahead of time which techniques your diver carries, by filling a loadout of three slots on your character. Whatever is slotted fires automatically the moment it's called for, as long as you have the spirit to pay for it. You choose the build; the fight chooses the timing.

Slot order is priority. On each of your own attacks, at most one ability fires. Your slots are checked from the top down, and the first technique that can fire — enough spirit banked, off its cooldown, and its moment right — is the one that goes; the others wait for a later opening. So the order you arrange your three slots is itself a decision: put the technique you most want to land in the first slot.

Every ability costs spirit, and no spirit means no technique — one that you can't currently afford simply sits idle until your pool recovers enough to cover it. Since the pool never refills mid-fight, a loadout of three thirsty techniques burns out early, while a leaner one paces itself across a long bout.

The four families

Abilities come in four families, sorted by what they do:

• Damage — amplify your next strike. (Kiai Focus multiplies a blow's force.)
• Debuff — weaken the enemy, blunting the force of their swings for a stretch of the fight.
• Buff — strengthen yourself, lifting your own attack for a stretch of the fight.
• Heal — mend your wounds. A heal holds in reserve and only fires once you drop below a set share of your health.

Buff and debuff effects last a while and then fade. Different techniques stack — a self-buff and an enemy-debuff can run at the same time — but there are ceilings so nothing runs away with a fight: an amplifier tops out at tripling a blow, a self-buff at doubling your attack, and an enemy-debuff can't drag a foe's swing below a quarter of its normal force.

Unlocking, mixing styles, and ranks

Each ability belongs to a style — Blades, Archery or Onmyōdō — and becomes available once that style reaches the ability's unlock level. Once learned, though, a technique is not chained to the weapon in your hand: you can mix styles freely across your three slots and carry a talisman ward beside a blade stance if you please.

Here's the wrinkle worth understanding. An ability scales with the level of its own style, not the weapon you're wielding. A Blades technique keeps growing with your Blades level even while you fight with a bow — and the bow, all the while, is what earns your Archery XP. (As always, the equipped weapon alone decides which style banks combat XP.) So a rounded hunter can lean on a strong off-style technique and still level whatever weapon they carry.

An ability's effect grows +3% for every style level past the first. On top of that, rank multiplies it: every technique starts at rank 1 and can climb to a maximum of rank 3, worth ×1.25 at rank 2 and ×1.5 at rank 3. You raise a rank by studying a Manual — a consumable book that teaches one specific technique a step further. For now, Manuals are stocked by the village trader; in time you'll be able to craft them yourself.

The six starter techniques

These are the first six abilities. The figures are each technique at its starting strength — style level 1, rank 1 — and grow from there as you level the style and study Manuals.

Technique	Style	Family	Unlocks at	Spirit	What it does
Kiai Focus	Blades	Damage	Blades Lv 1	4	Hits for 1.5× the damage.
Iron Tide Stance	Blades	Buff	Blades Lv 5	5	Raises your attack to 1.2× for a stretch.
Pinning Net	Archery	Debuff	Archery Lv 1	5	Cuts the enemy's attack to 0.75× for a stretch.
Skewer Shot	Archery	Damage	Archery Lv 5	6	A heavy 1.8× shot, then recovers for a few rounds.
Mending Sutra	Onmyōdō	Heal	Onmyōdō Lv 1	6	Mends about 12 HP when you fall below half health.
Binding Ofuda	Onmyōdō	Debuff	Onmyōdō Lv 5	5	Cuts the enemy's attack to 0.75× for a stretch.

Every diver can call on Kiai Focus from the very start — it unlocks at Blades level 1, and everyone begins there. Slot it and it behaves exactly like the lone technique of old: 4 spirit for half again the damage. From there, level a style to unlock its second technique, arrange your three slots to taste, and study Manuals to sharpen the ones you lean on hardest.

How the combat skills train

Style XP is only half the story. Every fight also feeds the three passive stats, and they don't all wait for a win:

Skill	How it earns XP
Blades / Archery / Onmyōdō	The fight's style XP (from 10 for a dock rat to 550 for a boss) — wins only, and only while armed.
Vitality	A quarter of the style XP you win each fight.
Defense	Half a point for every point of damage an enemy swings at you — counted before your mitigation soaks it, so even the blows your armour eats still train Defense. It banks even in fights you lose.
Spirit	One point for every point of spirit your abilities spend — also even in defeat.

That last part matters: a losing fight is never wasted. You earn no style XP and no loot from it, but the punishment you took still makes you tougher, and the focus you spent still sharpens your spirit.

The four hunting grounds

Hunting doesn't happen in one place. Taro Bay's four hunting grounds form a ladder — the further along you go, the tougher the quarry and the richer the spoils. Each ground beyond the first is a combat level gate, and your combat level is simply the highest of your three style levels (Blades, Archery or Onmyōdō). Training any one style opens the way — you never need a second style to get in.

#	Ground	Opens at	Everyday quarry	Boss
1	Harbor Quay 港	open to all	Dock Rats 🐀, Restless Spirits 👻	Nezumi Ōyabun 🐀
2	Coastal Forest 森	Combat level 8	Wild Boar 🐗, Angry Macaques 🐒	Ō-Inoshishi, the Old Boar 🐗
3	River Mouth 川	Combat level 16	Kappa 🐸, River Wisps ✨	Nure-Onna 🐍
4	Pirate Cove 賊	Combat level 28 + a boat	Pirate Deckhands 🏴‍☠️, Harpooners 🔱	Captain Kurogumo 🏴‍☠️

A locked ground still shows on the Hunt page, greyed out, spelling out exactly what it wants. The last one, Pirate Cove, is a hidden inlet you row to: on top of combat level 28 it asks for a boat in your boat slot — any Boat I or better, the same vessels you use for fishing.

Some grounds reward one style over another, just as the Restless Spirit does at the quay:

• At the River Mouth, River Wisps ✨ are pure spirit-stuff — steel and arrows glance off them almost entirely, while a talisman lands clean. Bring the brush. Their neighbours the Kappa 🐸 are stubborn all-rounders that shrug off a little of everything and parry hard, so expect a slower grind whatever you carry.
• At the Coastal Forest and Pirate Cove, the foes are honest flesh and blood — any physical style brings them down, and since none of them guard against the spirit, Onmyōdō bites just as cleanly. The nimble Macaques dodge and parry, so a talisman (which they can do nothing about) makes for a smoother hunt.

Bosses and expeditions

Every ground has a boss — a named foe far tougher than its everyday quarry, and a different kind of hunt. Where a grind hunt is one quick fight repeated, a boss expedition is a single, long approach that ends in one decisive clash. You commit to it once — there's no lining a boss up for a hundred rematches. It takes real time, from 8 minutes at the quay up to 15 in the cove, and before you set out the Hunt page shows your estimated chance of success. Trust that number: a boss is a real test, and walking in under-levelled is how you get hurt.

Bosses don't fight at one pace. As you wear one down past certain wounds it changes tactics — hitting harder, striking faster, or shifting its guard. The Old Boar of the Coastal Forest turns berserk once it's badly hurt; Captain Kurogumo tightens his parry the moment you press him, then throws caution to the wind near the end and swings hardest of all. Plan for the fight to get worse before it's won.

Win and you take a guaranteed haul — a good stack of the ground's materials, sometimes a purse of koban — plus a roughly three-in-ten shot at the boss's own trophy, a one-of-a-kind keepsake found nowhere else. Expeditions also pay far more style XP than any grind, from 150 at the quay to 550 in the cove: your reward for a risky, committed fight.

Lose and the expedition ends with nothing to show but the toughening every loss brings — and, because a boss hits so much harder than common quarry, a longer spell of recovery (below). You never lose an item or a scrap of gear for trying, win or lose.

Defeat, recovery and injury

Lose a fight and three things happen — and one thing pointedly does not:

1. The hunt ends and your queue stops. Nothing else starts automatically; your line-up simply sits and waits for you.
2. You need time to recover. A lost grind fight costs about 90 seconds — the Hunt page shows a countdown, and you can't start a new hunt until it clears. A lost boss expedition leaves you injured for a full 10 minutes: the price of picking a fight above your weight.
3. You keep everything you own. There is no item loss, no dropped gear, no penalty beyond the lost time. Every hide and essence you won earlier in the run is safely yours.

Catch your breath, level up a little or switch to a kinder quarry, and try again.

Kampō Salve — skip the wait

A dab of Kampō Salve 🧴 clears any recovery or injury on the spot — whether it's a 90-second breather or a full 10-minute wound — and puts you straight back on the hunt. Whenever you're held up and have a salve in your satchel, the Hunt page offers a one-tap Apply button.

Two ways to keep some on hand:

• Brew it. With Brewing level 12 you set a salve from two yomogi and one dokudami — both Kampō herbs the woodcutter turns up (see Skills & XP).
• Buy it. The village trader stocks the salve for 60 mon, so even a pure fighter who never touches the brewing bench can carry a few.

What hunting drops

Hunting fills your satchel with combat materials, never finished gear — Taro Bay hands you no ready-made weapon or armour for a kill. What you win is the raw stuff a crafter will one day work:

• Hides, pelts, shells and cloth, climbing in worth as you go: Rat Hide 🩹 at the quay, Boar Hide 🟤 and Forest Pelt 🟫 in the woods, Kappa Shell 🐢 at the river and Pirate Cloth 🏴‍☠️ in the cove.
• Yōkai essence 💠 — what banished spirits and wisps leave behind.
• Koban coins 🪙 — the pirates (and, fittingly, the rat boss) carry old gold pieces. They aren't spendable as they are; sell them to the trader to turn them into mon.
• Boss trophies — an Ōyabun's Whisker 🥇, an Inoshishi Tusk 🦷, a Nure-Onna Scale 🐚, Kurogumo's Hat 🎩. These are pure collectibles — no stats, no slot, never gear. Keep them as bragging rights, or sell them to the trader for a tidy sum.

Every drop is tradeable, so a material you don't need is coin waiting on the market. Some hunts also turn up the odd Kampō herb — a handy shortcut to the salve above.

Your first hunt

1. Buy a weapon. The village trader stocks all three starter arms for 40 mon each: the Training Harpoon (Blades), the Practice Bow (Archery) and the Novice Brush (Onmyōdō).
2. Equip it. It goes in the weapon slot — see Equipment & Slots. You can't start a hunt bare-handed.
3. Head to the Hunt page, pick a quarry, and read the estimated chance of success it shows for your current character. Trust that number — if it looks grim, level up or bring a better-matched style first.
4. Set an amount and go. Grind hunts use the same 1 / 10 / 100 / 1k / ∞ presets as any other action, so you can send your diver off for a single kill or an endless grind. A boss is the exception — you face it one expedition at a time.

For where combat sits among the other eighteen skills, see Skills & XP. Start at the quay, climb the ground ladder as your combat level rises, and when you're ready, corner a boss — the trophies won't collect themselves. And these six techniques are only the first: more abilities to master will wash ashore in time.