Introduction to MouseHunt

MouseHunt is a free game on the social networking site Facebook (also known as an application or app), where you take on the role of a MouseHunter, hired by the King to rid the land of a plague of fantasy mice.

The game is quite easy to pick up, but has a lot of strategy at later stages, which make it involving and challenging to play.

MouseHunt is an open-ended game, there’s no way to win or complete the game, nor is there a way for you to lose the game or get stuck and have to restart. MouseHunt is one of those “what you make of it” games, where you can find enjoyment from a style of play that suits you and you’ll set your own goals as you progress through it.

MouseHunt is also a passive game, you can leave it while doing other things, or you can actively manage it, but you can never be “attacked” in-game by other players, so you can just focus on enjoying the game.

We at MouseHunt Analytics are a group of fans that hope to provide you with some insight into how the game works, and provide you with some goals that you may like to achieve as well as guidance on how you might like to achieve those goals.

 

What you need to play

Firstly, you’ll need access to a computer with internet access, which we assume you have given that you’ve been able to visit us here.

Second, you’ll need to sign up for an account on Facebook, you can find Facebook here: www.facebook.com
Signing up is easy, and there’s plenty of other things to do on Facebook than just MouseHunt!

Thirdly, you’ll need to add the MouseHunt application, which can be found here: apps.facebook.com/mousehunt/

If you have all three of those, you’re ready to get started.

 

Getting Started

When you start playing MouseHunt you will be taken through a tutorial that explains some of the basics of the game. The tutorial doesn’t take more than about 5 minutes to go through, and you only have to make one decision during it, which trap to use (more on traps later), personally I recommend taking the Tacky Glue Trap, but if you’ve chosen the High Tension Spring, don’t worry, you haven’t ruined your game.

If you haven’t gone through the tutorial yet, do so now, then come back here and continue reading, things will make a lot more sense that way.

 

Basics of the Game

The Aim of MouseHunt is to catch mice which award you points and gold.

Points are a measure of how much experience you have at hunting the mice.
You need to get certain amounts of points before you are allowed to buy some items in the game.
Earning points also helps increase your rank within the game, which allows you access to different locations to hunt in.

Gold allows you to buy items in the game such as:
Cheese to use as bait for the mice.
New trap components.
Crafting items.
Gold is also used to pay for traveling costs to new locations.
Don’t worry if you run out of Gold, you receive a small sum every hour and travel to the starting location is free.

Cheese

Cheese is essential for catching mice in MouseHunt. Without it you will not be able to hunt, so always make sure you have a good supply or enough gold to buy more if you do run out. You will never have too much cheese as you can always return extra to the cheese shoppe for a refund.

Cheese is what attracts mice to your trap, without cheese no mouse will come near your trap, and you won’t be able to catch them. To start off with you have only one type of cheese, Cheddar cheese. Cheddar is the weakest, but also cheapest cheese you can buy. Later on, you’ll want to buy or make different types of cheese.

Above the Novice level you may occasionally see the message “I returned to check my trap, but it appeared my [variety] cheese had failed to attract a mouse. I replaced my bait since it seemed to be stale.” Cheese doesn’t go stale based upon how long it’s been on your trap, but is instead determined by the “cheese effect” of the trap itself. At first, getting stale cheese is a bad thing because it means you’ve lost that piece of cheese, but much later in the game stale cheese has a use. You may even find yourself wishing you had more or, as weird as it sounds, intentionally making good cheese go stale (known as “farming” stale cheese.) You can find more about cheese in the game here.

Traps

When combined, the Weapon and Base are referred to as your Trap, so to start off with, your trap will either be the “High Tension Spring with Wooden Base” or the “Tacky Glue Trap with Wooden Base”, sometimes the name of the Weapon has the word “Trap” in it, don’t let this put you off, you do need both a Weapon and a Base.

Once a mouse has been attracted to your trap, your trap may catch the mouse for you, there’s always a chance you’ll miss the mouse, and to start off with, you’ll probably miss quite a lot of mice, but don’t worry, soon you’ll be catching enough to earn money to buy a better trap.

Both your weapon and base have some various statistics that help you decide which ones to use, these combine to form your trap statistics.
As you change your weapon or base, your trap statistics will change, you can find more about how these statistics work and the various traps available in the game here.

OK, so now we know a bit more about what we need, but how do we actually put them to use and catch some mice? Well for that we need to be…

Hunting

Hunting refers to the action of attempting to catch a mouse, but it is also often referred to as a trap check, or a horn call.

Once an hour, you will get an automatic hunt, all you need to do for this is have some cheese armed and have logged into MouseHunt in the last 24 hours.

Every 15 minutes, you will see the appearance of the Hunter’s Horn, this allows you to go on an additional hunt (making the maximum number of hunts 5 in a one hour period). You can either sound the Hunter’s Horn yourself (by clicking the image), or a friend can sound it for you (if they are hunting in the same location as you and sound their horn before you sound yours).

Every time you go on a Hunt (no matter which way it’s generated), MouseHunt will work out what happens, and post the results to your Hunter’s Journal.

Well that’s the basics of what you need to do, buy cheese to hunt with, and hunt until you have enough gold and points to afford a better weapon or base, so now lets take a look at some of the more advanced aspects of the game.

 

Advanced Aspects of the Game

The basics of the game remain the same throughout the game, whichever stage you’re at, you’ll need to use cheese and the best trap for your goal to hunt with, but in order to see all the game has to offer you’ll need to carry out some more advanced actions.

You won’t be able to do all these instantly, so bookmark this page and come back when you’re ready to carry out each of the following.

Purchasing Trap Components

As you earn gold and points from hunting you’ll be able to purchase better Weapons and Bases for your Trap, new components allow you to catch more and different mice, so let’s take a quick look at the first of these components we want to purchase.

On the in-game menu bar is the Shops button, move your mouse over this and you’ll see a list appear, the first of these will say Trapsmith, click on that now to be taken to the Trapsmith page.

There are three tabs for you to see here, the Bases, Weapons and Help, take a moment to read the Help page to get a bit more information about traps, then click on the Bases tab.

For your first purchase a good choice would be the Wooden Base with Target, this base is better than the Wooden Base in terms of power and attraction bonus, although its less fresh than the Wooden Base, but hopefully that higher attraction bonus should offset that problem.

We can see that this Base costs 1,225 Gold and you require 650 Points before you can buy it, before you do buy it though, make sure you have at least 20 pieces of cheese (preferably Marble) in your inventory and 25 gold left over.

Now it’s time to arm your new trap component, move your cursor over the Inventory button and a drop down list will appear, select “Traps” and you’ll be taken to a page that shows all your Weapons and Bases.

From the short list you should be able to see that your weapon and base that are armed, and the new Wooden Base with Target is sitting there with an “Arm It Now” button on the right.

Press that button now and your new component will be armed.

You’ll need to purchase and craft numerous traps as you progress through the game, but for now, lets try this new component out in a different location.

Travel

So far you’ve been hunting in the Town of Gnawnia, it’s a nice enough place to hunt, but it does have some powerful mice which have no doubt been stealing your cheese without setting off your trap.

To find out more about where you’ve been hunting, why not visit our article on the Town of Gnawnia

Another place you can visit now is the Meadow, it’s overrun with weak mice, and while they might not bring in the huge rewards that some of the mice in the Town of Gnawnia can, they’re much easier for you to catch, and will actually earn you more in the long run.

To get there we need to press the Travel button on the MouseHunt menu bar and we’ll be taken to the Travel page.

Right now we can see only one region, but there are four locations listed, the first is the Town of Gnawnia where we’re currently hunting, two of the others, the Harbour and the Mountain can only be traveled to once your hunter’s Title increases, so lets just select the Meadow for the time being.

You’ll see some details about the location, telling you what title you need to be to hunt there, some information on the location, how many friends you have in that location, how many other hunters there are in the location and how much it costs to travel there.

Don’t worry about how many other hunters there are in a location, a location never “runs out” of mice, so you can’t have too many hunters in one place at any time.

We can see from the travel cost that it’s only 25 gold to go here, hopefully you’ve got that much saved up and you can travel now, so press the Hunt Here button.

You’ll be taken back to the main page, where you’ll see your location has changed and you should have a message in your journal that you’ve traveled to the Meadow.

Now you can continue to hunt in this new location, you should find yourself catching a lot more of the mice here, and steadily earning gold and points.

One other useful thing on the Travel page is the “Full Map” button, click on that and you’ll be taken to a new page where you can see the whole game world that you’ve explored so far, later on you’ll collect more map pieces and be able to see a more complete map.

Eventually you’ll run out of cheese in the Meadow, and you’ll discover there’s no Cheese Shoppe in the Meadow, it’s OK, you can travel back to the Town of Gnawnia to buy more cheese, then travel straight back out to the Meadow again, just remember not to spend all your gold, or you won’t be able to travel.

Ideally we want to stay in the Meadow until your title changes to Apprentice, so while we’re here, lets look around at a few other functions of the game.

Hunter’s Title

You’re hunting in the Meadow with the aim of earning points and gold to be able to afford new trap components, but you also need to increase your hunter’s Title to be able to move on to new areas.

The hunter’s Title isn’t just based upon the points you earn from catching mice, all hunting actions help you increase your title, so every time you sound the horn (or someone sounds it for you) there will be a little increase.

You get a bigger increase if you catch a mouse, and catching several mice in a row helps increase it even further.

You help you see how far you’ve progressed you can see a percentage after your Title, and underneath that is a small progress bar. If you move your cursor over the progress bar it will give you a more accurate percentage, so you can see just how close you are.

The hunter’s Title also has a few other advantages, which will be discussed later.

Mice

MouseHunt is all about hunting mice, and there are plenty of different types to hunt, if you move your cursor over the Mice button on the MouseHunt menu bar you’ll see two options, the first is mice in the region you’re currently hunting in, this will say Gnawnia Mice right now, and the second is All Mice.

Selecting Gnawnia Mice will take you to a page with pictures of all the mice, a description of the mouse, and some other information about the mouse such as the minimum gold reward for catching the mouse, how difficult it is to catch with your current setup, and some statistics on on catches and weight.

Any mice you haven’t caught yet will show a silouhette of the mouse, as soon as you catch your first one, this will change to the full colour picture.

You can even click on these pictures to be taken to a larger image of the mouse.

The All Mice page shows you every mouse in the game, but just the pictures, here you can see how many different mice there are in the game now and what type of mice they are.

Once again any mice you haven’t caught will just show a silouhette.

Friends

If you’ve got friends playing MouseHunt you can see how well they’re doing by using the Friends button in the MouseHunt menu bar.

Friends in MouseHunt are Facebook friends who have also installed the game, unlike some other games, having friends isn’t essential to play or progress to certain stages, but it does help you in the game.

If you move your cursor over the Friends button you’ll see a list of options.

Hunting Group

This gives you a list of all your friends in the game, how recently they’ve been active, where they’re currently hunting, and some other details on how well they’re doing.

There’s a couple of different ways to sort your list of friends, and you can also choose to only see those friends who are currently in the same location as you.

If you click on the profile picture of your friend, you’ll be taken to their MouseHunt Profile, where you can see more details of how they’re doing in the game, and you can also leave messages on their corkboard, more on that soon.

Organize Party

Here you can do lots of things involving Tournaments in the game, but this deserves its own section, so we’ll leave it for now.

Give to Friends

Here you can choose to help out some of your friends by giving them some of your cheese or gold if you’re feeling generous.

Trade SUPER|brie+

Later on in the game you may wish to buy some Super Brie using your MouseHunt gold, or if you have some Super Brie yourself, you may want to sell it to others.

The Trade forums are the place to do this, but you don’t want to buy Super Brie too soon in the game, it’s expensive and there’s much better uses for your gold right now.

Invite Friends

Hopefully you’re enjoying MouseHunt and think some of your friends might too, from here you can send them an invite to let them know about the game.

You don’t get any reward for inviting others, so there’s no benefit to spamming all your friends with requests.

Profile

From the Friends page you can see someone else’s profile, but you can also see your own profile, if you click the MouseHunt shield on the left of your MouseHunt menu bar you’ll be taken to your own profile page and you can see what your friends can see about you.

It lists your current setup and recent catches, and also has loads of other statistics about how well you’re doing in the game.

Breeds Caught tells you how many different breeds of mice you’ve caught in the game, and also tells you how many there are currently available.

Rare Breeds Caught tells you about any special mice you’ve caught during your time hunting, normally these are released during special events run in the game, but some are around all the time, but are just very rare.

You can see if you have received any badges as well, you won’t have any yet, but hopefully you’ll pick one up some day.

There are details on how long you’ve been hunting, what your title is, and the points and gold you have earned.

There’s also information on how many times you’ve sounded the Hunter’s Horn, where you’re hunting, and the average number of people who accompany you on a hunt.

Finally there’s details on your current trap setup and how many mice you’ve caught in total. Just underneath that you’ll see your Hunting Parties name if you have one, or a message telling you if you’re not hunting with a party at the moment.

Corkboard

Underneath all this information you can find your cork board, where you can find any messages your friends have left for you.

You can also post messages yourself here, for any one who visits your profile to see.

Lore

News

The News button will take you to a list of the most recent posts, some by the developers announcing new additions to the game, and others by the Nibbler, the fan created news for the game.

These are always worth a read to find out the latest happenings in the game.

Forums

The Forums are where you can talk to other MouseHunters, find information or ask questions. A lot of people use the forums, and posts can be moved off the front page quite quickly, it’s worth using the See all function and looking back over older posts to see if your question has been raised recently.

Remember to read the title of the forum before posting a new thread to it and make sure you’re posting in the correct place, posting in the wrong forum could mean that people who are interested in the same thing as you or could potentially answer a question may not see your post, and posts in the wrong section may be deleted without warning, so take a minute to get it right first time, and you’ll benefit later.

Donate

MouseHunt is free to play, you don’t need to pay anything to enjoy it. However the people who have spent so much time creating this wonderful game do need to earn a living so they can spend all their time working on improving and expanding it.

You can help support the game and keep it going strong by donating some of your real-world money to the game, in thanks for your generosity and support, you’ll receive some of the special cheese known as Super Brie without having to pay any MouseHunt gold for it.

You’ll also see your MouseHunt logo change from black and white to gold for a while, this is known as the lucky golden shield and adds 7 luck to your trap setup while it’s active.

You can even support the game without having to donate your own money, there’s normally some free offers, where you sign up for something (usually providing your e-mail address) and you receive all the benefits of having donated money. But be warned, sometimes these offers may result in you receiving a lot of useless e-mails.

Extras

We’ve covered most of the things in the game now, but there’s a few extra bits to go over, you won’t see these instantly, and some may take a while for you to get, but they’re worth knowing about in advance.

Loot

In the Meadow you may encounter mice that also drop loot, loot can take many forms, but one of the first you’re likely to see is some free cheese. This can be used in exactly the same way as normal cheese, or it can be sold to the Cheese Shoppe back in the Town of Gnawnia to earn a little extra gold.

Pages

In the Meadow you may catch a Dwarf Mouse which drops loot called “Plankrun’s Journal Pages on Gnawnia”, this isn’t vital to the game, but adds a bit to the background story and allows you to follow the progress of the first ever MouseHunter in Gnawnia.

Mice Stealing Supplies

Once you move out of the Meadow and into the Harbour, the mice get a lot sneakier. If you miss a mouse they may take something from you, this can be points, gold or extra pieces of your baited cheese.

You’ll know when this has happened because the box in your Hunter’s Journal will be red, and inform you of what you’ve lost. This is know by many MouseHunter’s as being “red-boxed”.

Maps

In the Harbour you may catch a Granite Mouse that drops a map piece, this one is called the “Whisker Woods Clearing Map Piece”, check your Travel page and you’ll see that a new Region has appeared, and your full map now shows a new area.

Maps are an essential part to the game, most of them are dropped as loot by mice throughout the game, but a few require special actions to complete.

Crafting

Once you’re in the Harbour you’ll be able to visit the General Store there, and you’ll be able to buy some supplies to begin crafting with.

The two of the first items you can buy are Curds and Whey and Salt, these are a staple of most crafting recipes in the game, but don’t buy too many of them right now, as they are available cheaper elsewhere.

Buy a few of each and go to the crafting page under the Inventory button.

Here you’ll see the crafting menu, which allows you to select items from your inventory to try and craft. To start off with you’ll have two drop down lists, but as you progress through the game you’ll get more.

One of those two is also highlighted in red, it’s always a risk to use this one, as doing so may result in you losing all of the crafting ingredients. The benefit is that if you’re successful you might get a useful item sooner than others, but there’s always that risk of losing everything, and having to either repurchase it or find the loot again.

If you wish to experiment with crafting now, try using 1 Curds and Whey and 1 Salt, you might lose them both, but if you’re successful, you might make your first crafted cheese, called White Cheddar, and ll be asked if you wish to craft some more, allowing you to try and make up to 10 additional pieces each time.

If you have created something before, you can use the Previously Crafted drop down box to automatically fill in the item drop down boxes for you.

Underneath this crafting section is the Hunter’s Hammer, not so much use to you right now, but later in the game you can smash items to create others items, sometimes you can even smash weapons to get items that can make even better weapons, but make sure you don’t need that weapon any more, because you might not be able to recreate it!

Below the Hunter’s Hammer is the list of all the crafting items you have collected in the game, telling you a little about it, and how much you have.

Any item that can’t be sold back to a shop also has a discard button here, should you wish to get rid of it from your inventory. Personally I’d suggest nevery discarding anything, while it may not be useful today, tomorrow might reveal a new secret use for it.

Crafting can be used to make new cheese, new trap components and even new maps.

Potions

When you reach either the Laboratory or the Great Gnarled Tree for the first time, you’ll begin to collect Potions as loot from mice.

If you’re lucky, you may even have picked one up in the Mountain.

These potions have the ability to change one type of cheese into a completely different type of cheese.

In the case of Radioactive Blue Cheese Curd Potions and Gnarled Cheese Curd Potions, these are the only ways to get those types of cheese.

You have two options, using Super Brie generally means you get to convert more cheese per potion, and costs less MouseHunt gold to use the potion, but if you have to purchase Super Brie via the trading boards then you may find the price does not make it cost effective to do so.

The alternative is to use a regular cheese to convert, for both of these potions that cheese is Brie.

Once you choose the cheese you wish to convert, you choose how many potions you wish to use and then select Imbue. You’ll be taken to a confirmation screen which will tell you how much of which cheese will be used, and what it will cost you in total.

If you’re happy, click OK. But one warning, if you’re trying to use potions and you have less than the maximum amount of cheese, the rest of the potion will be wasted.

Once imbued your new cheese is ready to use as normal.

The Cartographer

The Cartographer is a special type of shop, it takes one of your maps and improves it, allowing you to access even more locations.

Ususally these improvements cost a reasonable amount of gold, and take a few days to complete. While the map is being “repaired” you can’t use your original map to travel to those locations, although you could try and collect another one if you wish.

Once the map is repaired, you’ll have access to the original location and the new location as well.

 

Other Resources

That’s it for our introduction, we hope you found it useful, but it’s not all we have to offer. If you’ve looked around the site at all you’ll have seen there’s plenty of other articles, each one going into more depth about an aspect of the game.

For more in depth understanding of how hunting works why not try our Mechanics of MouseHunt page next?

We hope those will give you some detailed knowledge to help you with your hunting, but we’ve also got some other tools for helping you that aren’t found in these pages.

Check out the Useful Links page on the top menu for more about those tools.

Remember, the key to MouseHunt is patience, it’s not a quick game to play through, and more is being released all the time. Most of the goals you want to achieve will take some patience, and there’s no benefit to rushing through the game.

Take your time to enjoy it, and happy hunting!