Trapping

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"You can use your energy chasing Rabbits and trying to stun them with stones, or you can use a more long-term strategy, Snares. Look for areas of high Rabbit activity, and place a Snare nearby. Check on it daily. You may get lucky and catch a Rabbit. You can set up multiple snares to increase your chances. A well maintained Trapline can be an excellent long-term source of food. Just remember, it may attract other wildlife!"

— In-game description

Trapping is a rather safe and efficient method of taking wildlife. Traps hold their quarry in place so you don't have to track, and animals are dead of exposure before you return eliminating any chance of their injuring the character. What is required is good trap placement, some time, and the attention to find and clear your traps before their contents are eaten by scavengers.

The snare

Small snares are effective against rabbits. Their slip-knotted loops close swiftly when pulled and refuse to release, only becoming tighter while struggled against. Rabbits are always killed when caught in a snare.

Placement

Snares are set individually by "placing" them from either the radial menu or inventory. Selecting a trap from the radial menu allows the player to immediately see the outline of a placeable snare, centered on the screen. Alternatively, a "place" button uniquely appears under the snare description in the inventory screen. Similarly, selecting "Place" from the inventory screen immediately returns the view to the main screen with the outlined view of a placeable snare. The outline will be red when placement is not possible, green when it is. Move as desired to a good spot. Left click to release. Right click to cancel. Left click on a placed snare to pick it up again as you would any loose item in the game. Alternatively, snares in the world can be repositioned and replaced by right clicking on them. This can be a quick method of resetting triggered snares. Placed snares are always "set", or ready to catch.

Setting runs

Location of traps is critical; they must be set where the animals commonly are or they will catch nothing. Spotting a specimen is the best sign that animals are common to an area. But individuals wander, so take no guarantee that because you see a rabbit walking there today, you will catch one there tomorrow. Rather, observe multiple times. Estimate the center of animal activity. Set your traps there. Setting multiple traps along a line or even in a grid can greatly assist learning where exactly the rabbiting area is. Traps set outside a rabbiting area will never catch anything. Location is also important because you will have to come back later to remove the catch, so finding traps again is necessary, possibly in bad weather. Conspicuous location may be best.

The catch

You will never see a trap activated. Chasing rabbits into snares has no effect, and there is no relevant bait. What catches rabbits is time and absence. Approximately 12 hours after a trap is set, it becomes "active". Active traps have a chance to catch a rabbit each day. The next time a map is loaded from memory, all active traps test to see if they caught something. Trapped animals immediately begin freezing. Their carcasses appear identical to animals killed by other means. Snares that have made a catch will need to be reset. It is also possible that some empty snares will need to be reset or may have been damaged and must be rebuilt.

Broken snares

Occasionally snares will be found "broken", their condition reduced to 0%. It is believed this represents multiple possibilities. The animal may have struggled loose, perhaps a predator stole the prize for its own, or the snare became damaged in severe weather. Broken snares cannot be re-set or repaired, however, they can be harvested to get 1 Reclaimed Wood which can again be crafted into a snare by combining with Cured Gut at a Work Bench.

• In a current glitch, broken snares can continue to be set and used successfully by placing them with the right click placement function while they are on the ground.

Diminishing returns

At first, a rabbiting area should produce about 2 rabbits per day. It seems that constantly trapping the same rabbiting area may weaken it to produce only 1 or even none per day. Restoration seems swift if trapping is suspended for a couple days. Remember, Trapping is very effective and will more than likely get you some food in a survival situation if placed properly.