Blood Testament Chapter 3 went live in Hunt: Showdown 1896 on 3 November. The headline is a four-barrel pistol called the Lancaster, but the change I'd actually care about as a player is smaller: if someone kills you and later gets banned for cheating, Crytek now pays you 1,000 Hunt Dollars. Steam had 25,001 people in the game on Wednesday afternoon, against about 14,600 last Saturday morning.
Lancaster: four barrels, medium ammo
The Lancaster is a break-action pistol with four barrels and a rotating firing pin, so it fires faster than you'd expect from something that looks like a hunting relic. It takes medium ammo: 4 rounds loaded with 12 in reserve for basic and poison, 12 and 8 for high velocity. You can carry two.
There's a catch in the reload. Opening the action always throws out every round, spent or not, so topping up after two shots wastes the other two. The Lancaster Cleaver variant adds a blade under the barrels and swings like a Heavy Knife.
Neither is in the game yet. Both are rewards from the next community event.
Reap the Harvest and the Bileweaver compounds
Reap the Harvest starts "later in Chapter 3", Crytek hasn't given a date. It works like All Hallows' Cleave: everyone earns points in matches, and each stage unlocks a reward for the whole player base.
- Stage 1: 5,000 Hunt Dollars and 1,000 event points.
- Stage 2: the Lancaster.
- Stage 3: 10,000 Hunt Dollars and 2,500 event points.
- Stage 4: the Lancaster Cleaver.
- Stage 5: a random legendary skin.
Last time the community cleared all five stages of the Halloween event in two weeks, so I wouldn't expect a long wait for the pistol once this one opens. Event points still count toward the free Burgess shotguns, see our Burgess unlock guide. On the maps, all 40 Bileweaver compounds are now in one pool, the 20 from earlier events and the 20 added in September, with five picked at random each match.
Refunds for cheater deaths and a high-ping queue
Fair Play Follow Up does two things after a ban. If you reported the player, you get a notification. If they killed you within a certain window, you get 1,000 Hunt Dollars, which Crytek says is an average loadout plus hunter, rounded up. Everyone in that window gets paid, whether or not the cheat was switched on at the time. In the studio's example, 279 bans led to 1,074 notifications and 8,147 payouts.
The second test only runs on European servers for this chapter. Players above roughly 125 ms ping (the number may change) are matched with each other first, and if nothing turns up, they get the option to join a normal match. Teams are judged by their worst ping.
Twitch Drops run until 9 November: the Hide and Seek choke bomb skin is the reward from 4 to 6 November and a random legendary hunter from 6 to 9 November, full schedule in our Twitch Drops guide. Sources: Crytek's Chapter 3 patch notes on Steam (3 November), the Fair Play Task Force post on huntshowdown.com (3 November), player count from the Steam API.
