Hunt Showdown is a competitive first-person PvP and PvE bounty hunting game that originally released at the start of 2018. It has a passionate player base and a unique identity that very few other shooters even attempt to match. Even if it has not become a massive mainstream title, it remains one of the most distinct competitive shooters out there, and the gunplay is a huge part of why.
Hunt Showdown is not a battle royale, and it really isn't your typical Call of Duty style shooter either. The closest comparison would be something like Escape from Tarkov, where patience and positioning matter more than reflexes. The run and gun mentality does not work here. You can and will get punished for sprinting around a corner without a plan.
Because of this slower, more deliberate FPS style, the game has a steeper learning curve than most shooters. You need real strategy, real practice, and real awareness of how aiming works inside Hunt specifically. The aiming system itself functions differently from what you are probably used to, and the crosshair sits in a place that takes most people by surprise the first time they boot up a match.
That brings us to the question that probably brought you here.
Can You Center the Crosshair in Hunt Showdown?
In short, no. You can not center the crosshair in Hunt Showdown.
The crosshair sits a noticeable amount below where you would expect it to be. There is no menu setting that fixes this, no console command, and no officially supported way to move it. The developers have confirmed multiple times over the years that they have no plans to add a centering option, and the position is locked into how the game was designed from the ground up.
If this is a deal breaker for you, it is better to know now than after you have sunk hours into trying to figure out a workaround that does not exist. The good news is that most people adapt to it within a few weeks of consistent play. After a while, you stop noticing it entirely.
Why Is the Crosshair Not Centered in Hunt Showdown?
The developers purposely lowered the crosshair to allow players to take in more of the environment. They did not want the crosshair to obscure any important visual information at the center of the screen, especially considering how much of Hunt's tension comes from spotting tiny details in the environment like footprints, hanging clues, and movement at long distances.
The reasoning the team has given over the years usually comes back to the same idea. The lowered crosshair leaves the upper part of your view unobstructed for tracking enemies and reading the environment. It also loosely mimics how a real firearm would sit in your peripheral vision rather than blocking your line of sight, which fits with the slower, more atmospheric tone the game is going for.
They also wanted to create something that felt different from every other shooter on the market. Hunt's whole identity is built around being a separate kind of experience, and the crosshair placement is part of that identity whether players love it or not.
How to Improve Your Aim in Hunt Showdown
Improving your aim is not always as simple as dialing in some settings, but settings matter more in Hunt than in most other shooters because of how unusual the systems are. The off-center crosshair, the slower combat pacing, and the sensitivity options all stack on top of each other to create something that feels foreign at first.
The next several sections walk through each piece in order, starting with the most foundational decision and working down to the smaller details.
Hunter vs Gunslinger Control Schemes
Before touching any sensitivity sliders, decide which control scheme you actually want to play with. This is the foundational choice that affects everything else.
Hunter is the older, more traditional control scheme for Hunt. Your weapon is lowered by default, and you press right click to bring the gun up into a hipfire ready position. From there, you can press shift or your designated key to enter aim down sights. Melee comes from your default attack input when the gun is down, which gives you faster access to a melee swing without needing to lower your weapon first.
Gunslinger is the more modern, action-oriented scheme. Your weapon is up and ready to fire by default, melee has its own dedicated button, and aim down sights takes a single input. You can still lower your weapon by holding the holster key (Q by default), so the gap between the two schemes has shrunk over time. Gunslinger used to be objectively worse for stealth because your gun would clip through walls and doorways, but the developers have addressed most of those issues.
In the end, the two schemes are now mostly preference. Pick the one that matches the kind of player you want to be and stick with it long enough to actually internalize the inputs. Constantly switching between them is one of the worst things you can do for your muscle memory.
Choosing the Right Field of View Settings
As a competitive player, taking advantage of a higher field of view is almost always the right call. Things look slightly further away at higher FOV values, but the tradeoff is that you can see significantly more of your environment, which matters a lot in a game where information is the most valuable resource you have.
Hunt splits its FOV into multiple separate settings rather than giving you one master slider, and that catches a lot of new players off guard. Each setting controls a different aiming state, so a change in one place will not automatically apply everywhere else.
Lowered State FOV vs Shoulder Aim FOV
The lowered state FOV affects what you see when your weapon is down or when you are simply moving around without aiming. The shoulder aim FOV controls what you see when your weapon is raised but not in ADS. These two settings together cover most of the time you actually spend in a match, so getting them right has a huge impact on how the game feels.
Get into a match and test how each setting feels. The defaults are not bad, but most players benefit from pushing both values higher. Just keep in mind that whatever you set will affect how scoped and unscoped views feel, so make small adjustments and play a few matches between changes rather than overhauling everything at once.
A common mistake is to crank both FOV values to the maximum and assume that more is always better. At very high values, distant targets can become hard to spot because they take up fewer pixels on your screen. Find a value that gives you enough peripheral information without making long range encounters harder than they need to be.
Why Sensitivity Matters More in Hunt Showdown
Hunt gives you more sensitivity options than most shooters, which is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that you can fine tune almost every aiming state independently. The curse is that it is easy to make things worse if you do not understand what each slider actually does.
If you are coming from another shooter, do not just copy your sensitivity over and assume it will feel right. Hunt's aiming system is different enough that even matched centimeters per 360 settings can feel off until you actually play with them. Spend a few matches getting a baseline feel before you commit to any specific number.
Shoulder Aim Sensitivity Explained
Shoulder Aim sensitivity is the setting that controls how your camera moves when your weapon is raised but you are not in ADS. It also affects your hipfire feel and overlaps with how your normal looking sensitivity behaves in many common situations.
This is one of the settings people get wrong most often because they treat it like a hipfire only slider. In Hunt, your shoulder aim state is actually one of the most useful aiming positions in the game. It gives you faster reaction time than ADS at close range while still keeping the crosshair available for quick shots. If your shoulder aim sensitivity feels wrong, your entire close range gameplay will suffer.
A good rule of thumb is to keep your shoulder aim sensitivity slightly higher than your ADS sensitivity but not so high that you overshoot targets at medium range. The exact value depends on your DPI and your personal preference, but the relationship between the two settings matters more than the specific numbers.
Why ADS Sensitivity Will Make or Break You
Your Aim Down Sights sensitivity is the setting you should spend the most time with. This will determine whether your shots actually land or whether you keep flicking past targets and getting picked off in return.
It can be tempting to crank ADS sensitivity high because it feels good in the moment, especially when you flick onto a target and snap a kill. The problem is that high sensitivity makes consistent accuracy much harder, and Hunt punishes inconsistent accuracy more than most games. Bullets in Hunt do real damage, but only if they hit. A single missed shot can give away your position, alert nearby teams, and end your run.
A lower ADS sensitivity pays off across the board for most players. You give up some flick speed, but you gain the kind of fine control that lets you place shots on heads at distance, which is where most Hunt fights are actually decided.
Spend time in the training mode or a low risk match testing different ADS values. Drop the sensitivity in small increments rather than big jumps, and play several matches at each setting before deciding whether it works.
Scoped Sensitivity for Snipers and Marksman Builds
If you plan on running marksman or sniper rifles, the scoped sensitivity options deserve attention of their own. Hunt usually splits these out by zoom level, which means a marksman scope and a sniper scope can have completely different sensitivity values.
Most experienced players run their scoped sensitivity slightly lower than their base ADS sensitivity. The reasoning is simple. At higher zoom levels, even tiny mouse movements translate to large camera shifts, so the lower sensitivity helps you actually hold your aim on a target rather than constantly correcting overshoots. If you find yourself zooming in and immediately losing the target, your scoped sensitivity is probably too high.
Adapting to the Off-Center Crosshair
Settings only solve part of the problem. The other part is mental, and it comes down to retraining your eyes to expect the crosshair where it actually is rather than where you wish it was.
The best advice for most new players is to lean on ADS more often than usual during the first couple of weeks. Iron sights and scopes show you exactly where the bullet is going regardless of where the crosshair sits, so they bypass the off-center problem entirely. Use this period to learn the maps, learn the weapons, and let your hipfire instincts catch up over time.
It also helps to pay close attention to your kill replays. Notice where your shots actually landed compared to where you thought you were aiming. That feedback loop is what builds the muscle memory faster than just grinding matches without reflection.
One thing to avoid is jumping between Hunt and other shooters in the same play session while you are still adjusting. The muscle memory will fight itself, and you will feel worse in both games for it. Pick one game per session until the off-center crosshair feels natural, and then go back to your normal rotation.
Most players adjust within ten to twenty hours of focused play. After that, the off-center crosshair stops being a conscious thought and just becomes part of how you see the game.
Common Aim Mistakes to Avoid in Hunt Showdown
Even with perfect settings, certain habits will hold you back. The most common one is sprinting into corners and trying to shoot reactively, which Hunt punishes harder than almost any other shooter. The combat is built around the player who is already aiming when the encounter starts, not the one who reacts after seeing the enemy.
Another common mistake is spamming shots when accuracy would do more damage with fewer bullets and less noise. Hunt's audio system means every shot you fire announces your position to everyone within a long radius, so missed shots do not just waste bullets. They actively put you in danger.
Ignoring sound cues while hyper focusing on the crosshair is also a frequent issue. Audio information often matters more than visual aim in Hunt, and players who tunnel vision on the crosshair miss the footstep that would have told them exactly where the threat was.
Hipfiring at distances where ADS would clearly land the shot is another bad habit, especially among players coming from faster shooters. Hunt rewards taking the half second to actually aim. Skipping that step might feel cool when it works, but it loses you fights more often than not.
Why Most Aim Problems Are Actually Positioning Problems
Aim is not just about your hands. Most aim problems in Hunt are actually positioning problems wearing an aim costume. Fix the positioning and the aim problem usually fades on its own.
If you are constantly losing fights at close range, it is not necessarily because your aim is bad. It might be because you are entering rooms in predictable ways and the people you're playing against have already pre-aimed your entry point. If you are losing fights at long range, your aim might be fine, but you might be exposing yourself in open areas where smart players already have angles set up on you.
Watch your deaths with this lens. Ask whether the lost fight was actually about aim or whether it was about being in the wrong place when the shooting started. Once you start separating the two, your aim improvement will accelerate because you are no longer trying to fix a positioning issue with sensitivity sliders.
Practice Habits That Make a Real Difference
Improving in Hunt is a slower process than improving in faster shooters, but consistent practice habits speed it up significantly. Try working these into your play sessions:
- Spend ten minutes in the training mode before each play session to warm up with iron sights and scoped weapons
- Focus on one weapon archetype at a time rather than rotating through every gun in the game
- Review your deaths instead of brushing them off, since most deaths in Hunt teach you something specific
- Play with audio you can actually trust, since sound design in Hunt is doing half the aim work for you
- Take breaks between intense matches, because tilt is a real and measurable performance killer
This is the only numbered list in this article, so use it as a checklist if it helps.
Final Thoughts on Aim and Crosshair in Hunt Showdown
Hunt Showdown is not a game you master in a weekend. The off-center crosshair, the deliberate combat pacing, and the deep sensitivity options all combine to create something that takes time to internalize. The good news is that the time investment pays off in a way that few other shooters can match. Once Hunt clicks for you, the gunplay starts to feel rewarding in a way that run and gun games never quite reach.
The crosshair will never be centered, and that is a permanent feature of the game's identity rather than a bug waiting to be fixed. The best thing you can do is stop fighting it, get your settings dialed in, pick a control scheme and commit to it, and put in the practice hours that the game asks of you. Everything else falls into place from there.
