Ant Hill

Ant hills are found on forest terrain, and can be raided by right clicking the mound and selecting Raid. Ant hills are a common source for low FEP edible insects; Ant Soldiers and Ant Larvae are commonly found, Aphids and Ant Pupae are uncommonly found, while the Ant Empress and Ant Queen are rarely found. Be aware, it is common for three wandering swarms of Ants to be guarding the Ant Hill and all of them will attack if you raid the hill without fighting them first.

If you are fairly new, there are six good strategies to employ if you need ants to eat from an Ant Hill:

1) If you are a new and fresh Hearthling, by taking Foraging and not Hunting, you can freely raid hills without aggroing the ants themselves. Taking the Hunting skill tells the game that you are ready to go into combat and will cause the ants to notice you (This no longer works after W4 was loaded and started)

2) If you have some combat skills and have raised your combat abilities, simply kill the ants guarding the Ant Hill one by one before raiding it.

3) If you have a rowboat, sail around until you see an Ant Hill right on the water's edge and raid it from the safety of your boat. You will have to initiate the raid, sail back a few tiles while the ants try to attack and then sail closer again to complete the raid; otherwise the game will allow them to attack you despite being in a boat.

4) Finally, you could start raiding, then quickly run far away before the guard swarms can hit you, and then let them start to catch up to you again. Once you have drawn the ants far enough away from the Ant Hill, run back and continue raiding it. Ants are slow, and as long as you ran far enough away, you should be done raiding and gone by the time they get back. If you attempt this method, note that it takes approximately 10 seconds to fully raid an Ant Hill, so give yourself enough distance between the guard swarms and the Ant Hill when running back to finish the raid. 5) A variation of 4; have a friend raid the ant hill and run away, as soon as he gets off screen raid the anthill yourself. After which both of you can escape on foot or by boat. 5) If you run away far enough after having attacked the ant hill, the soldier ant swarms will stop following you : they will remain between you and the ant hill, without attacking you. They will resume attacking you only when you attack the hill again but you will have time to loot the hill before the soldiers catch back up to you. You will need to run away from them again until they lose aggro, but it will be quicker this time around. This makes anthill raiding quite easy and riskless, unless you're very low HP and get hit a few times on your first attack to the hill while the soldiers are around it.

6) You can also raid the hill, then run into some shallow water. When the ants get to the edge of the water, they'll mill about for a few seconds then go back to acting like they aren't in combat, without actually leaving combat. You are then free to raid the hill without the ants attacking again, because they never technically stopped attacking to begin with.

Note: Quality of edible ants recovered in a raid are directly related to soil quality.