In this beta, game saves are not backward compatible with the last released patch, v1.1.1g. Multiplayer games are also NOT backward-compatible, so you can only play with those who have this beta.

See bottom of this page for instructions on opting into the beta.


* Elk Hunt: Adjusted elk speed logic so it's easier to catch up to the herd and stay with the herd without excessive sprinting.
* Elk Hunt: Adjusted damage dealt by elk to wolves -- it's now higher when elk have high stamina and gradually drops as those drop. (This was already occurring, but now the min and max effects are much greater. The goal is to reward patience, chasing the herd to tire them out, and to identify the weaker elk -- the latter has been too quick and easy to do.)
* Elk Hunt: Reduced odds of stumbling on most elk (but greatly increased them for bull and spike elks, the odds were extremely low for them.)
* Multiplayer: Reduced rival wolf multiplier during den raids a bit, when there are only two players in the game.
* Multiplayer: Modest reduction in size of rival wolf raiding partly in multiplayer, based on number of players in the game.
* On all maps, moved rival pack homesites so hexes can be claimed, and NPC wolves should usually not be beyond world borders. (Only applies to new games).
* Increased minimum number of dispersal groups on each map.
* Reduced maximum health penalty a bit for elk in April and May.
* Revised some code for toggling den scent glow in different seasons (should not have any visible effect).

* Fix some packs missing homesite on upgrade save to pp
* Persistent packs: Disbanding packs sometimes are not instantly removed when jumping ahead to next year.
* Dispersal wolves move back and forth between hexes to much.
* Summer pup can carry grizzly bear skull, though it's awfully big for them.
* Lost River: Dispersals still getting into ranch area.
* Pups will circle predators at too long of a distance.
* Cougar charge attack has an indefinite duration.
* Idle music plays for a second when doing emotes while moving.
* Some cougar vocalizations are too quiet.


_____________________
1) In the Steam app, go to your Library, then right-click on the WolfQuest: AE name in the left column and choose Properties.
2) Then go to the Betas tab and select the WQ current Beta option in the pulldown. No password is necessary. Steam should then start downloading it. Later you can switch back to the public version in that Betas tab, by selecting NONE in that pulldown.

The upcoming Hellroaring Mountain DLC map is really shaping up -- but as with so many things, the closer you get to completion, the more little things you notice that need further attention.

So it is with this map, which has ten rivers (about three times more than any other map), each of which need some tender loving care. I'd thought they were finished last week, but taking a closer look, I decided that I wasn't satisfied with their appearance, so I spent a few days tweaking the water shader effects. Today's video looks at that process and offers a sneak preview of the new achievement icons by Loach and special Hellroaring dream images that Susan has been working on. We don't do specific release dates but it shouldn't be too much longer!



___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

Today we're looking at a very important part of the upcoming WolfQuest Saga* -- when your pups of the year learn to hunt! There's no evidence that wolves teach their pups to hunt. Instead, the pack goes hunting, the pups join them and learn at the school of hard knocks -- literally. We are modeling the pups' learning curve with XP, experience points. So in September, when your pups are five months old, they've gained about 1500 XP, and are now ready to live the nomadic lifestyle. The pack abandons the rendezvous site and spends the fall and winter following the elk herds. Initially, pups follow the adults on hunts, but hang back, observing the action. Over time, they gain XP from observation, and soon they start coming in closer and closer, and finally daring to bite an elk.



As the pack leader, the player's job is to give the pups enough experience to learn how to hunt while preventing them from getting killed in the process. But this is trickier than we'd initially imagined. The hunt is so hectic, just keeping an eye on your pups is difficult, much less tracking their health and XP. So first, we needed to make it clearer which wolves were your pups of the year, since they're about 90% the size of an adult wolf. To aid the player, we're giving pup nametags special icons (currently simply a bullet point before and after the name) to make them easier to recognize during the chaos of the hunt.

But we also realized that, with your wolf, your mate, a couple subordinates and yearlings all involved in the hunt, it simply gets too crowded around an elk. Often there's no space available for a pup to get in there to bite. We needed to limit the number of wolves actively participating in the hunt. But how? Fortunately, science came to the rescue!

I recalled this research paper** by Dan MacNulty (one of our WolfQuest science advisors since 2007) and Doug Smith, Dave Mech, John Vucetich and Craig Packer, which found that the optimal number of wolves in an elk hunt is only three or four. So that's very helpful -- but I'd forgotten the best part. MacNulty et al. looked at various possible reasons for this number, and ruled out most of them, concluding that some wolves in the pack are free riders. They're here for the food, not the injuries. They'll participate in the hunt, but they'll try to avoid putting themselves in harms way -- as long as they can be there when there's fresh meat to eat.

So that helps us enormously. With that limit in place, there is always some space on the elk for a pup to get in there and bite. But even so, the hunt is still fast and chaotic, and it can be quite hard to know when a pup is biting an elk -- especially since they only bite for a second or so when they're still gaining skill and confidence. So we're experimenting with some feedback, trying to decide on the bare minimum of feedback without too much information overload.

So this is very much a work in progress -- we've got the young hunter mechanics working well and are now playtesting to figure out the actual gameplay -- what the player is thinking and doing. So this will likely evolve before the Saga is ready for release. Stay tuned for more in upcoming devblogs!
________________

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game." Your pups will continue to grow into the fall and beyond, learning to hunt under your supervision, and then becoming yearlings when next year's pups are born. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. The Saga is currently in development but we do not have a release date for it.

** Research paper: Nonlinear effects of group size on the success of wolves hunting elk
Daniel R. MacNulty,a Douglas W. Smith,b L. David Mech,c John A. Vucetich,d and Craig Packera
aDepartment of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St. Paul, MN, 55108, USA, bYellowstone Center for Resources, PO Box 168, Yellowstone National Park, WY, 82190, USA, cU.S. Geological Survey, Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, 8711 37th Street SE, Jamestown, ND, 58401, USA, and dSchool of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, 1400 Townsend Dr., Houghton, MI, 49931, USA


___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

That's right -- we're talking about wolverines today! Of all the animals we've wanted to add to the game, wolverines have been one of our favorites. Wolverines are notoriously fierce and feisty -- with their formidable claws and jaws, they can and do take on larger and more powerful animals. The problem has been that they don't really live in Yellowstone National Park. A survey in 2009 found a few wolverines in only two areas of the park: the southeast and one area of the northern border -- which, as it turns out, is where our upcoming Hellroaring Mountain DLC map is located! So we took this opportunity to add wolverines to the game, only on this new map.

Wolverines will put up a heck of a fight if you challenge them over a carcass. And they've got some new moves you haven't seen before (thanks to animator Zoltán Záhorszki, who created all of the wolverine's animations). Get a sneak peek at our wolverines in today's devblog!

Get a sneak peek at our wolverines in today's devblog!

___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

The upcoming Hellroaring Mountain DLC map is shaping up nicely! Like every game map, it needs a lot of potential den sites. But after making over 90 dens in the other three maps, coming up with some new, interesting dens in HM has been a challenge. Of course we have the standard dirt burrow dens -- the most common type of dens in the real world, along with the tree and rock dens. But how to give some of the Hellroaring dens a fresher look? Inspired by photos of real wolf dens as well as hikes in the wilderness, I came up with several somewhat interesting variations. We're aiming for a spring release of this DLC map.



___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

* Unlockable coats (formerly called NPC coats). Now when you raise a pup with one of these coats, that coat is unlocked in Wolf Customization after you generate the summertime Family Tree snapshot. (Only works in new games, not retroactive. There are some cheat-prevention methods in place so you can't share wolf saves with other players to let them unlock a coat.)

* Among real wolves, males are more likely to disperse to find a mate. Females are more likely to stay in their natal (family) pack. We have added this behavior to the game. So now, when looking for a mate, you'll find more males in the dispersal groups, and more females interested in courtship in rival packs. A red heart icon on the compass indicates courtable wolves (when they howl back) and on the Scent View panel.

* Multiplayer map moving: You can now move to another Yellowstone map in multiplayer games.

* A few pup coats have changed a bit, retroactively (to get better matches in the pup-to-adult coat sequence in the Saga).
* Persistent Pack code was refactored to make it more robust, which should not have any changes except as noted here, but might create new bugs, please report if you see any!
* Yearlings are now called Yearlings until their second birthday -- but they can potentially disperse before that birthday. (Previously they changed to Subordinates at 18 months of age, to allow dispersing, due to a limitation in the code.)
* Reduced rival pack aggressiveness after player intrudes into their territory from 24 hour cooldown to 8 hours. (So you can return much sooner if you're trying to court a pack wolf.)
* Reduced odds of dispersal wolf finding another dispersal as mate (to reduce dispersal churn).
* Increased odds of mortality for older wolves in rival packs. (Should also make packs a bit more likely to disband periodically.)
* Improvements to 9F coat.
* Adjusted odds of certain wolf coats higher or lower.
* Persistent Packs: Added a delay before widowed pack leaders can find a new mate.
* Wolf nametags are now controlled independently from HUD, using N key to toggle on/off
* Multiplayer: If player goes AFK while in den, their wolf automatically exits the den so as not to prevent game progress.
* Multiplayer: Greatly reduced the number of dispersal wolves in non-Story games (since they aren't needed and can get annoying).
* Increased minimum number of dispersal wolves on each map at any given time.
* Added info about dispersal differences to Find a Mate: Tips text.
* Controller: Enabled auto-scroll when using controller to navigate in Known Wolves panel.
* Controller: Improvements to controller navigation of Known Wolves panel.
* Controller: All Tab menu buttons remain visible now, with highlight of the one selected, to help with navigating the tab buttons.
* Controller, switching tabs with shoulder buttons navigates to left/right from selected button.
* Female wolf doesn't look pregnant after going from Establish Territory to Find a Den quest.
* Player-wolf is invisible in scent view when switched to Carmella mode.
* Game stalls when in Reminisce mode and trying to jump ahead to next year (which should not be possible).
* Player-wolf can go beyond the map border when bite-holding prey, which can lead to a long forced-walk back into the map afterwards.
* Multiplayer: Pups repeatedly playbowing the wrong parent when they switch to an absent favorite parent.
* Multiplayer: On Known Wolves panel, dead pack wolves are not synced correctly.
* Longer pack names are truncated on the World Map legend.
* Controller: Can't access Departed Wolves section on Known Wolves panel.
* Known Wolves: Yearlings can die when pack disbands even if old enough to disperse,
* Persistent Packs: Rival packs don't disband (or see other changes) if player has reached the end-date of the current quest.
* Persistent Packs: Unborn pups not removed from rival pack when it disbands.
* Persistent Packs: Unborn pups are not removed from rival pack if female breeder dies.
* Light rain audio is too quiet.
* Mate pathfinding issue near Lost River (DLC) ghost town den.
* When moving to another map with a trial mate, trial period ends automatically when arriving at the other map.
* Lost River DLC: In wintertime, an invisible floor in coffeeshop is higher than the visible floor.
* Known Wolves: Unborn pups immediately grow into yearlings.
* File sync throws an error if manually triggered again while already in progress.
* Pup said to have starved to death when it was really killed (in rare situation).
* Controller: Physical keyboard doesn't work when renaming mate or pup.
* Dispersal wolves go into ranch area.
* Can get stuck underground after certain sequence of events and map-moving in Find Den quest.
* Error after a dispersal NPC group fought a territory NPC group and won.
* Error when loading saves from a short period of 2021.
* Known Wolves: Dispersals can return to a natal pack that no longer exists.
* Error thrown when trying to delete many save games
* Pathfinding issues at several dens.
* Typo in rival pack name.
* Various terrain issues.


_________________________________________

See all patch notes here.

At last, the second chapter of our documentary video series about the history of WolfQuest. This chapter covers the continued development of the original game from 2008 through the end of the project in 2012...and then the revival as WolfQuest 2.7 in 2015.

We've got a new public beta out on Steam and, along with the usual variety of bugfixes and minor improvements, it has three notable new things:



1) In multiplayer games, you can now move between Yellowstone maps (currently Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek) whenever you don't have pups, same as in single-player. Run to a section of border with the "To [Map Name]" label and you'll be asked if you want to move (using the procedures of either Host Decides or Majority Rules).

2) The devblog a few weeks ago talked about how, among real wolves, males are more likely to disperse to find a mate, while females are more likely to stay in their natal (family) pack. We have added this behavior to the game. So now, when looking for a mate, you'll find more males in the dispersal groups, and more females interested in courtship in rival packs. To make it easier to find a prospective mate, we've also added some visual clues: a red heart icon indicates courtable wolves on the compass (when they howl back) and on the Scent View panel.

3) For several years now, NPCs in the game (rival wolves, dispersal wolves, and grown-up pups) have sometimes had an "NPC Coat" -- a coat that is not available to players in Wolf Customization, so it's restricted to those NPCs. We've decided to open these up by making them unlockable. So now, if you raise a pup who has one of these coats, when you make them a playable adult wolf (in the Family Tree), the coat is unlocked so you can select it for your own wolves. This is not retroactive, so it will only occur in new games (in this beta and then the v1.1.1g patch release) that you start fresh. (Note that we have some cheat prevention code in there so you can't trade wolves with the coat. You must start a new game (or jump ahead to next year) and raise the pup on the same computer. After the Family Tree snapshot is generated and the coat is unlocked, it's then registered to your WolfQuest account – so it'll remain unlocked if you get a new computer. If you don't have a game account, it'll remain unlocked on that computer.)

See what else is new and improved in the beta notes here.

This public beta is available on Steam now for Mac and Windows.


___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.

In this beta, game saves ARE backward compatible with the last released patch, v1.1.1d. But multiplayer games are NOT backward-compatible, so you can only play with those who have this beta.

See bottom of this page for instructions on opting into the beta.


* Unlockable coats (formerly called NPC coats). Now when you raise a pup with one of these coats, that coat is unlocked in Wolf Customization after you generate the summertime Family Tree snapshot. (Only works in new games, not retroactive. There are some cheat-prevention methods in place so you can't share wolf saves with other players to let them unlock a coat.)

* Among real wolves, males are more likely to disperse to find a mate. Females are more likely to stay in their natal (family) pack. We have added this behavior to the game. So now, when looking for a mate, you'll find more males in the dispersal groups, and more females interested in courtship in rival packs. A red heart icon indicates courtable wolves on the compass (when they howl back) and on the Scent View panel.

* In multiplayer games, you can now move between Yellowstone maps (currently Amethyst Mountain and Slough Creek) whenever you don't have pups, same as in single-player. Run to a section of border with the "To [Map Name]" label and you'll be asked if you want to move (using the procedures of either Host Decides or Majority Rules).

* A few pup coats have changed a bit retroactively (to get better matches in the pup-to-adult coat sequence in the Saga).

___________________


* Water at top of Fairies Falls is pink.
___________________


* Controller: Enabled auto-scroll when using controller to navigate in Known Wolves panel.

* Longer pack names are truncated on the World Map legend.
* Controller: Can't access Departed Wolves section on Known Wolves panel.
* Persistent Packs: Discrepancy in multiplayer with pack progression.
___________________


* Controller: Improvements to controller navigation of Known Wolves panel.
* Persistent Packs: Added a delay before widowed pack leaders can find a new mate.

* Persistent Packs: Rival packs don't disband (or see other changes) if player has reached the end-date of the current quest.
* Persistent Packs: Unborn pups are not removed from rival pack if female breeder dies.
* Light rain audio is too quiet.
___________________


* Increased odds of mortality for older wolves in rival packs. (Should also make packs a bit more likely to disband periodically.)

* Persistent Packs: Unborn pups not removed from rival pack when it disbands.
* Known Wolves: Some Departed Wolves lack a status.
* Known Wolves: Wolves duplicated and/or placed in wrong maps or sections after jumping to next year.
* Player-wolf hunger resets to 50% when moving to another map.
___________________


* Persistent Packs: Rival packs don't disband when the number of adults in the pack drops below two.
* Known Wolves: Sometimes wolves are listed twice, and under wrong map.
* Mate pathfinding issue near Lost River (DLC) ghost town den.
___________________


* Known Wolves: Yearlings can die when pack disbanding even if old enough to disperse,
* Sometimes long-dead wolves are removed from Departed Wolves list
___________________


* Increased odds of Shadow unlockable coat, decreased odds of Frosty coat.

* When moving to another map with a trial mate, trial period end automatically when arriving at the other map.
* New packs sometimes claim many hexes immediately upon moving onto a map.
* One Amethyst den appears on compass at all times.
___________________


* Improvements to 9F coat.

* Persistent Packs: pups and unborn wolves "dispersing" as siblings of adults when pack disbands.
* Slough Creek dirt den near Lake McBridge doesn't always render correctly in winter.
* Minor terrain issues.
_______________________________


* Adjusted odds of certain wolf coats higher or lower.

* In Wolf Customization, wolves created from pups in the Family Tree cannot be edited at all.
* Typo in rival pack name.
___________________


* In Wolf Customization, wolves created from pups in the Family Tree cannot be edited at all.
* Typo in rival pack name.
___________________


* Persistent Pack code was refactored to make it more robust, which should not have any changes except as noted here, but might create new bugs, please report if you see any!
* Yearlings are now called Yearlings until their second birthday -- but they can potentially disperse before that birthday. (Previously they changed to Subordinates at 18 months of age, to allow dispersing, due to a limitation in the code.)
* Reduced rival pack aggressiveness after player intrudes into their territory from 24 hour cooldown to 8 hours. (So you can return much sooner if you're trying to court a pack wolf.)
* Reduced odds of dispersal wolf finding another dispersal as mate (to reduce dispersal churn).
* Photo Mode now leaves wolf nametags enabled, but you can press N key to hide them.
* Multiplayer: If player goes AFK while in den, their wolf automatically exits the den so as not to prevent game progress.
* Multiplayer: Greatly reduced the number of dispersal wolves in non-Story games (since they aren't needed and can get annoying).
* Increased minimum number of dispersal wolves on each map at any given time.
* Controller: All Tab menu buttons remain visible now, with highlight the one selected, to help with navigating the tab buttons.
* Controller, switching tabs with shoulder buttons navigates to left/right from selected button.

* Female wolf doesn't look pregnant after going from Establish Territory to Find a Den quest.
* Player-wolf is invisible in scent view when switched to Carmella mode.
* Game stalls when in Reminisce mode and trying to jump ahead to next year (which should not be possible).
* Player-wolf can go beyond the map border when bite-holding prey, which can lead to a long forced-walk back into the map afterwards.
* Multiplayer: Pups repeatedly playbowing the wrong parent when they switch to an absent favourite parent.
* Multiplayer: On Known Wolves panel, dead pack wolves are not synced correctly.
* Lost River DLC: In wintertime, an invisible floor in coffeeshop is higher than the visible floor.
* Known Wolves: Unborn pups immediately grow into yearlings.
* File sync throws an error if manually triggered again while already in progress.
* Pup said to have starved to death when it was really killed (in rare situation).
* Controller: Physical keyboard doesn't work when renaming mate or pup.
* Dispersal wolves go into ranch area.
* Can get stuck underground after certain sequence of events and map-moving in Find Den quest.
* Error after a dispersal NPC group fought a territory NPC group and won.
* Error when loading saves from a short period of 2021.
* Added info about dispersal differences to Find a Mate: Tips text.
* Known Wolves: Dispersals can return to a natal pack that no longer exists.
* Error thrown when trying to delete many save games
* Pathfinding issues at several dens.
* Various terrain issues.

_____________________
1) In the Steam app, go to your Library, then right-click on the WolfQuest: AE name in the left column and choose Properties.
2) Then go to the Betas tab and select the WQ current Beta option in the pulldown. No password is necessary. Steam should then start downloading it. Later you can switch back to the public version in that Betas tab, by selecting NONE in that pulldown.

We're making good progress with the Saga!*

Lately we've been working on the yearlings -- the pups who survived their first year of life and now are helping raise the new pups of the year (whenever they're not playing or getting distracted). Even at 13-15 months of age, they're still very puppyish, even though they're physically approaching adult-wolf size.



I know there are a lot of questions about yearlings, so let’s answer a few of them:

1) Once you've got some yearlings in your pack, how do you tell them what to do? The short answer is: you don't. Just as with your mate, you can go up to any of them and whine to invite them to hunt -- but they have minds, preferences, and personalities of their own. Typically, females are more likely to stay at the homesite and males are more likely to go hunting -- though certainly an individual can have a different preference. Packmates are more likely to stick with their best friend (using the new fondness feature between packmates). And you'll see packmates whine at another wolf to invite them to go hunting -- sometimes they may invite you, and sometimes they may not, but either way you can join them if you want.

2) Similarly, when it's time for some wolves to go hunting, yearlings are more likely than older wolves to stay with the pups, since they're not great at hunting yet. They lack an adult's strength and skill. So don't expect to be able to sit back and make all your packmates do all the work. In fact, marking territory is generally the responsibility of the pack leaders. They're the only ones who do raised leg urination. Everybody else can pee and howl, of course, which helps a bit, but territory is the leader's job.

3) So then, you might ask, can we find some dispersal wolves and invite them to join our pack, so we can delegate the work to them? Sorry, no. While that does occasionally happen, it's usually when the pack needs a new breeder (packs are families, not an aggregation of unrelated wolves).

4) The way to expand your pack is by having pups, and playing through the years. A good percentage of pups won't survive to become yearlings. But it only takes a few years to get a multi-generational pack. In Yellowstone, packs tend to have 6-12 wolves. Sometimes they get bigger (though the famous examples like the Druid pack with 37 wolves, was a quirk from wolf reintroduction, before wolf and elk populations stabilized). We'll definitely have a cap on pack size, since it just gets awkward to have so many NPC wolves in your pack (along with performance impacts of so many NPC AIs running at full bore)

Tommi has the yearlings working pretty well, generally, and so we've also been working on gameplay balance. For example, while yearlings do help out with daily work, it's limited. At a carcass, they can eat extra food to regurgitate for the pups, but as much as adults, since they still need most of that food for their own development.

So: good progress, but still lots to do before the Saga is ready to release! We'll share more as we go, so stay tuned!


* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game." Your pups will continue to grow into the fall and beyond, learning to hunt under your supervision, and then becoming yearlings when next year's pups are born. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. The Saga is currently in development but we do not have a release date for it.

___________________

The WolfQuest saga will continue! Stay tuned for more news in upcoming devblogs about it and other new features!

Once the game is completed on PC/Mac, we will consider porting the game to other platforms.

We do not announce specific release dates. We will release them when they are ready.