The next patch, v2.0.0b, is now in Public Beta for Windows and Mac!


* Increased odds of successful courtship when dispersal wolf courts a wolf in the player's pack.
* Persistent packs: Made it more likely (in code and by fixing a bug) of unrelated-to-player dispersals that are already on the map of becoming a new rival pack after another pack disbands.
* Improved randomization of names when rival packs are formed.
* Some refinements to NPC wolf courtship and pairing when not spawned.
* Sad Parent is now unlocked if pup dies of health loss caused by hunger.
* Changed priority on all Packmate Dispersed notifications so they appear even if Common Notifications are hidden.
* Hellroaring: Added some winter holiday decor during winter season.

* Issues with newlywed wolves not being created when they should.
* Multiplayer: Sometimes the bio panel shows the same wolf's bio for everyone.

________________________


* Known Wolves: Added confirmation step when clicking Clear Departed Wolves.
* Apply Den Memory and clear dens correctly while in Survive Missions for a long time.

* Wolves pick up meat chunks even nearly to full to give to an injured packmate -- only to realize that the packmate wasn't hungry and there was a carcass right by them.
* Airborne scent for lost pup has wrong shape and color.
* Packmates weave back and forth too much when targeting prey on the run.

________________________


* Multiple AI optimizations which should improve performance especially during prey hunts and wolf fights.
* When moving maps, game now chooses the most appropriate territory config in the new map.

* Multiplayer: Player-wolves appear to be stuck in limbo.
* Young Hunter pups don't close their eyes when howling.
* In photo mode, tutorial tip doesn't turn itself off if HUD is already disabled when entering photo mode.
* Some presaga saves getting upgraded twice, causing saves to stall during load.
* Error after upgrading presaga saves with disbanded packs until they get destroyed.
* Unborn pups of player have default sequence names (16xx).
* GP and YH pups' jaws sometimes glitch out briefly when picking up an object.
* Minor terrain and water issues.
________________________


* Added information about map moving to Game Help: World Map.
* Known Wolves: Added "Clear Departed Wolves" button.
* Improved odds of pups doing contact interactions like wrestling and tail biting. (May need more work though.)
* Made distance matter more and fondness less when determining who a wolf plays with (fondness was dominating it, causing the same wolves to play together too repetitively).
* Performance optimization when determining if an animal to target is too deep in water to attack.
* Slough Creek: Removed all "Dangerous Territory" alerts when marking hexes around the outer areas of the map.
* Clarified some achievement texts.
* Corrected the "I'm Juggling As Fast As I Can" achievement text (said requirement was to finish YH quest, but actually is to finish GP quest).
* Clarified some quest tests.
* Added entry to Game Help about Elder Wolf.
* Shortened Survive with Family quest in winter by two game-days (not that this gives you less time to find a mate if you need one).
* If pup who suffered Unknown Fate reappears later, their status will be updated on the Family Tree.
* Hellroaring: Show flashing red edge effect when hunter shoots any pack member.

* When loading presaga saves, some adult wolves can be "Unborn" after moving maps.
* Dead wolves still alive in some presaga saves.
* Mark previous player wolf as known wolf after succession.
* Toad's scent trail says Snowshoe Hare until you get close to it.
* Multiplayer: Game broken when reloading a MP save.
* Multiplayer: Injuries not preserved during host transfer.
* Multiplayer: Pack Life games could get into a state where resuming the game from a save or doing host migration broke things, including showing a broken wolf badge for the host or forgetting injuries of clients
* Game can crash in rare situation when two groups in player's pack are trying to merge back together.
* In player's pack, yearlings are categorized as siblings after player switches to play as pup in Pack Succession.
* Family Tree: Some causes of death do not display for pups.
* Dead mate listed as still alive in KW panel as alive (possibly fixed).
* Some map hex icons have messy edges.
* Hellroaring: Wolverine never does dive-under-wolf attack.
* Minor terrain and water issues.

* New hidden achievement and related functionality.

* Rival packs now prefer invading hexes towards map edge if they don't have enough, when in no-homesite seasons.
* Improved rival pack's skill at choosing homesites that make sense given pack's territory.
* Ensure that rival packs don't choose home hexes in vacant territory when there's much closer ones available in neighboring hexes.
* Pack Info: Show "Elder Wolf" label for other packmates than mate.
* Pack Info: Expanded Packmates area when Your Homes section is hidden.
* When more than seven wolves in player's pack are at the the homesite, coyotes won't try to attack.
* To reduce wastage of meat chunks at a carcass (caused by packmates grabbing a chunk but then filling up before all food has been eaten from chunk), packmates now will not pick up chunks when they are almost full.
* Older packmates are less interesting than younger packmates in running around and playing with pups at any given level of wakefulness.
* Multiplayer: Pups will now go in the den if the last babysitter disconnects.
* Fine-tuning rival wolf mortality odds at older ages.
* During pack howl at end of Young Hunters, old "triumph" music now plays.
* Compass and World Map now share the same rule about visibility of den and rendezvous sites icons.
* In social exchanges with the player, made packmate conflict dissipation emotes give only a small amount of affinity and emit a single heart.
* Fine-tuning dispersal odds in player pack.
* Controller: Added fallback glyphs for controller types.
* Hellroaring Mountain: On low graphics settings when boulder fields are not rendered due to performance constraints, player-wolf is now turned around with a notification, as when at border.

* During hunts, after woofing Young Hunter pups on low health to back off, they can get too close to prey which are doing standing defense.
* Wolves with eye customizations don't show those in Family Tree preview.
* In Compass, scent post icon isn't quite centered.
* Iron/Elder Wolf death defaulted to Thermal Burns in some cases, incorrectly.
* When playing as dispersed pup, Hex Invasion icon appears for invasions against the player's old pack.
* Pressing ESC just when permanent death panel opens can freeze the game.
* Early Graduation achievement sometimes doesn't unlock when it should. (Possiby fixed, please submit report if you don't get achievement when you should.)
* Some pup-related notifications do not appear in certain circumstances.
* Packmates do T4 (tucked tail) after winning a fight.
* Minor terrain and river issues.
* Newly-dispersed pup's save loads as parent. (Fixed in existing saves too.)
* Packmate dig when they have a major leg injury.
* Error causes black screen in certain circumstances when pups disperse.
* Error causes Pack Succession to get stuck if pack has wolves eager to disperse.
* When multiple pups disperse, only one of them is saved even when multiple are selected to save.
* Multiplayer: "Strength of a Wolf" and similar achievements don't unlock even after player reaches Endless Summer.
* Multiplayer: Some achievement descriptions still say "raise pups to 20 pounds" (instead of 25).
* Pregnancy issues after female mate dies or player does Pack Succession.
* Packmates run into player-wolf when doing Bouncy gait.
* If player got far into August in presaga Endless Summer, Growing Pups quest is truncated.
* In About the Saga text, RNG "Sickness Only" text says max litter size is 5 pups, should say 6 pups.
* Sibling pack stats row shows outdated injury stats.
* World Map shows packmates icon for pups at home.
* Minor terrain issues.

Public Beta for v2.0.0a is now available in the public beta branch!


* When more than seven wolves in player's pack are at the the homesite, coyotes won't try to attack.
* To reduce wastage of meat chunks at a carcass (caused by packmates grabbing a chunk but then filling up before all food has been eaten from chunk), packmates now will not pick up chunks when they are almost full.
* Multiplayer: Pups will now go in the den if the last babysitter disconnects.
* Hellroaring Mountain: On low graphics settings when boulder fields are not rendered due to performance constraints, player-wolf is now turned around with a notification, as when at border.
* Fine-tuning rival wolf mortality odds at older ages.

* Early Graduation achievement sometimes doesn't unlock when it should. (Possiby fixed, please submit report if you don't get achievement when you should.)
* Some pup-related notifications do not appear in certain circumstances.
* Packmates do T4 (tucked tail) after winning a fight.
* Minor terrain and river issues.
______________________


* During pack howl at end of Young Hunters, old "triumph" music now plays.
* Pack Info: Expanded Packmates area when Your Homes section is hidden.
* Compass and World Map now share the same rule about visibility of den and rendezvous sites icons.
* Older packmates are less interesting than younger packmates in running around and playing with pups at any given level of wakefulness.

* Newly-dispersed pup's save loads as parent. (Fixed in existing saves too.)
* Packmate dig when they have a major leg injury.
* Error causes black screen in certain circumstances when pups disperse.
* Error causes Pack Succession to get stuck if pack has wolves eager to disperse.
* When multiple pups disperse, only one of them is saved even when multiple are selected to save.
______________________


* Rival packs now prefer invading hexes towards map edge if they don't have enough, when in no-homesite seasons.
* Improved rival pack's skill at choosing homesites that make sense given pack's territory.
* Ensure that rival packs don't choose home hexes in vacant territory when there's much closer ones available in neighboring hexes.
* In social exchanges with the player, made packmate conflict dissipation emotes give only a small amount of affinity and emit a single heart.
* Fine-tuning dispersal odds in player pack.
* Added fallback glyphs for controller.

* Multiplayer: "Strength of a Wolf" and similar achievements don't unlock even after player reaches Endless Summer.
* Multiplayer: Some achievement descriptions still say "raise pups to 20 pounds" (instead of 25).
* Pregnancy issues after female mate dies or player does Pack Succession.
* Packmates run into player-wolf when doing Bouncy gait.
* If player got far into August in presaga Endless Summer, Growing Pups quest is truncated.
* In About the Saga text, RNG "Sickness Only" text says max litter size is 5 pups, should say 6 pups.
* Sibling pack stats row shows outdated injury stats.
* World Map shows packmates icon for pups at home.

The WolfQuest Saga is now released!

The most important thing: Treat the Saga like it's a new game! While much of the game is the same, the Saga brings many changer to existing gameplay and features, along with the new Saga quests and gameplay. Don't assume that everything works exactly how it did before. Please peruse the Game Help (now available in the main menu of the game), especially the new About the Saga section. It's pretty long, but if you're wondering if something you're seeing in the game is a bug or intentional, that's a good place to check. The Game Help is also much improved in general, with better entries about various gameplay features.

Similarly, even if you have logged hundreds of hours logged in the game, be sure to enable Tutorials and Common Notifications in Game Settings, as those will give you important information when you reach something that's new or different.

* You really want to prioritize your wolf's health. Without good health, everything else becomes much harder, including keeping your pups and packmates alive and healthy.
* Your yearlings and subordinates are not duplicates of your mate. They won't help much with marking territory (that's the job of the pack leaders). They will help hunt, but if they see enough other wolves taking on the risks, they're happy to freeride and get an easy meal without taking damage.
* Your packmates will eat regurgitant if they're hungry, but they'll wait until the pups of the year have mostly filled up. They're pretty polite about that, but not totally polite.
* Sickness and low health is extra dangerous for pups now. Sick pups move slowly, as do pups with low health -- they're not speedy if you woof them into the den during a pup raid, and can be picked off by predators more easily.
* Don't expect all of your pups to survive, even on Easy difficulty. That's not the way of the wild.
* You can load a saved game in Loaf at Rendezvous Site or Endless Summer quests and carry on into the Saga quests -- but it's not a bad idea to start a new game to try out the Saga, and we don't recommend playing on Accurate difficulty this first time either. (And if you do, expect that things can get hairy.)


General
• New IK system for better foot placement on terrain. (Phase 1 completed, more improvements to come in future.)
• Some whiter coats now have young versions of their coats. These are toggleable in customization menu.

Menus
• New “Pup RNG Death” option in Game Settings. This controls random (RNG=Random Number Generator) deaths for pups. These settings only affect future litters, not the current pups of the year. There are three choices with this setting:
-All Types: Pups can die of sickness and can also possibly get lost and meet unknown fates. Maximum litter size on this setting is seven.
-Sickness Only: Pups can die of sickness but not unknown fates. Maximum litter size is six.
-None: Pups cannot die of sickness or unknown fates. Maximum litter size is five.
• New double-pawprint icon <sprite=298> in pack stats for packmates about to leave on excursion.
• New single-pawprint icon <sprite=297> in pack stats for packmates who are on an excursion away from the homesite.

Packmates
• Affinity is now gained by eating together, rather than killing together. Applies to all packmates.
• Mates and other packmates have their own opinion about whether to join player on excursions.
• When woofing at a packmate to tell to go home, you must target them before woofing.
• Pack Rally added to Single-Player. Just before starting an elk hunt (and when with packmates away from homesite), start a pack rally by howling twice. This will boost everyone's stamina and also prevent younger packmates from getting distracted and falling behind the leaders during the hunt.
• To complete the Loaf at Rendezvous Site quest, pups must grow to 25 pounds instead of 20 pounds.
• Playbow at packmates and then run to invite them to chase you.

Pup Sickness
• Companionship now has a cooldown after two game-hours.
• Sickness is now in effect on ALL difficulties.
• Pups now are visibly weaker when they are sick or low on health or food.

Prey
• Mothers of newborn ungulates may now flee from you, even if you haven’t found their baby.
• Elk mothers may now abandon their calves to stay with the herd.
• Beaver population depletes from overhunting. They recover as time passes.

Predators
• Predators can now startle pups out of tall grass.
• Growling repeatedly at predators has diminished effects on Flee meter. Damage them to reset it (prove you aren’t all bark and no bite).
• All wolves can now sustain major injuries.
• Predators can’t be lured as far from a carcass during carcass disputes.

Territory
Rival packs only have home sites in the same seasons the player does.
• Territory now has 4 strength levels:
-Recent [80-100%, 2 rings)
-Strong (51-79%, 1 ring)
-Fair (25-50%, no ring)
-Weak (1-25%, hatching)

Achievements
• "Soulmates" achievement will only unlock with new games started in the Saga. (If you have a wolf who has already gotten a mate before the Saga, that won't unlock this achievement when reaching age 8.)

Age Perks
• Youthful Prowess: no longer provides recovery boost for pup sickness.
• Fun Parent: no longer removes social cooldown, just extends it.
• Elder Authority: reduces but doesn't completely prevent pups from emerging from den or grass during pup raids.

Emotes
• To send packmate home: target them and Woof.
• During Younger Hunter quest, tll low-health pups to back off during hunts and fights: get close to them and Woof. All within 4 meters of your wolf with low health should obey.
• Playbow: Playbow at packmates and run away to invite them to play chase with you.
• Playful Trot: Toggle on/off with B key (for "bouncy"). Player-wolf also does "chase invite" version of playbow when in this mode.

Achievements
• Survival of the Pack Achievements now requires completion of Young Hunters, not Loaf Quest.
• Iron Mom & Iron Dad: now require completion of Young Hunters, not Loaf Quest.
• Bad Parent Achievement renamed to "Sad Parent," since hunger is a bigger threat and not always preventable.
• Eighteen new achievements, distributed among various sections of the Achievements panel.

• The Saga has not come to multiplayer yet. We have some plans for it and will focus on those after the Saga is released.

• Substantially reduced struggle damage dealt to wolves by grizzlies.
• Elk herds will wander much shorter distances from their seasonal homes (so should remain decently distributed across the map -- more in highlands in summer, and more in lowlands in winter.
• Increased territory decay when pack has disbanded.
• Added toggle in Game Settings: Show Quest Intros. When disabled, only a brief non-pausing quest title is displayed at the start of each quest.
• Reduced odds of player-wolf and mate death during each sleep after reaching age 8 (to have better chance of living another year or so).
• All pups are marked as "experienced" after finishing Young Hunters, so they skip Learn to Hunt when made into playable wolves.
• Family Tree snapshots are now non-pausing corner notifications (unless there is a conflicting newer snapshot that would be overwritten.)
• Some refinement to rival wolf behavior: they won't hunt in rival territory, they'll hurry when moving through rival territory
• Prevent longer roaming music tracks from looping.
• Improvements to urine stream positioning and appearance.
• In Family Tree, use wolf's number-name as nickname if it has no nickname.
• Made wolf eating animations more consistent (shorter animation when eating regurgitant or in a fight, longer animation when eating raw meat).
• Player-wolf can now drop objects when moving.
• Added FT snapshots at beginning and end of Raise Pups.
• Optimized wolf spawning to reduce or eliminate spikes when rival wolves spawn.
• AI: Made wolves less likely to initiate social exchanges when they have their mouth full.
• Adjusted litter sizes so they can a bit larger than previously at each diversity rating.
• Coyotes and foxes will be a bit less bold against multiple wolves.
• In family tree, pup name+number now shown under preview image.
• New logic for courtship attraction: now dispersal flocks are more proactive in seeking out non-dispersal packs (including player-pack).
• Hellroaring: Wolves act startled when they hear rifle shots north of the Hellroaring border.
• Wolves can die now from starvation (even when health is not zero).
• Two more entries for territory hex colors (might be needed in certain scenarios with pups dispersing).
• Territory quality is divided into four levels (1-24%, 25-49%, 50-79%, and 80-100%). Each has a different icon on the territory map. Rival packs treat all hexes that are 50% or stronger as the same in terms of pup raids and hex invasions. And Hex Percentage toggle is 3-way now: None, Current hex, All hexes.
• Reduced chances of mother elk losing track of calves.
• Family Tree now displays the text about the fate of a pack after the player-wolf dies (if the player did not do pack succession).
• In Pack Info, new pawprint icon next to packmate name indicates if they've decided to go on an excursion but haven't left yet.
• Changed name of Bad Parent achievement to Sad Parent.
• Added a cooldown period to Companionship: Doing companionship speeds up recovery, but you can only do it for two game-hours per game-day (so now very similar to the emote cooldown).
• The whitest wolf coats will have a "young" alternative version. All NPC wolves will get the younger version automatically when they're 4 months old, and will change to the original/older/whiter version when they turn age 5. In Wolf Customization, players can choose either version and switch to the other version at any time to represent the aging of that wolf.
• When pups (from May through September) get sick or very low on health or hunger, they act more obviously weak: Moving slowly, not romping around. Slow and painful when standing up and walking.
Music: "Wild and Free" music track is now the quest music when playing as a dispersed pup. (Previously was when escaping from a wolf fight.)
• Pups can be spooked out of tall grass patches when raiding competitors come close to the grass.
• Competitors should only run a short distance when you try to lure them away from a carcass.
• Made the Original Black coat to be genetically black regardless of tint, to avoid confusion about it.
Lost River: Ranch herd now includes yearlings: Lots of meat but less health than full-grown adult cattle.
Lost River: Ranch cattle now wander periodically. Watch and wait for one calf or yearling to drift away from the group.

• When courting a pack wolf, siblings instantly become hostile at end of courtship.
• Various minor issues with terrain, water, and dens.
• Occasional invisible obstacles on some maps.
• Hellroaring and Lost River: Early Spring and Fall seasons have green grass on Basic Sky & Veg mode.
• On World Map, rendezvous sites are shown by default rather than respecting previous user action.
• Slough Creek: No bull elk herds spawn in fall season.
• Hellroaring: Shot in body causes leg limp.
• Hellroaring: A few areas have low-resolution texture splotches.
• Lost River: One house starts celebrating Christmas season way too early.
• Many other minor things.

The WolfQuest Saga* has been in public beta on Steam for ten days now. Lots of people are playing it. Lots of them are submitting feedback and bug reports. And we appreciate all of them! Today's devblog takes a look at a few samples from more than 15,000 reports that we've received during the public beta.



* The WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time continues progressing through the years until you die.

We've gotten some bug reports about the game crashing. Of course, they are sent after the player restarted the game -- which means we get no logging data about the crash itself. If the game crashes on you, please check this support page for tips, and if those don't help, then send us the Player log file as instructed here. It's important to send us the Player log before you launch the game again. Thanks!

The WolfQuest Saga is now in public beta on Steam! See instructions at bottom of this post for instructions on how to switch to the public beta branch. If you'd rather wait until the full release, that's fine, it won't be too long!



But first, a couple things:

The Saga is in good shape, but there's a chance that it might break an existing save or family tree, so please make a backup of your User Files folder. Just copy and paste the whole folder onto your desktop or wherever you like.

* Windows: Documents/My Games/Wolf Quest Anniversary/User Files
* Mac: [YourUserDirectory]/Wolf Quest Anniversary/User Files

Now most important: Treat the Saga like it's a new game! While much of the game is the same, the Saga brings many changer to existing gameplay and features, along with the new Saga quests and gameplay. Don't assume that everything works exactly how it did before. Please peruse the Game Help (now available in the main menu of the game), especially the new About the Saga section. It's pretty long, but if you're wondering if something you're seeing in the game is a bug or intentional, that's a good place to check. The Game Help is also much improved in general, with better entries about various gameplay features.

Similarly, even if you have logged hundreds of hours logged in the game, be sure to enable Tutorials and Common Notifications in Game Settings, as those will give you important information when you reach something that's new or different.

Now a few tips about Saga gameplay:
* You really want to prioritize your wolf's health. Without good health, everything else becomes much harder, including keeping your pups and packmates alive and healthy.
* Your yearlings and subordinates are not duplicates of your mate. They won't help much with marking territory (that's the job of the pack leaders). They will help hunt, but if they see enough other wolves taking on the risks, they're happy to freeride and get an easy meal without taking damage.
* Your packmates will eat reguritant if they're hungry, but they'll wait until the pups of the year have mostly filled up. They're pretty polite about that, but not totally polite.
* Sickness and low health is extra dangerous for pups now. Sick pups move slowly, as do pups with low health -- they're not speedy if you woof them into the den during a pup raid, and can be picked off by predators more easily.
* Don't expect all of your pups to survive, even on Easy difficulty. That's not the way of the wild.
* If you come across a bug, please do use the in-game Bug Reporter! And pleeease give us a lot of details, don't just say "mate isn't working right" -- tell us what you were doing, what's happening, and what you expected to happen.
* You can load a saved game in Loaf at Rendezvous Site or Endless Summer quests and carry on into the Saga quests -- but it's not a bad idea to start a new game to try out the Saga, and we don't recommend playing on Accurate difficulty this first time either. (And if you do, expect that things can get hairy.)

So there it is! The Saga is in public beta, on Steam. If you're interested, check it out!

_____________________
TO GET THE BETA BUILD
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.

(I'll be traveling this weekend, so releasing this devblog a day earlier than usual.)

The WolfQuest Saga* has been in beta-testing for five months now -- plenty of bugs to find and fix, but we're also making hundreds of improvements too. Many of these improvements are suggested by our beta testers, so in today's devblog I'd like to look at a few of those.



1: Companionship with a sick pup. We added companionship long ago to give players some chance of helping their pups recover from sickness. But it can feel burdensome as gameplay. You feel like you really should spend all your time with that pup, but you also have things to do! So betatesters suggested adding a cooldown, similar to social emotes. This has been a great improvement: you can put in some time with your sick pup, but you don't feel guilty if you then go off and hunt and maintain territory. We limit companionship to two game-hours per day (five realtime minutes) before the cooldown hits.

2: When you have yearlings and older offspring, any packmate can decide to go on a hunting excursion. They invite other wolves, including your wolf, by whining. But it can be a bit hard to know who is planning to go and who's planning to stay. So beta testers suggested indicating this "planning to go on excursion" mindset in Pack Info. We created a small double-pawprint, which appears next to the name of those packmates. And then once on a trip away from the homesite, a larger pawprint icon appears there in Pack Info.
This gives more clarity to each packmate's situation.

3: Fights with rival wolves can get pretty wild, with packs of eight or more wolves involved. In fall and winter, pups of the year are involved in these fights, and their older packmates get upset if you bite one of those pups, so it's important to know who's who. So we implemented a beta tester suggestion and added a small yellow dot on the Fight or Flight meter above those pups. So you can go in knowing that you're risking a more vigorous response if you bite one of them.

4: Pup raids by competitors can theoretically happen at any time -- but from the start, we prevented them from happening while the player-wolf was sleeping. This of course narrows the window for attacks considerably -- not when you're sleeping, and not when you're away from the homesite. That really leaves only a few game-hours each day -- and so raids often appear soon after you wake up. We've gotten complaints about that over time, so decided to finally solve it by allowing raids to wake you up from sleep. We put in some constraints, ensuring that you get at least three hours of sleep, and this change did solve the problem. This new feature didn't bother many beta testers -- you get woken up, fight off the raiders, and go back to sleep -- but some beta testers really, really hated it. So after trying to finesse it more, we finally disabled the feature, and again limit raids to your waking hours at the homesite. That's why we test things in private beta before releasing them!

5: Playing with your pups. As your pack grows, it's fun to watch your pups and older offspring play together. In fact, it's so fun that beta testers felt rather left out of the fun. They really wanted to be able to join in -- at least doing the playful, bouncy trot. So we added that (pressing B key on the keyboard toggles on this gait on and off). And furthermore, we enabled a special playbow that packmates often use when inviting others to chase them. So when you're in this bouncy/playful mode, if you do a playbow, your wolf will do this Invite Chase playbow. So now you really can be part of the fun.

All this is coming soon in the WolfQuest Saga -- later this year!

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
____________________

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

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

We're going full speed with beta-testing the upcoming WolfQuest Saga, finding plenty of bugs along with many, many little things to tweak and tune and polish. Every day, the Saga gets a little better. One thing we're testing are the new achievements for the Saga. We have about 18 of them. Some will be in a new Saga tab on the Achievements panel, but others make more sense in the Core, Above and Beyond, and Life Arc sections. Especially with the Saga achievements, these take a long time to test, since they generally take several game-years, at least, for even a chance at unlocking them. But we're getting there.



Longtime WolfQuest player/beta tester/moderator Loach (Jessie Clarey-Berthiaume) has created all of the achievement icons already in the game, and she created the icons for half of these new achievements. Rolin Serna (who created the beautiful splash image that you see when you launch the game) created the other nine new icons. Each one is exquisite.

Loach recorded a video while making the Guard Dog icon, so along with a sneak preview of several of the new achievements, today's devblog features this video. Enjoy!

All these new achievements are coming with the Saga, which we expect to release later this year.

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
____________________

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

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

Territory is an essential part of a wolf's life. The territory system in WolfQuest: Anniversary Edition has worked pretty well over the last five years, but as we have been playtesting the upcoming Saga*, we decided to tweak a few things.

With the addition of Hex Invasions in the Saga, territory quality is even more important than before. You should try to keep your hexes above 50% strength-- that's why we added the special "Strong" hex icon some years ago. But some players feel the need to keep their territory much stronger than that, above 80% strength, and since you can display the strength percentages on all hexes, it's easy to focus on that more than necessary. Which is fine -- if you enjoy maintaining territory (and some players do). But it's not necessary. We needed to make that clearer.



So now, in the Saga, there are four different hex styles: two styles for hexes above 50% -- the same "Strong" icon we've had for a long time, and a newer one, with a double outline inside the hex. This doesn't mean Super Strong. It just means you've marked it recently and gotten the strength above 75%. But rival packs regard all hexes that are above 50% equally enticing. So do what you like with those hexes, but it doesn't matter to rival packs if they're 52% or 99%.

We also have a new crosshatched hex icon for Weak hexes, which indicates they are below 25% strength. You should probably get out there and mark those soon!

Also, to try to discourage players from obsessing about hex percentages, we added a third option to the hex percentage display, so you can choose to show no percentage readouts (except on mouseover), or just the percentage for the hex your wolf is in at the moment, or percentages on all hexes. We don't recommend this last option. It's an awful lot of information, and it can lead you to focus too much on keeping hexes very strong when that doesn't matter. But it's up to you.

On another topic: we do have plans for multiplayer in the Saga, but that will come later, after we get the Saga for single-player in good shape and released.

So anyways, these territorial tweaks are another little improvement to the upcoming WolfQuest Saga, which is coming later this year!

* The upcoming WolfQuest Saga is "the rest of the game," where your pups grow up as you have a new litter each year. Time will continue progressing through the years until you die. We expect to release it later this year (but we have not set a release date).
____________________

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

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