Herd Any Good Names? (Help us name the elk herds!) (Devblog)

31 Jan 2019Developer post

Source: Steam Community (opens in a new tab)

https://youtu.be/IDXFc9P-MwI

Elk have always been the mainstay of a wolf’s diet in Yellowstone (though that’s started to change in recent years as the bison population increases….but that’s a story for a future episode). About 7,500 elk live in the northern part of Yellowstone and adjacent area in southern Montana — that number once was much higher, over 15,000 before wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone in the mid-1990s. With the new predators in the area, elk population dropped year by year, all the way down to about 5,000 — but in recent years, it has begun to increase, and the 2018 survey counted 7,579. (These surveys don’t find every single elk, of course, so there is a margin of error.)

What does that mean for the game? We want elk to be reasonably easy to find, but not so common that you don’t need to use your scent view to track down a herd. We began with just a few herds on the map and found it usually took waaaay too long to find a herd. So we added a bunch more herds, and now have about 18 of them, of varying sizes and compositions, living on on Specimen Ridge and the slopes of Amethyst Mountain.

That adds up to about 300 individual elk. We may tune this more, but based on beta testing so far, it seems about right — for gameplay, that is. But how does it compare to the real world?

The area in question (Northern Range of Yellowstone, extending into Montana) is about 1500 square kilometers, and if about 7500 elk live in that area, that means the elk population density is about five elk per square kilometer. Our map is 49 square kilometers, which means to be accurate, we’d have 245 elk in our game-world. That surprised me, as I thought we’d exaggerated the density much more than that for the sake of gameplay. So…not bad!

(And if you’re wondering how many wolves live in that area nowadays: the most recent numbers are from the 2018 Yellowstone Wolf Project report, which counted 33 wolves in Yellowstone’s Northern Range — but this doesn’t include wolves outside the park but still on the Northern Range, so the area is smaller, about 1000 square kilometers. So wolf population density is a mere 0.033 per square kilometer — or one wolf per 30 square kilometers. We’ve got some 40 wolves in our Amethyst game-world. Although most of those have territories which extend well beyond the edge of our map, we clearly have exaggerated the wolf population for the sake of gameplay, far more than the elk population. Knowing this, and seeing how easy it is to find a stranger wolf (or for them to find you), we may reduce those numbers a bit.)

Anyways, back to elk: one thing we’ve found when playing the game is that it can be a bit confusing to have so many elk herds out there. You pick up one scent trail, but those scents might intermingle with scents from another herd, and it’s hard to know which one you’re following. To solve this, we’re thinking of giving each herd a name. Of course, elk herds are not coherent groups in the same way that wolf packs are. Herd size and composition shifts over the seasons. But for the few months on Amethyst Mountain in the fall, it’s plausible that wolves become familiar with each group of elk and learn their habits. A name is simply our way to build this into the game.

But what kinds of names should we give these herds? The elk roam around quite a bit so placenames wouldn’t be meaningful for long….so then what kinds of names? We’re very interested to hear what our players would like to see for elk herd names, so if you have an idea, please post it in the comments! We do want names that fit our theme — the life and ecology of Yellowstone wolves — so please keep that in mind. We look forward to reading them and, we hope, finding some great names to use in the game.