The most dangerous time in the life of a wolf pup begins just after the current WolfQuest game ends -- it's called "The Period of Rapid Growth," when pup food intake nearly doubles and they grow by more than 50% in a six-week period. Unfortunately for pups (and their parents), this rapid growth occurs just when prey animals are at peak health, after grazing on nutritious summer grasses for months now. The WolfQuest Saga* will depict this period in a new quest, which we're calling "Growing Pups" (because you are 'growing them' and they are also 'growing up' and will soon become young hunters).
In many parts of the world, such as northern Minnesota, this combination of hunger and healthy prey is a major cause of pup mortality. The situation is not as dire in Yellowstone, due to the abundance of prey in the Northern Range, but it's still a dangerous time for pups -- pups can starve to death and, even if they don't, they can die from disease that they contract in their weakened condition.
So in this new Growing Pups quest, you'll be hard-pressed to keep your pups well-fed, but we are adding two mitigating factors:
1) Because ungulates are at peak health, the meat chunks that you can pull out of carcasses are also more nutritious, with almost twice the food value as usual.
2) Pups are now big enough to tackle somewhat larger rodents -- Uinta ground squirrels -- along with voles and toads. These make perfect practice prey for your pups while providing a small snack.
That still isn't going to be enough to keep a big litter of pups alive. Some pups are going to die (and it's not your fault!). This is a big reason why wolves have larger litters -- because not everybody is going to make through the first year of life.
We know that some players accept this as a fact of life for wolves. But some players really do not want their pups to die, especially from something like sickness that is, at least partly, out of their control. To accommodate the latter group, the game currently prevents pups from dying of sickness when on Easy difficulty level. However, in the Saga, it's simply not feasible to have a full litter of pups survive. It's neither realistic nor accurate, and it also doesn't work in our game world. It gets too crowded, especially after a few years, to have a pack of 15 or 20 animals in a pack. it would make it impossible to balance the gameplay and could cause performance issues , as well. So it's necessary to limit your pack size by having some pups die along the way, just as they do in the real world.
So: In the Saga, pups WILL be vulnerable and can die from sickness on all difficulty levels, including Easy. But for those players who cannot stand that, we're adding a new option in Game Settings: Pups Die Of Sickness. It is enabled by default, but you can disable it to prevent death from sickness. However, to preserve game balance and prevent performance issues, if you disable it, then you'll have smaller litters. (We're still testing and tuning to determine that maximum size.) You can change this setting anytime, but changes only affect the next litter of pups, not your current litter, of course. We hope that this provides a reasonable option for players who can't stand their pups dying from sickness, while preserving the longer-term arc of the life of a wolf pack.
This quest, like the other new quests in the Saga, is still a work in progress, but it's exciting to see them coming together. Stay tuned for more updates!
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* 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.
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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.