Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
Since predators don't seem to spawn while others are still attacking, I have kept one around. A cougar that swims constantly back and forth across the river beside my grass den but never attacks due to how terrified it is of my wolf and her mate. Its name is Coogies. Now, I don't even have to pay attention to predator attacks!
Update update: Coogies swam too far and ran away from home. She will forever be missed.
Another update: I managed to finally reach another point where no pups were sick. I took my mate and went on a baby-hunting spree and traveled to a rendezvous site. We had a well-deserved nap, and everyone's at 100% hunger again. We also managed to reclaim and replenish our territory
My strategy for dealing with illnesses is try to spend time with pups that are sick first thing, hunt, mark then go back, spend time until my sleep completely depletes and then sleep. Before the "carrying a pup will deplete your stamina" update, people would grab the sick pup and carry it around the territory on marking disputes which seemed smart but...if you had other sick pups, what would you do then considering the game doesn't let you carry more than one pup.
You can still kind of do this but it's less likely to work. Also, there was a glitch in the game where the illness would never come about but that was fixed and adjusted, this could just be bad RNG for you considering the RNG varies between player to player, some have Bad RNG, some have Good RNG or it's a mixture of both.
Though, my condolences you had to go through this. Maybe try my strategy, I'm sure it'll be easier on you.
RNG is absolutely against me though, yeah.
I can understand the frustration. Once I had three sick pups all at the same time in different stages of the illness. Pups get sick a lot more now than they used to. I play around on my tablet while waiting for a pup to get better. It IS boring so I wish sick pups would get better faster.
Edit: I've been at 0% wakefulness for so long I forgot that sleep effected the stamina bar for a second there
let me put it to you this way- your pups cannot survive without you, so you need to tend to your vitals and territory before you tend to the pups. do not waste your time sitting at the den, not eating, not sleeping, and letting territory decay. you are setting yourself up for failure. sure, put a little bit of extra time aside from marking to spend time with the pup, but you should not be neglecting yourself, your territory, and your other pups (including the sick pup- nobody is eating so they're all suffering). Instead, spend time with the pup until it gets to around 50-70% wakefulness, then either sleep or woof in the den so you and your mate can go hunt, or touch up territory. i don't understand why you're sacrificing so much.
i also noticed you said you marks when territory was getting to 80%... please don't. You only need to mark when the majority of your territory is lower than 50%. you will stress and burn yourself out if you are constantly doing territory work, especially on accurate.
illness on accurate is not as dangerous as you make it seem. but, if you can't get that out of your head, maybe don't play accurate. stick to challenging. from the looks of it, i don't think you're fully ready to play accurate.
At first I did care about territory, but after a while I learned that the stranger wolf attacks increasing didn't do much to me, so I let it drop in favor. I kept my pups fed through beavers, and much later on baby ungulates. So don't worry! They're alright. My mate, however, could not leave. Because I was denless, his AI was to stay with the pack to "keep it moving" despite the fact we never moved.
I didn't do that the entire run, that would be REALLY excessive. I did that in the very beginning because I was preparing more leeway to stay at home when I would need to. It also kept me busy. In the end, the diligence payed off. Most of my territory survived by a little less than 10%
A couple of my pups survived by less than 10% of their health with all of my work put in- I honestly think they would've died if I let myself walk away to mark all of my territory up and sleep consistently.
All in all, I appreciate your words, but reading the post would've helped. I can understand why you didn't, though! It's a bit of a novel. My complaint isn't that the game became difficult, it was that the game became boring. I was succeeding by a thin margin, I just wasn't having fun doing it.
I'm honestly not sure how to tell apart Kk from kk, but my wolf was deep, black-brown and her mate is bleached white with a brown head. I thiiiink they fit the requirements, but you're right, this would've been way easier if I had a smaller litter. I'm just dedicated to large ones so they get hungry faster and I can hunt more
Wolfquest has some vids that explain it in a very simple way. Some skins (like the one you say your mate is) is always grey, or kk. Not all "black" skins are Kk, and some "grey/white" skins are Kk, so I just memorize them.
Difficulty — The difficulty has no effect on the rate of pup sickness. The only single change that exists between difficulty and sickness is that currently pups will never die from sickness on easy difficulty; challenging and accurate are exactly the same regarding sickness, so this bad luck you're having on your accurate run is just that, and not a result of playing on accurate rather than challenging. One thing that does affect pup sickness though is the parent's coat genetics, (which I see others have mentioned above while I was typing) which you can read a bit about on the Raise Pups[support.wolfquest.org] article:
Territory — There are some pop up dialogs that display warnings when you mark hexes above 50% strength, because a lot of the time, you don't need to. Players had some trouble with this in the past, and so that's what the hex ring that indicates a strong hex (any hex over 50%) is for. (But again, I see this has been mentioned above while I was typing)
Spending time with pups — As you saw from the game, you can spend time with pups, but it only helps them to have a higher chance of recovery, and never guarantees it. Personally, I don't go out of my way to do this, because as you said, I don't find it too terribly exciting, and much of the time I have other pups. While it sounds like your main issue was with this and sickness, it also sounds like all seven of your pups survived, but I can understand why so much sickness must have been frustrating. These quotes from a developer discuss some of the reasoning behind sickness and pup death with regards to RNG in the game:
But DO NOT sacrifice the wellbeing of your wolves or your other pups for a single sick pup at any given moment, and let a few hexes get a little weak if thats what it takes, yes spend whatever free time you can manage with a sick pup, but spending time only increases the chances of recovery, it does not guarantee it, and you're likely to lose at least one pup.
personally i think keeping your pups well fed can also help them recover, and if you've been doing a lot of hunting, you should have a carcass or two you can run to for a quick snack so you have more time as well. let the hexes fall to between 30-60% and very rarely the mate can help too, which will help a little bit when it does happen. it honestly feels like you're playing at 2 different extremes, try to find a useful balance for you, and if your pup dies it is not your fault, thats just the way it goes sometimes even when you do your best, there is no guarantee recovery for illness.
Something else i do that i'm not 100% effects illness rates is putting the pups in the den when the weather is bad, there's some hints that pups need shelter from bad weather and while i'm not positive it helps, it does give me an excuse to tuck the pups away and spend time with my mate. plus if weather is bad and theres a sick pup you can rest in the den with them, that's especially useful if you have more then 2 sick pups, just keep an eye on fleas.
It's a lot to keep track of
1. Staying with a sick pup doesn't guarantee its survival no, but unless the devs changed something last time i did a naughty thing i cannot repeat here, staying with a sick pup helps IMMENSELY. By a lot. But it can still fail. That being said, what I usually do (granted I haven't touched accurate in a while) is loaf around with them until their energy reaches the point where they sleep. (I used to wait for the lullaby music as a cue but i keep forgetting to report that glitch that it doesn't trigger consistently anymore. Oops.) Then I sleep/hunt/mark. For the most part, most of my pups on challenging have survived, except maybe one or two where I may have neglected them more than I should - because I just recently learned that a lot of us are probably being overachievers and that pups don't even count as hungry until 50% hunger. (Although if that is the case, I don't know why my mate will feed them at 80 when I wake up from a sleep cycle.)
2. HOWEVER. I do agree with you that the way sickness is handled in this game is kind of...very bad game design. For the first issue, the fact that there is ALMOST (to a degree) nothing you can do once a pup gets sick is a problem because every other risk of death in this game gives you player agency. This doesn't. It's entirely RNG based, and player actions to some degree have absolutely no impact on the final outcome. I say almost because it turns out that staying with your pups does indeed help a lot! The problem is 1. it's boring, after a while, not engaging gameplay at all. 2. The game is not very clear about when other aspects of a wolf's life are in dire need of attention EXCEPT maybe territory. I realize the point is to make you choose between hunting and territory and caring for a sick pup, but given the insight I got in another thread that we may have been doing all this work for nothing, it feels like we're not being given enough information to make proper hard choices. 3. The mate issue. The fact that you cannot consistently rely on your mates to pick up your slack while you stay home (which, again, from what I am learning, is actually because the player does not get the information that controls to what point does your life have to be falling apart before your mate helps you) makes it even harder to judge when or if you should leave a sick pup to take care of things.
3. No shade to the devs. I absolutely love this game to death (which is why these few things frustrate me to no end.) but what they choose to gamefiy and what they choose to stick to realism for is baffling to me. If they are trying to go for ultimate tug on the player's heartstrings, the way of handling sickness is actually not a great idea, because having a pup die because you as the player made a fatal mistake is way more heartwrenching and impactful than RNG killing a pup and there was nothing you can do about it. The fact that this is the ONLY thing in the game that takes away player agency also really kind of...ruins the flow of the game, imo. It's jarring and disrupts the tone a little. I know that not all wolf pups survive but first, this is a video game, and player skill should be rewarded with better outcomes, regardless of how realistic it is. Wolves sleep most of the day too but that was tweaked because it's bad gameplay. Second, the saga isn't even out yet. If the devs are trying to make it so that less wolf pups survive for performance reasons by the time the Saga is out, maybe tweak the max number of pups a litter can have instead? And be upfront that it's for performance? And yeah, given the Saga is not out yet, I don't actually see what the problem is for all 7 pups to survive on accurate if the player is skilled enough, because I assume that the Saga is going to have even more hazards for AI controlled pups and a few of them will probably die in the next part to begin with. More wolf pups that survived this first part actually makes it MORE challenging for players in the next part, which is GOOD.
My suggestions to fix the illness thing is actually just...be transparent about when you should mark or hunt, and work on making mates pick up the slack. It's never happened to me because I apparently overachieve, but I still hear stories of people letting the territory decay to almost nothing and the mate doesn't help at all. The odds of a pup dying if you are with them are actually pretty satisfactory to me, which is as much player agency I think you can possibly give for this situation. The only thing that I suppose you could tweak, somehow, is make staying with a sick pup a little less boring but I don't want increased predator attacks or anything, so I'm a little stumped on how you would be able to make that more engaging. More pup to parent emotes, I guess?
I will also say (in response to what you said about larger litters and pups dying) that, during the Saga, the pups under 6 months of age ( the pups we have currently are only 1-2 months old ) have a lower chance of surviving, so in the Saga as they age, the likeliness for their survival will likely be higher?
Thanks for the info though, everybody! I re-checked and my pair is Kk/kk, for some reason my brain filtered KK pups being extremely rare/thought to die before birth = more illness?? Brain issue on my end.
I was however taking care of essentials, of course, don't worry! My issue in the post was that with most other options becoming non-priorities it made the gameplay FAR less engaging. I think I agree with a lot of what cutecabaret said above, especially.
Your pup grows penicillin in its fur.