For nearly twenty years now, enthusiastic players have shared ideas and suggestions on how improve WolfQuest. And that hasn't stopped with the release of the Saga! We appreciate all of them -- and it's also helpful to see what patterns emerge. For example, there are many suggestions on how to add more variation to the gameplay. The life of a wild wolf is (if they're lucky) quite consistent and repetitive from day to day and year to year. The game reproduces that pretty well. So many suggestions are about ways to shake things up through periodic events like forest fires, floods, and earthquakes. Yellowstone certainly does experience those from time to time, but they would be challenging to create in-game, ensuring that they look good without affecting game performance. Furthermore, such events would not shake things up as much as you might imagine. Yellowstone got some severe floods in 2022, but animals generally just moved elsewhere to avoid the floodwaters. Larger animals are also are pretty good at staying ahead of forest fires too. And because these events are so spectacular, they can't happen every year or two without becoming trite.
But we agree with the sentiment and we are always thinking about ways to inject more variation in the gameplay from year to year. We have a new feature to help with that, called Variable Prey and Food Abundance. As an optional feature, you can switch it on in Game Settings. When enabled, there are annual fluctuations in prey populations and food abundance. Some years are good, just like normal. But in other years, there are fewer elk and bison herds, those herds are smaller, and there fewer ungulates in general. And those prey that you can find have less meat on their bones. Why is that? That's for the wolf or the player to speculate. Maybe a drought, maybe disease....could be a variety of things. The game doesn't depict any of those possible causes visually. All that wolves know is that food is harder to come by.
When Variable Prey and Food Abundance is enabled, a text readout in the lower-left corner of the World Map indicates the situation for the current year (which starts on your wolf's birthday in April). You can toggle this option on anytime, though if it's after April, it'll take a little while for some effect to appear, since some herds and carcasses have already been spawned.
This new feature is now in public beta, in the v3.0.1j beta, so if you're interested, read the beta notes and check it out!