Collaring Wolves

So much of what we know about Yellowstone wolves is from the radio collars that biologists put on them.

Every winter, Yellowstone biologists go out and collar some wolves. (It's easier to spot wolves against the snow, without the cover of vegetation, and often there's some deep snow on the ground to slow the wolves down.) Using a tracker airplane to locate the packs and a helicopter to dart individual wolves, this is quite a production for the biologists and quite a scene for the wolves. The biologists not only size and place the collar, they take blood samples and many measurements. All the data produced from this effort has had led to incredible gains in our knowledge about wolf ecology and behavior... but it is quite a scene.

The game has had some logic to put collars on NPC wolves since Early Access release in 2019, but the Persistent Pack system and then the Saga expansion mostly broke that, and we are finally addressing that. But we really do not want to recreate this actual collaring event -- it would be quite a lot of work, in terms of development, and it would be hard to design it so players wouldn't be tempted to behave in non-wolfy ways during the event. So we finally decided to keep it simple: During winter months, there's a chance that wolves will get collared in the game. This occurs during dreams and time-skips, so players will be alerted to it by a special new dream. Upon waking, one or two or three wolves in your pack will have a radio collar! Same with rival packs too. Over the course of a game-year or two, enough wolves will be collared to reach the park's goal.

What is that goal? Published data shows that in wintertime, about 30% of wolves in the park have collars. But I'd also read that the goal is to have 1-2 collared wolves per pack, which doesn't quite match with that 30% figure. I asked Dan Stahler, head of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, and he explained that they take many factors into considering when deciding how many wolves to collar each year. How old are the current collars in that pack (since batteries eventually die)? Are some pack members likely to disperse in the coming year? Is the pack growing or shrinking overall? So drawing on that guidance, the game aims to have three wolves in each rival pack collared, and 1-3 wolves in the player pack collared, depending on the pack's size.

We expect that many players will enjoy this new feature, but some players really prefer wolves without collars.

In Game Settings, there is a new option

In-Game Wolf Collaring. Here you can disable in-game collaring entirely, or set it to affect only NPC wolves, or set it to affect all wolves including your player-wolf.

A few notes on that

• If you disable it, the collaring events still occur, but the collars are disabled, so if you later switch this on, then any wolves that have been secretly collared will suddenly be wearing those collars.

• Your wolf's customization will always override this setting, so you can force the collar on or off as you prefer.

• Collaring occurs only in Yellowstone maps, not in Lost River, since there are no biologists working in that area, wherever it might be.

This new feature is available now in the new public beta for v3.0.1e, out on Steam now! See the beta notes here and instructions on how to opt-into the beta! We expect to release this patch soon!

Learn more about radio collaring in Yellowstone.