What is your playstyle?

How do you manage and run your wolf pack? What challenges do you give yourself? What's your limit, towards anything? Do you stick to certain appearance thresholds, or just go all out, or somewhere in between?

You don't have to stick to these questions or answer them at all--but the more said, the better!

My playstyle is keeping my pack small...ish. I'm attempting to keep a strategy where I have a main hunting team and an "apprentice" hunting team. With both of these I'm able to provide for my small pack while selling my excess to make funds. When it comes to breeding/keeping wolves... I prioritize high stats so I don't breed very often which works well with the small pack playstyle that I have. Anyone that doesn't contribute isn't kept and is either sold or chased to help enhance the chase pool because most everyone from my pack is now either a Tier II and/or with many markings. 

My playstyle is somewhat complex but boils down to the main goals of:

1. Limiting myself to using wolves I find in Explore for new pack members. No studs, no buying wolves from the TC.

2. Gaining stats over the generations

3. Working towards looks goals

At least, that shapes my Non-Canon pack. My Canon Pack is just my lead wolf, their mate, and their pups, and is just big enough to fill all roles for one Hunting Team, an Herbalist, a Scout, and a Pupsitter. Currently, one of the pups has taken a mate that’s a second Scout, but I’m unsure how I’d go about further expansion to account for more pairs. Maybe trade off Scouting roles daily. *shrugs* Leads will always come from this pack, and mates for pack members are always sourced from the Non-Canon pack.

Back to said Non-Canon pack, I keep a Hunting team and a Pupsitter here. Currently, these wolves consist of several mated pairs, but due to the small size of this pack and my goal of increasing stats, I don’t want to keep it that way. Once my current Breeding Male retires, I’ll be assigning a single Breeding Male for the Non-Canon pack to breed to, and ultimately play it in the harem-style I play Lioden in - keeping track of lineages through the female lines for replacement purposes. This will allow stats to steadily increase, and also allow me to reinforce traits I want. Yes, this means my pack will ultimately be IB through half-sibling mating, but I’m not playing the wolf-selling game.

Good finds in Explore are kept as replacement members of the Non-Canon pack, and may take other NBW mates in the meantime until there’s a slot to fill. As they don’t have roles, their stats will be low, but I can and will propagate desirable traits until there’s a slot for them.

I also only have one growing pup litter per Pupsitter, and only one Pupsitter per pack. This is to keep my pack to a more manageable size while I let pups grow to Chase them as adults. It also guarantees Pupsitters a consistent stream of Exp and for the best pup of each litter, survival. Plus it means I won’t run out of pair bond breedings.

Honestly, I don't think I have a specific play-style. I have tons of fun though, and it's cool to see how everyone else plays.

Mine's changed a decent bit.

I initially intended to only breed each wolf 1-2 times in their life, but things haven't quite worked out that way, haha! Now I breed my favorites much earlier on (and will probably breed them more frequently too), all while trying to balance not keeping too many of their pups (which is hard because those usually become favorites too).

I've also taken on more projects than intended. Originally I was going to focus on Monochromes with a "side" of Warm bases. Now I've got Cool and Muted wolves on top of that. And I'm also going to be working on breeding Melanistic wolves now that I have two NIB pups.

To limit myself, I try to set minimum stat requirements (generally ~400) before I breed a wolf. But if I know they're not going to hit that in their lifetime, then I'll breed them once or twice anyways.

I don't write lore so I just use the sub-head below wolves' names to track who's breeding with who. I used to use a spreadsheet but I haven't updated it in over a month lmao. Most of the tracking is done in my head and I just hope I don't forget anything important.

As far as breeding itself goes, I go for a mix of appearance- and stat- priorities. I'll take a prettier but lower-statted wolf over an uglier but higher-statted one generally.

In terms of roles, I've recently decided on a rotation: once a wolf hits around 5-6 years they'll be switched out of their hunting party and into pupsitting. I ignore personalities (rarely have issues there) and instead keep similarly-aged wolves together in hunting parties. As such, younger adults get cycled into hunting parties so they can earn levels quicker and get better stats. There are currently 4 hunting parties (one only has three wolves) and I send them out in turn, so party 1 goes out, then party 2 goes out, and so on.

I keep a lot of pupsitters so they're each watching about 2-3 pups at a time. In almost three months, I've been lucky enough to never have a pup die.

Scouts also get rotated semi-frequently in my pack (except for my stud). I'll level a pretty, high-stat wolf up to around 10 through scouting and then see if there's anyone else who needs the boost.

Ideally, I was going to keep my pack small. But that hasn't stuck. I try to minimize where I can, by not keeping too many pups and even cutting some breeding projects out completely. Don't really let myself look at wolves in the TC/forums too frequently either--those are huge weaknesses for me!

I sympathize all too strongly to my wolves. It's easy to pick and choose which pup from a litter will stay or go, but in terms of allowing wolves by other means staying...it's a little harder. There are just so many beautiful wolves and patterns out there! I hate having to try and keep a small pack. I'm on this game often enough to keep my pack amused and fed. The only problem is exp. Having every role except hunter and pupsitter be limited is, of course, extremely limiting the amount of exp earned that's shared around. Otherwise I'd have like 40 wolves...but I'm forced to keep my hard cap at 25.

I go by a Warrior Cats style lore, and am recently trying to implement a "no breeding until 500+ rule." In terms of anything else...I don't know what I want to do. I've been all over the place with my goals. Originally my 'goal' was to just 'breed randomly according to who would be compatible personality-wise' to 'only breed x eyes' to 'only breed wolves with x y z-type markings' to nothing. I can't stick to any appearance-restricting playstyle, or one that excludes some wolves from breeding as opposed to another (unless they're just potato all around)

That's a big chunk of the reason why I posted this thread! I'm looking for inspiration on a playstyle, because right now I'm kind of floating around aimlessly, and I'd like to have some direction. Otherwise 'just playing the game' wouldn't feel as fulfilling.

-cracks knuckles-

So I’ve been in it for the lore potential from the start, more or less, because I’m fascinated by how the ever-changing nature of the mechanics lend themselves to an ongoing story as opposed to “collect pretty pets, they sit there until/unless you yeet ’em, rinse/repeat.” But also I’ve been busy lately and also decided to start a breeding project, to keep things exciting in gameplay even if I can’t hype myself up over writing development. Still, I’ve found this is more than enough to keep me busy for >5 in-game years and counting >:3

I think from the getgo my only real “rule” was aiming for a monochrome pack—although keeping my obligatory plain NBWs from the start as long as they may live (RIP 4/7 of them, at the time of writing) threw a wrench in that, as has insisting on breeding them & keeping at least one offspring, because it makes for a better story than “and then they all just died and new randos came along to replace them.” So sentimentality’s had me by the tail since day one, basically :D

• 15 adult slots maximum, forever. I like to keep everyone fed/played with (unless intentionally neglected for ~lore~), and this seems to be a good compromise between having lots of wolves and having the patience to do all that clicking manually. The project and my lore oldies are going to test this limit very soon, which oughta be fun.
• Every wolf has a role or they go yeet; adult freeloaders are strictly banned in this house, unless they’re on the TC or set to replace a current role or something. On that note:
• Two main hunting parties, romantic/aggressive and friendly/stoic, and the rest are kinda just cobbled together on a third party without regard for personality coherence so they can be Doing Something.
  
• I try to avoid buying wolves (although this isn’t a hard rule), partially because they’re trickier to write for with all that unknown past history (ik I can wipe it but then what’s the point of basing lore on the game at all), and partially because chased/special NBWs are more fun. But hypothetically I would only buy T2+3s with >400-ish stats, with the stat minimum increasing as I eyeball my current wolves’ numbers; the bought wolf would need to be about on par with the leveled pack or higher to be worthwhile.
  
• I went ham on breeding once on a whim and it was great for lore but I Can Not Do That Again. Right now I’m basically only breeding wolves if they’re level 20, or if they’re sentimental and I want to carry on their lineage. (Or if they hit some arbitrary stat threshold I make up on the spot, or w/e. But I’ve had >400-stat wolves die without a single kept offspring, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) Incidentally this helps a lot in the small pack department, because wow these guys level slow :^D
  • No limit on studs. I prioritize the higher-level lads and aim for similar stat maximums, and if there’s a wolf within the pack that fits the bill better then they might take priority for #hashtagLore, but I honestly do not care about throwing SC to the stud fee void.

Uhh, what else… I currently only have one scout, who I’m tentatively keeping in the role til my current lead kicks the bucket because if she could match his level or higher that’d be grand. Used to have two scouts, but after hitting lvl20 they moved to hunting; I… have no clue who if anyone will fill the other slot, tbh 🤔

I also don’t use pupsitters unless I absolutely have to, come to think of it. The lost proficiency messages when they inevitably switch roles is annoying, and I don’t breed often enough to warrant raising fodder pups to keep proficiency up. But maybe this’ll change with the breeding project, we shall see.

Oh yeah, and I prefer to let wolves die of old age, but aforementioned slot issues might force me to kill some off early. I mean, let’s face it, it’s not realistic for every important character to make it to seniority, never mind wild animals. unless they’re from ThunderClan or something :P

TL;DR, kinda: small pack, forcibly-enforced via slot limit (and hiding the slot-adding boxes with CSS lol), breeding for stats and sentimentality, no freeloaders, winging literally everything else. I guess you could call it “floating around aimlessly,” but I haven’t missed a rollover since joining and I’m having fun :>

I typically follow a lore based playstyle and follow a more 'nomadic' lifestyle in the northern, more colder regions, which means keeping the pack small (max 25 adults). To prevent being overrun with pups (especially ugly/low stats), I separate wolves that breed and dont breed and any wolves underneath a certain stat (rn it's 450) don't get the breeding rank. I also don't like keeping many males within the pack, even with breeding pairs unless it's for a certain bloodline im working towards (none at the moment!)

As for challenged, I personally try to move my pack to a different biome once every one or two years in order to work towards higher stats and to give my wolves a challenge. I also try to breed wolves into the pack rather than use NBWs or buy wolves in order to establish a bloodline (and bc of lore purposes). However, occasionally I do accept the pretty NBW or wolf from the trading center c: However, I stick to cool and monochrome wolves, since warm colors don't really catch my eye and it doesn't fit in with the arctic wintery biomes my wolves roam.

Even so I do like variety with my wolves and whilst i dont like warm markings, I love wolves with patches (especially the ones that look like oreos) and I love heterochromia and blue-shaded eyes alot!! I hope that it makes sense ^^"