guide/faq for Optimal pup training

hello. the latest development update finally introduced a highly requested feature, which is the ability to train your pack's puppies to gain extra stats. pretty pogchamp.

between the news post introducing the feature and the tutorial quest intended to teach players about how it works, most people probably understand the basics of how it works, so that's not what this guide is going to be about. this is instead going to be about POWERGAMING (which, of course, assumes that you care about minmaxing stats in the first place. obviously it's cool if you don't but admittedly this game is pretty stacked in favor of people who do considering how brutal the hunting system can be)

IMPORTANT NOTE (which IS taught in the tutorial quest/news post but i feel the need to point out here anyways)

wolves who train pups NEED to have a higher stat than the pup in the skill they are training, and by a significant margin, or else the pup WILL NOT receive as many stats (and the difference is VERY significant). to get MAXIMUM STAT GAIN, the teacher needs to have at least 50% higher stat in the stat they're teaching.

for example: if you are training a pup in WISDOM, and the pup in question is starting with 100 wisdom, then the wolf TEACHING them the wisdom lesson needs to have at least 150 wisdom (so, halve the pup's stat, and add that half on top of the original stat to get the minimum number that the teacher needs to have)

question 1:

is it really that important to train every pup every day?

YES! pups can be trained on the day they are weaned (at 2.5 mo) and can no longer be trained once they reach the adolescent stage (at 6 mo, which means the LAST DAY THEY CAN BE TRAINED is actually at 5.5 mo, the day BEFORE they age up). this means you have all of SEVEN ROLLOVERS to train your pups. this is a pretty small window. missing a day can be kind of a big deal.

question 2:

what's the maximum extra stats i can get for each pup/should i go for the bonuses?

the bonus that you get for completing all three lessons in a given stat's "curriculum" is +9 (i do not know if this changes based on the stats of the wolf that taught the lessons). this means that the maximum gained stats you can get from completing any stat's curriculum is +27 to the fully trained stat (3+6+9=18, 18+9=27). with seven days worth of training, you can complete TWO complete stat curricula, thus gaining +27 to two different stats. and then after that you even have an extra day left to take a +9 in an extra stat of your choosing, resulting in a maximum stat gain of +63 (!!!!). fellow user fran has pointed out to me that you can also get to this number by fully training just ONE stat and then getting +9 in all the others, which is probably optimal for finishers, who only have one role stat instead of two.

if you DON'T get any bonuses at all, the highest total stat gain you can get is +57 (which you would get by taking a +9 in every stat and then a +6 in two stats) which while i guess isn't a huge overall stat loss, it still IS a stat loss, and since obviously roles only require one or two stats to be high, it is in fact much more Optimal™ to just pump the two stats you expect the wolf to use.

tl;dr: get the bonuses.

question 3:

what stats should i train my pup in?

that depends on what you want them to do, which probably also depends on what stats they already have. when it comes to hunting roles: chasers need speed and agility, stalkers need wisdom and smarts, and finishers need strength.

if you're a new player/have a new lead and you need dedicated scouts to fully explore the map, you should probably have one scout trained in strength and another trained in wisdom, since discovering the glacier/rainforest requires 101 wisdom/strength respectively, and that can be kind of hard to get early on in the game. when it comes to rescouting, though, it doesn't really matter. it's mostly just a way to power level a wolf so you can move them to another role later.

herbalists Supposedly need wisdom and smarts, and they GET wisdom and smarts from researching/crafting medicines, but as far as i know your herbalist's stats... don't actually do anything to make them more functional (yet). so i wouldn't worry too hard about who gets to be your herbalist.

for pups you plan on making your lead, however, your stats are a little more important, since they can make it much easier to win battles. fellow user relevantkoala has made a very very good guide about the battling system and how it works/how it can be gamed to your advantage, and based on her observations the best stats to train your lead in are probably speed, agility, and smarts (all of which can affect whether you move first in a fight, agility and i believe smarts can affect how often you get hit, speed makes the chase opening move more likely to work, and smarts makes the focus opening move more likely to work). strength can also be useful if you plan on doing a lot of latching and shearing/crushing.

do note, however, that your lead wolf's stats have to be PRETTY RIDICULOUSLY HIGH before they actually give you beneficial modifiers against enemies of your level or higher. they probably just WON'T until you're at least level 20. keep that in mind.

most pups are BORN with a stat array that lends itself to one thing or another. i would advise you not to rage against fate. if a pup is born with high chaser stats, train them in chaser stats. it doesn't matter how low their other stats are. focused stats are always going to be better than "well-rounded" ones, with maybe the exception of lead wolves.

one thing this new system is REALLY REALLY helpful for is pups with awkward "split" stat arrays, like, say, they have really high agility, but their wisdom is higher than their speed. if the gap is small enough, this can easily be fixed by training speed and ignoring wisdom, and bam, you now have a perfectly good chaser pup with no weird stat splits. hooray!

question 4:

does having multiple pups in a lesson at once spread out/"dilute" the stat gain?

nope. all pups receive the same amount of extra stats regardless of how many pups are taking the same lesson alongside each other.

that's all i have so far. i will answer questions in this thread and update this post with new information/new questions i see get asked a lot in the future >:)

This is great, thank you! I'd been meaning to calculate out how many stats are gained total and that stuff, but now I don't have to :) Your note about lead stats is also helpful. I'd semi-figured it out by logging my own battles and stat effects, but I gave that up because I kept forgetting to log things.

Point being, thank you for the guide! Only wish my newest hunting party hadn't literally just aged up when the update was released. Hoping to see some new role-specific studs come out of this, though!

Very nice guide, but I would like to offer a collection to this math: (3+6+9=15, 15+12=27)

3+6+9=18, so the stat bonus is 9

Another good stat spread is to grab bonus in one stat and +9s in the remaining four stats for a total of 63

OH duh thank you for correcting me, i will add that stuff to the post >:)

Thanks for the guide!

A note on herbalists: Because herbalists are in charge of 3-hour wisdom lessons, it's important for herbalists to have high wisdom! (I learned this the hard way - I just picked a cute herbalist without thinking about stats, and now it turns out she has lower wisdom than the puppies I want to train. oops)

Thank you for the informative guide! I have bookmarked it, in part just to remember which stats the different kinds of hunters need haha

Oooh this is great!! I'd like to add a little math that may help everyone out!

So as mentioned you can easily figure out how many stats a wolf will need to effectively train a pup by halving the pups stat and adding in back in. EX : lets say pups wisdon = 100   so... 50 + 100 = 150. easy.

But what if you're looking at the "Mentor" wolf? It's even easier. You can simply divide your "Mentor" wolfs stats by 1.5 

EX : lets say Mentor wolfs wisdom = 150   so... 150 /1.5 = 100 

I really like to be able to look at any wolf / pup and know who will be the best mentor so I hope this helps! 

I couldnt find the pupsitter. Did you miss it or did I just not see it?

@Sweetnose, for pupsitters stats do not matter at all. i guess since you can use them to teach the 3-hr speed lesson you might want them to have speed, but taking an old chaser and giving them the mentor role is probably easier, since pupsitters don't tend to level up very much and therefore don't tend to have very high stats in general.

@rattlesnakeacrobat

I have a question. For the 3hr training for smarts, it says I require a mentor or a lead. I know why I can't use a mentor wolf (I have none as none of my wolves are old enough), but what does it mean by lead? I can't choose my lead wolf to train the pups, and thus I can't get the bonus.