No varied scent trails in the Taiga biome

I can't quite tell if this is a bug or just a cruelly designed game mechanic, but I have been living in the Taiga biome for weeks now and have Never seen a medium or large scent trail while hunting.

I've sent out well over 100 hunts (sometimes the full 20 a day that my pack is capable of), and about 95% of the trails I am able to find are critter trails, with the last 5% being small trails.

I thought that this might change once my hunting parties gained more synergy, but I had a party of 4 wolves at the highest possible synergy for over a week and still never saw a medium or large hunt trail. I've also been told by other players living in the Taiga biome that they have experienced this same issue, even with full synergy.

What makes me the most frustrated about this though is that I currently have a snake fetch quest that requires a caribou bull carcass-- with seemingly no way to acquire one. The caribou carcasses are supposed to come from large scent trails in the Taiga biome, but those don't seem to exist.

So now I'm stuck with a snake quest, barred out of earning experience from questing until either the timer ticks down, or I shovel out the currency for a skull to skip. I'm so frustrated by this.

I don't mind the idea of harder biomes being harder to live in, but this seems beyond reason. I feel like the hunt success should be the thing affected by difficulty, not the variance of trails you can find. Though it'd be one thing if these big trails were just Less common. They don't feel less common-- they're downright either not there, or the slimmest of chances.

I'm so close to level 15 on my lead wolf, and being barred out of a quest (unless I'm willing to drop the sc on a skip item) has me pulling at my hair. There aren't even any caribou carcasses on the TC that I can get (I assume for the same reasons I haven't been able to hunt one down).

In terms of help, I'd just love if anyone else in the Taiga biome can tell me if they've even Seen a large hunt trail-- and if so, how many. And if any mods see this, could you please either assuage my anxiety over this, or consider making it less of a gameplay wall?

EDIT: I decided to submit a ticket for more direct answers and apparently the scent trail variance is tied strongly to the stats of your wolves. So will probably have to just move out of the Taiga biome until my wolves are all chads u __ u

I really think it'd be nice if the game was more descriptive of what moving to a "challenging" biome entails. And I still think that either the scent trail variance shouldn't be the thing horribly affected by stats (so much as the success rate), or that the snake shouldn't be able to request items that your wolves are physically incapable of finding.

At the end of the day I suppose it's my fault for flippantly moving to a challenging biome just for the Aesthetic (Taiga is <3), but a "hey this might be a bad idea right now" message would have been very helpful. I didn't really assume that the biomes themselves had difficulty rankings outside of scouting (I thought that it was just challenging to scout, not that it would affect other things so dramatically).

Technically there is nothing "wrong" about moving to a challenging biome even if you don't have high statted wolves. If you can feed you pack with just critter preys and what you find in explore, you can easily live in there. Of course you have to take into consideration that some quests might become harder to complete.

So I don't think a warning about moving being a "bad idea" is needed. Thankfully, moving back to an easier biome isn't hard nor limited by a cooldown. I would say it's part of the learning curve of the game and one of those "mistake" players made in order to learn how the game work.

In theory, challenging biomes are there as some sort of goal for players to motivate them to get better wolves and build a higher statted pack in order to be able to live there, something created for when the game is a bit older and advanced.

Thank you for creating this topic! I was pulling out my hair trying to figure out why I was only getting critter trails in both the Rainforest and the Swamp :( Guess we're moving back to an easy biome!