How to Give Your (NBW) Hunting Team the Best Start

Do you want to train some amazing hunter wolves? Here I will walk you through the optimal process to achieve this goal. It's mainly tailored towards those starting fresh with NBWs, but it can be adapted to other teams as well.

Note that this will be quite an advanced (and long) guide to min-maxing your wolves' stats for hunting. It is not necessarily for beginners, as it assumes you know or are familiar with which personalities get along with one another and which stats are relevant to each role, and that harder biomes and larger trails give more exp. You should also know a little bit about how stats are inherited. But it should set you up for an amazing personal line of fantastic hunters!

Also note that from my experience, this is the optimal strategy. If you are a more casual player, that's ok! You don't have to follow all the steps of this guide, or you can be a little more lenient in your training or criteria. Your wolves may not be ultra mega stat monsters, but they will still be quite good!

1. Core Game Mechanics To Be Aware Of

There are a few somewhat hidden things to know before starting your hunting teams. 

First, hunting team success is based on a combination of individual relevant stats, proficiency, and synergy, plus trail size and biome. Overall stats do not matter for your hunters, only relevant stats: Strength for Finishers, Speed and Agility for Chasers, and Wisdom and Smarts for Stalkers. This was announced in development update 6 (and mostly overshadowed by Gene), but there was a hunting update in there too! The admins released a spreadsheet to help approximate the success chances based on certain values. From this formula, the "Wolf Stats" input is defined as "a single wolf's role stats, e.g. 50 stats in each Agility and Speed for Chasers." 

• Why is this important?
• It means that for the best hunters, you want your wolf to gain relevant stats.
• Also keep this in mind for the next generation; a better finisher will come from a stud with 300 strength and 700 total stats vs a stud with 250 strength but 1000 total stats. 

Second, stats gained upon level-up tend to prioritize the top two stats, with a healthy dose of RNG thrown in. The stats gained are NOT based on role, personality, or anything else. This was admin-confirmed in this bug report.

• Why is this important?
• Upon level-up, you want your wolves relevant stats to be the highest so that the stats gained at level up have the biggest chance to be allocated to the correct categories.

Third, as wolves do their tasks, they have a chance to earn "bonus" stats based on their role. Herbalists can earn wisdom and smarts by mixing medicines (NOT foraging), scouts get different stats depending on the biome they scout, and hunters gain stats relevant to their role. This is somewhat common knowledge, but have you paid attention to how often it occurs? In general, the cap on stat gain per rollover is +2 +4! Increased in Development Update 19. Scouts have a smaller chance of gaining bonus stats. Because scouting takes so long, without guarana, it is reasonable to go on 5 scouts per day. Hunters can go on 10 hunts, meaning they have twice the chance of getting bonus stats.

• Why is this important?
• Consistency is key in training your hunting teams. It will help the most, over the long run, to send them on all 10 hunts each RO so they have the greatest chance of gaining bonus stats.

2. Assembling Your Dream Team(s)

Ideally, you can start two hunting teams at once so that you can pairbond one of each role. But if you don't think you can maintain that many hunts per day, that's ok too!

If you are starting out with NBWs, the right chased wolf is as good as gold. You will want to look for young, high stat NBWs. Young so they have the greatest amount of time to gain relevant stats, and high-stat so they get a jumpstart from level one. You many have noticed, but regular NBWs total stats tend to correlate with age. As in, higher stat wolves are older. However, since chased wolves under 5 years keep the age they were when chased, AND their stats are randomly shuffled, you can get lucky and get a young chased wolf with high stats. For reference, I have seen NBWs as low as 186 and as high as 282.

Here's how I set up my filter on the TC when combing for good NBW candidates: minimum of 260 stats, under 1 year 6 months, and "NBW" in the title. You can play with the criteria and see what fits your goals. However, be aware that it counts the pups' stats as well, so the young and high stat filters could grab the pup with a NBW mom.

Now remember that relevant stats are the most important. So you will also want to look for a good stat distribution. Unfortunately (?), NBWs are extremely even in where their stats are allocated. To be set up for maximum success, you'll want to look for ones that are higher in strength, or BOTH speed and agility, or BOTH wisdom and smarts.

Lets say you are looking for a chaser, who needs high speed and agility.

For example, this NBW to the left has rather high stats! But they are distributed all over the place. He will tend to gain stats in speed and smarts, which will split the relevant stats and won't make him as good of a chaser as he could be.

Now, this NBW has overall lower stats. However, speed and agility are the top two! Not by much, but that's really the best you can hope for. So this one is set up to be a better chaser, and honestly, I would choose this wolf over the higher stat one.

You can still use the left wolf after a lot of "puptraining jail" (see the next section!) but it will take a while to correct, and you'll need a lot of fodder pups to use as trainees.

Of course, like all things in this game, you will still need a good amount of luck as well. Level-up stats will prioritize the highest two, but it is not guaranteed (don't mind the orange filter). And this is a stat guide, so I am obviously only concerned with stats. You might have different goals with bases or markings, and take that into consideration when finding your new hunters. That's okay too! Even if the stats are a little off and not perfect, we can still (hopefully) fix it in the next section.

But to make sure their stats stay on the right track, you will want to monitor the level ups to make sure they are going the way you want them to. If they start to split and not gain stats where you want, you might want to cut your losses and find a different NBW, or change their role to what they end up favoring.

This is mostly a problem when looking for NBWs. If you decide to start from bred pups, it's not difficult to breed your own from hunter studs or find some on the TC that already have an edge in the desired stats. Now, the baseline is always changing and it depends on which generation of pups you want, but searching for over 80 relevant stats is a decent start. Just make sure they are under 80 in the other categories! Over 100 will be even better, but at that point you will probably run into higher generations or leaderboard lineage. It just depends on what your goals are!

3. Training Your Dream Team(s)

BIG HUGE EDIT:

It seems counterintuitive, but with new teams where their stats are all very close together like in the example above, you should begin hunting critter trails exclusively in an easy starter biome (Grasslands, Deciduous Forest, or Mountains) for a week or so. That gives the least experience, and consequently the greatest time to accumulate bonus stats in-between level-ups. This helps create a buffer to avoid a few wayward level-ups from messing up the entire stat distribution. (If you have started with trained wolves or bred pups that already excel at their role, this step is less necessary unless you want to build some synergy before going off the deep end).

This also helps if you don't have totally perfect NBWs. Let's say for a stalker, wisdom is the highest but smarts is equal to or just a little below strength. This way you could try to accumulate a good amount of bonus smarts before level-ups skew it too much.

Keep an eye on their level-ups and stat gains, and change roles if necessary. In the above example, if your stalker keeps getting points in strength, maybe it would be worth it to switch it to a finisher role? Evaluate as you go don't be afraid to switch it up if something better comes along. It's much easier to change in this early period then later down the line.

Then when you have your relevant stats a decent amount higher than the third highest stat (a separation of 5 or so is good), THEN it's off to the edges of the map. You will probably want to move to the hardest biome your pack can manage for the most experience. But be sure you can feed everyone! Especially if you are starting with NBWs, you won't be catching much. 

No matter what biome you are in, though, if you want to maximize exp, you should always pick the largest trail you can find. Of course, catching a large trail will get the most exp. But that doesn't always happen! Still, an unsuccessful larger trail will give more exp than a successful smaller trail. 

The general rule of thumb is that for each biome difficulty you move up, you get the same amount of exp from a trail one step smaller. For example, you get ABOUT the same exp from a small trail in the swamp as a critter trail in the rainforest. And because you aren't guaranteed to find bigger trails, it's better to go to the more difficult biome.

Then while you are there, just stay the course. Once your team is set and where you want it, the most important thing is to be consistent and send all your hunts out, every day, as much as you can. Move back to an easier biome for winter if you need to. Hang out in the desert or taiga if you have a puppy boom. But send those hunts out! Every day. For months. Yes, it's a grind. But checking in every so often to send out a hunt doesn't take up too much time, if you are able to log in throughout the day like that. If you are ambitious and want to run three hunting teams, I recommend a timer. 

 4. Breeding Your Dream Team(s)

You might notice that I have thus far left this part out! Well, that's because appearance, sex, and pairbonds can all be changed (at a cost), but stats are set in stone. It's a good idea to wait to sex change or form pairbonds or look for studs or anything like that until your team has gained a few levels and there's no question that they might need to switch roles or be replaced. If you are making pairbonds, you'll want to pair the finishers and the stalkers together of course. But you have more options with chasers, so you can wait until even later for those to determine the best pair. 

If you have the spare GC, sex change the older of the two to male, as they can breed at an older age than females. Because if you want to maximize stats, you should breed at the last possible moment for the highest possible stats.

To figure out how late is too late, look at your females'  "age in rollovers" in the breeding information box. 172 ROs is the last day females can be in heat, so make sure they are not on cooldown then and you miss it! It's ok to skip a few heats and elk heart as necessary to sneak those last few stats in. Likewise, the last day males will be guaranteed to be around to breed is 179 ROs. They can still breed after that, but every RO they have a random chance to die so I wouldn't count on it!

On the day she breeds, the female will have a 24 RO cooldown if you let the birth happen naturally, or 20 RO if you IBF. So that way you can also figure out if you need to IBF or not to see if the 4 days will make a difference.

Sometimes, even if you do everything right, you just get unlucky and there's nothing you can do about it. For example, this girl was a chaser all her life but early on she got some unlucky level-up rolls favoring smarts. Eventually the gap was too big for +1s to overcome (especially because some went to agility) and I guess she just keeps reading books instead of running around. So she's part of a G2 T3 project now instead of breeding for chaser stats! It just depends on how big of a deal this is to you. It can still be balanced out in the next generation if bred to a dumb chaser. However, this guide should give you the best chances of starting them out right. Good luck and happy hunting!

Reserved post

Feel free to ask questions below and I will try to help!

I have one question 

Why would you do this to yourself? What are you trying to atone for? 

This is awesome!! Thanks for putting it together! 

Do you recommend using the critter trail first only method for higher stat wolves that are just starting out?  

(Lol, Unika.)

LOL. It is suffering, sometimes.

The critter trail thing is only really necessary when the stats are pretty close together and you want to give the relevant ones a boost. If their desired stats are already far enough ahead there's no need to bother with that! 

Edit: thanks for the question though, I clarified it in the post!

This +2 RO cap, I didn't know till I checked user logs and realized wolves who have gained at least 2 bonus stats during the day can't get any more till RO. Good to know.

Btw are you sure swamp small trails give as much EXP as rainforest critter trails? From the data found in this thread you can see swamp small trails give more EXP. I would compare rainforest critter trails to desert small trails though. I think the EXP gain has some multipler that is {1, 2, 4, 6, 8} for biome difficulty and {1, 2, 3, 4} for trail size.