WILD SEASONS -- MIGRATION, RARE ANIMALS AND PEDIGREES (27 September update)

Everything here is in the game menu: Life plus, Wild and country. Shortcuts: /migration, /rareanimal, /pedigree.

Seasonal migration

Every season some animals really move to other maps. They are real animals: you can hear them, hunt them and track them.

Autumn: crows from Cragspire gather over Sunflower Valley; wild boar from Boar Forest go to the Vineyard; coyotes from Willow Creek raid the Orchard.

Winter: wolves come down from the Frozen Pass into Sunshine Forest; a polar bear wanders from Glacier Station to Fjordheim; snow hares shelter below the Frozen Pass Monastery.

Spring: crows nest in Juniper Forest; hares spread into Belgrade Forest; boar sows move into Sunshine Forest.

Summer: pythons bask in the Arid Grassland; crows raid the Orchard's cherries; boar wander Juniper Forest.

There are never more than 12 visitors in the whole world. A hunted visitor is replaced after 20 minutes. When the season turns, the old visitors leave and new ones arrive.

Seasonal migration watch shows what is out there right now, how far and in which direction the nearest visitor on your map is, and what comes next season.

When visitors arrive on the map you are on, you hear a flock sound and a notice. Switch the notices off on the watch page or in notification settings (Seasonal migration).

Rare animals

About every three hours a rare animal appears in its own wild country: a pale, almost white one, an unusually dark one, or a giant one. It is a wolf, boar, bear, coyote, polar bear, lion, leopard or hare. It stays about 25 minutes (a little longer if someone is fighting it), and only one is ever out at a time.

It is much stronger than its kind: two and a half to four times the health, and the dark and giant ones hit harder.

Bring it down and its rare hide goes into your bag, with the title Rare Beast Hunter (five of them: Legend of the Wild Trails).

Use the rare hide from your bag to have it tanned and mounted: a trophy of its own in your trophy cabinet. Every kind (pale wolf, giant bear...) is a different trophy. A hide you got from another player mounts as a general rare-hide trophy.

Or photograph it: carry a camera, get within 12 steps, and choose Photograph it on the Rare animals page. You get the title Rare Wildlife Photographer, a photograph trophy for that kind (five photographs: Ghost Lens). Everyone can photograph the same animal once.

The Rare animals page tells you where it is, and on the same map how far and in which direction. The hall of rare sightings keeps the last 20: who hunted or photographed what, and which ones slipped away.

Announcements use the Rare animal sightings notification setting.

Your breeding book and pedigrees

Animals born in your barn now record both parents. A pedigree page shows three generations: the animal, its parents and its grandparents, whether each still lives in a barn, and how good the line is.

Open it from an animal's More about page (Pedigree), or from Wild and country, Your breeding book.

Line quality comes from the parents' and grandparents' breeding (plain, good or prize): no recorded line, a sound line, a good line, or a proven prize line.

What a good line gives: a pair from good lines has a slightly better chance of a good or prize young (at most 8 in 100 better), and a recorded good line earns up to 5 extra points with the animal show judges.

Choose the breeding pair: with two or more animals of one kind, pick which two are used on your daily barn round.

The village breeder's stud: if you keep only one animal of a kind, book the breeder's prize stud for it from its pedigree page. Fees: horse 11250 points, dog 5000, cat 3000, duck 1500, cow 3000, other kinds 2000. On your next daily barn round, with your animal healthy, loyalty 80 or more and a free place in the barn, a young one may be born (one young at most every three days, as always). Cancel any time before that for a full refund. Wolves and coyotes do not breed.

Animals born before 27 September have no recorded parents; their own young start a recorded line.