• Very old game saves (from before February 2021) can no longer be loaded (and are not displayed in the Load Saved Game panel), due to a vulnerability in that old code which would allow a malicious actor to run malicious code on the player's computer.

• In-game radio collaring: Player-pack and rival wolves can be radio-collared during winter months. For player-wolf and packmates, this can happen during each sleep/dream sequences (and is indicated with a special dream sequence). Smaller packs will eventually have one collared wolf, while larger packs will have two or three. NPC packs will, over the course of one or two winter seasons, have two or three wolves collared.

• New option in Game Settings: Gameplay to disable collaring entirely, or enable it only for NPC wolves, or enable it fully (for player-wolf as well as NPCs).

• In-game collaring only occurs in Yellowstone maps, not in either Lost River.

• In-game collaring can occur in 2-Player Saga Multiplayer games, but not in other multiplayer game modes.

• Collar selection in Wolf Customization overrides the Gameplay settings selection, so you can force a collar on your player-wolf if you like.

• Two-player Saga Multiplayer: When one player dies as an Elder Wolf, the game now pauses for both players and applies the same logic as in pre-Saga single-player to determine which young pups will survive and then become playable in the Family Tree.

• My Account: Friends: New toggles to show/hide Offline Friends and to sort the list of Friends alphabetically. Also a new subpanel to show Blocked players (and unblock them).

• Game Settings: Display: New slider to adjust Nametag opacity.

• Display new notification if game cannot connect to game server/accounts, and the language or multiplayer region is set to Russian, explaining that this is likely due to issues within Russia and out of our control.

• Wolf swimming: Improved animation, and wolf now turns head in direction of turning when swimming.

• Refinements to wolf's jump movements.

• Multiplayer: Refinements to weather syncing between host and client players.

• Added notification when player-wolf is carrying pup and energy drops to zero but pup can't be dropped because terrain is very difficult.

• Improved controller detection to identify the controller model being used and display appropriate glyphs.

• Some memory optimizations.

• In rare circumstances, after joining a rival pack, some pups in that pack have a weight of zero.

• In Growing Pups quest, pups' legs sometimes stretch unnaturally.

• When going into building interiors when there is no snow on wolf's fur creates snow on fur.

• Family Tree: When opened from Pack Info, button in top-right incorrectly says "Back to My Wolves."

• Multiplayer: For client players, research airplane audio sound doesn't respect Human Noises setting in Game Setting: Audio.

• My Account: Messages: Multiple-delete button not appearing as it used to. Also added a Select All button.

• Setup New Game: Sleep Types not displayed for Tower Fall map.

• Some errors triggered by initialization issue with scent tracks in multiplayer.

• Bug Reporter: Word-wrapping sometimes causes text field to move annoyingly.

• NPC wolves occasionally have very short "corgi" legs. Also added more logging about this so please submit a bug report if you see it happening.

• Pronghorn doe carcass inflates when it's nearly fully consumed.

• Tower Fall: Lynx eyes are red sometimes on Basic Sky & Veg mode.

• Tower Fall: In one area on the west border, prey animals can go beyond the world wall.

• Tower Fall: Pathfinding issues at a few dens.

• Tower Fall: Some rocky areas have misaligned colliders.

• Tower Fall: Minor den and terrain issues.

So much of what we know about Yellowstone wolves is from the radio collars that biologists put on them.

Every winter, Yellowstone biologists go out and collar some wolves. (It's easier to spot wolves against the snow, without the cover of vegetation, and often there's some deep snow on the ground to slow the wolves down.) Using a tracker airplane to locate the packs and a helicopter to dart individual wolves, this is quite a production for the biologists and quite a scene for the wolves. The biologists not only size and place the collar, they take blood samples and many measurements. All the data produced from this effort has had led to incredible gains in our knowledge about wolf ecology and behavior... but it is quite a scene.

The game has had some logic to put collars on NPC wolves since Early Access release in 2019, but the Persistent Pack system and then the Saga expansion mostly broke that, and we are finally addressing that. But we really do not want to recreate this actual collaring event -- it would be quite a lot of work, in terms of development, and it would be hard to design it so players wouldn't be tempted to behave in non-wolfy ways during the event. So we finally decided to keep it simple: During winter months, there's a chance that wolves will get collared in the game. This occurs during dreams and time-skips, so players will be alerted to it by a special new dream. Upon waking, one or two or three wolves in your pack will have a radio collar! Same with rival packs too. Over the course of a game-year or two, enough wolves will be collared to reach the park's goal.

What is that goal? Published data shows that in wintertime, about 30% of wolves in the park have collars. But I'd also read that the goal is to have 1-2 collared wolves per pack, which doesn't quite match with that 30% figure. I asked Dan Stahler, head of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, and he explained that they take many factors into considering when deciding how many wolves to collar each year. How old are the current collars in that pack (since batteries eventually die)? Are some pack members likely to disperse in the coming year? Is the pack growing or shrinking overall? So drawing on that guidance, the game aims to have three wolves in each rival pack collared, and 1-3 wolves in the player pack collared, depending on the pack's size.

We expect that many players will enjoy this new feature, but some players really prefer wolves without collars. In Game Settings, there is a new option: In-Game Wolf Collaring. Here you can disable in-game collaring entirely, or set it to affect only NPC wolves, or set it to affect all wolves including your player-wolf. A few notes on that:

* If you disable it, the collaring events still occur, but the collars are disabled, so if you later switch this on, then any wolves that have been secretly collared will suddenly be wearing those collars.

* Your wolf's customization will always override this setting, so you can force the collar on or off as you prefer.

* Collaring occurs only in Yellowstone maps, not in Lost River, since there are no biologists working in that area, wherever it might be.

This new feature is available now in the new public beta for v3.0.1e, out on Steam now! See the beta notes here and instructions on how to opt-into the beta! We expect to release this patch soon!

Learn more about radio collaring in Yellowstone[www.nps.gov].