This guide is focused on wolves and their mechanics in-game, especially how they can be used to augment your hunting and long-term survival. This guide will NOT discuss how to get settled in at a base (although I highly recommend the Camp Office as a base of choice), but rather focus on using the wolf mechanics to min-max your survival.




This is what my base looks like at 50 days, with 7 bullets to spare and tons of wood and water.

• A base of operations (I recommend the Camp Office, as it is the easiest place to use Wolf Mechanics to your advantage)
  
• A Hunting Rifle and Ammo -- I generally find about 15 bullets after exploring most of the map (not including the bunker)
  
• Flares
  
• A Hunting Knife (while not necessary, extremely useful for saving time and calories)
  
• Sufficient wood to cook approximately 14 kg of meat.

If you have spent any significant time in the game, you will realize that wolves don't just chase you. They chase the deer too. And they kill the deer.

Deer, conveniently enough, run away from you in a straight line.

Catch my drift yet?

If you haven't, here is the plain and simple gist of it:

• Scare deer into wolf.
  
• Let wolf kill deer.
  
• Scare wolf off with flare, or kill wolf for extra meat.
  
• Harvest so much meat you can barely walk.
  
• Forage tons of wood to burn calories, so that you can eat all the meat before it goes bad.

Here's how:

• Look for a place where a deer and wolf are commonly found within each other's vicinity. I highly recommend Mystery Lake.

This is what you should see.

• Sneak around the wolf and the deer until you are behind the deer with the wolf behind the deer (from your point of view)

• Scare deer into wolf.

• Scare wolf off with flare, or kill wolf with rifle.

• Harvest as much meat as you can carry, and go back home to cook it.

• When hunting deer and wolves in this way, carry as little gear as possible (clothes, 1 L of water, and hunting tools). You will generally be harvesting anywhere from 8-16 kg of meat in a single run. This can be dangerous if your condition is low and your fatigue is high.
  
• Try to have at least 600 calories in your belly before hunting via this method. You need time to position yourself relative to the deer and wolf, harvest the meat, and get back to your base and cook some of the meat before you go hungry.
  
• Because you will have so many calories available to you from hunting in this way, you need to find a way to burn all those calories before the meat goes bad. I suggest foraging wood as the fastest way to burn calories.
  
• When you first collect the meat, only cook as much as you need to fill up on calories. Wait til the raw meat in your inventory is at 60% condition and then cook it all. This makes the meat last significantly longer because the cooking process adds 50% condition to the meat quality. (Edit: Since last update this has changed. Cooking adds ~30% condition)
  
• Try to save your canned/dried goods as long as possible. These foods take a significant amount of time to deterioriate and almost never give food poisoning unless they have been opened already. You should expect to use these food items only as a last minute survival tactic, or until you have run completely out of bullets, flares, antiseptic, and bandages.
  
• Wolves are not always scared by flares. When throwing flares at them, stand a safe distance away and be ready to pull out your gun if things go pear-shaped.
  
• Hunt and gather wood from outside the Camp Office from 1-6 PM during the day to minimize the effects of cold.
  
• Store any extra cooked meat in containers (doubles how long it lasts)

If you're starting to run low on flares or bullets, you can use your own body as a way to scare off the wolf from the deer carcass.

Instead of expending a bullet or a flare, you will be expending your condition, antiseptic, and bandages. This means you will actually charge the wolf and let it attack you -- be prepared to fight it off.

Because this trick might kill you (I had a wolf take me from 100% condition to 2% and survived with 1%), only use it when you are OUT of bullets and flares.

With the recent update (.156), attacking wolves is actually a very viable option. Antiseptic now gets multiple uses, you can make your own bandages, and your hunting knife helps in the wolf fight. Tapping RMB rapidly with a knife in hand can scare the wolf off with only 5-10% condition loss, and if you want to kill the wolf, maxing out the power bar will usually only drain you 20% condition and result in a dead wolf.

Here's a list of problems with using wolves in this way (in no particular order):

• Food poisoning will be your nemesis. On average I only get about 28 antibiotics per run, and since your character uses 2 pills per ingestion, you can only take 14 food poisonings before food poisoning can kill you. In other words, try to consume as much cooked meat as possible when it is above 50% condition. For other ways to draw out the condition of the meat, check the tips section. I personally have observed that venison is safer to eat than wolf meat, but by no means is a guarantee.
  
• Bullets and Flares will eventually run out. Once they do, you may resort to the Advanced Trick I recommended, but after you run out of antiseptic and bandages, there will only be whatever canned goods you have saved left.
  
• Cloth for repairing clothes may run out (thanks to .154, not as quickly any more). Try not to waste cloth.
  
• Scrap metal for repairing your hunting knife will likely run out. Scrap metal should generally only be used to repair 3 things -- your hunting rifle (until it runs out of bullets), your hunting knife (most useful use of scrap metal), and an emergency can opener (have at least one for the end of your run).

This guide is a little game-y and in following its suggestions, you will see some of the flaws in the game design.

For example, food poisoning at the time of this writing (10/19/14) is extremely deadly when compared to real life. I went from 100% condition to dead in about 8 hours without antibiotics. In real life, most food poisoning kills you from dehydration and, in more severe cases, gradual organ failure. However, organ failure would occur over weeks, not hours.

Additionally, deer behavior doesn't make sense -- in real life they would see the wolf and steer clear of it, even if they were running from you. Deer also run way longer than they should to get away from you, and when they have stopped running, they head back to the location where they were originally patrolling (which can work to your advantage if your wolf has gone full idiot).

Also, you will see wolves acting in weird ways. I've noticed wolves consume an entire deer in less than an hour. This makes no sense -- they are eating more than their own body weight in an hour, and they're still hungry afterwards! I've also observed some wolves outright ignore deer I've sent their way or had delayed reactions to the deer (I saw a deer waltz right by a wolf and the wolf didn't react until the deer was well past him). On one occasion I saw a wolf that was constantly scared of me -- instead of stalking and attacking me, it would run away from me every time I came close. I'm guessing this was a bug with the flares. I've also chased two deer into a wolf once, and it was so hungry it killed both of them. Greedy little wolf.

Following the guide can actually let you last for 70+ days. This would be long enough for the harshest part of the winter to pass, and possibly long enough to last you into spring (depending on when your character crashed). However, there is no observable change in weather. In one of my runs, I've survived over 150 days, and have yet to see any change in weather.

You will observe animal corpses degrade insanely quickly -- I saw a freshly killed wolf have its meat quality drop to 17% overnight, despite being frozen solid. I'm not a nutritionist, but I'm fairly sure that frozen meat lasts longer.

Certain items will degrade too quickly (IE clothes, rifle, can opener).