Wildhollow Walkthrough

Wildhollow is an adventure game that's part quest solving RPG, part animal breeding SIM, with a dollop of mini games and even a dash of HOG thrown in for good measure.

You, the story's hero, return to your hometown of Spring Valley after a long trip abroad, only to find that your parents have disappeared and their ranch, Wildhollow, has been burnt down! No one knows exactly what happened, but you vow to find out, rebuild the ranch and bring your parents home safe. To get to your goal you will need to balance between quest solving and looking after the ranch.

GENERAL TIPS

Basic Gameplay

Your main objective is to find out what happened to your parents. For this, you need to talk to everyone you meet. When you talk to someone you will get a dialogue menu with possible questions you can ask or answers you can give. There are no right or wrong options - whatever you select will eventually get you in the right place. Try all options in the dialogue menu, and if the conversation ends before you manage to do so, simply open the conversation again. Not only will this get you interesting new information or new quests, sometimes it's just really good fun! Often it pays to ask the same question a few times.

To get information out of people you will have to do many side quests for them. New locations will be unlocked on the world map as you go along. Pay close attention to what you're told, as the clues to solve the quests can be very subtle! When in doubt, talk to everyone again!

Each time you get to a new location, scan the entire map with your cursor; it will sparkle when you find a location or object of interest. Sometimes there may even be hidden stashes of money! Also, there are 13 animal statues hidden throughout the game - one for each possible animal breed.

Menus

In the top left corner of each window you will find the keys to your menus.

• The main menu will allow you to save and exit or change your settings.
• The inventory menu shows all your current items, both for quests and for the ranch, and your how much money you have.
• In the quests menu you can see where you are up to in your unsolved quests, as well as a list of the quests you already finished.
• The status menu shows you how long you've played, how many quests you've completed, how many breeds you've discovered and how many statues you've found. It also has a list of all the trophies you've won.
• The animal status key will appear as soon as you have your first animal. Clicking it gets you directly back to Wildhollow ranch, from wherever you are. The color of the icon will change depending on the status of your animals at the ranch. When all animals are in good health, the icon will be green, new or neutral animals will be indicated in gray and the icon will be red when an animal is in urgent need of care. When this happens, an alert sound will also be played.

Making Money

For a lot of the quests you will need money to buy items or pay fees. You can make money by

• completing quests for people and getting rewards
• selling animal food
• scanning new maps with your cursor
• breeding and selling animals

When you start out, most of your income will come from rewards for helping people out and finding the occasional hidden stash. However, very quickly this will no longer be enough. Although animal food can be found for free in abundance, it is quite a tedious job to collect a lot and selling it won't earn you a lot of money. So I'd only resort to that when you're really in a pickle! The best way to make money by far is to buy, breed and sell animals.

Ranch Animals

As soon as you've repaired the first stage of your ranch, you will be able to keep animals. The ranch needs to be repaired in three stages. The first will cost you $200 and allows you to keep 3 animals, the second costs $500 and allows you to keep 6 animals, and the third costs $1000 and allows you to keep 9 animals. There are two yellow squares in the top right corner of the screen where you can keep an additional two animals. These animals do not need feeding or grooming, but they can't be used for breeding until they're back on the ranch.

Buying

You can buy the three basic animal breeds (bunny, catfish and bovine) from Zachary at Zachary's Ranch and one more secret breed at a location that will be revealed later in the game. Zachary will only give you two options at a time. If you don't like the options, say goodbye to him and then instantly talk to him again. He will have two new options for you then.

General Care

To look after your animals, you need to keep them fed, happy and healthy. In the main ranch window you can see how happy and well fed your animal is, and whether its health is increasing. It also shows how much food you have available and the other animal care items you own. To feed an animal, simply drag and drop food onto it.

When you double click the animal you get its status window. The status window will tell you the animal's breed, sex and age; show you its food, mood and health bars; lists which types of food it does and doesn't like; and tells you its current resale value.

An animal's status bars will be fairly low when it first arrives at the ranch. Feeding it foods it likes will instantly increase its mood and health. Feeding it foods it doesn't like will make it very unhappy! Apples are the only food that all your animals will eat, but they only affect the animal's mood if they're listed among the animal's favorites. Late in the game you will be able to buy food potions that increase the food and mood status of all breeds.

Feeding will only get you so far in improving an animal's mood. To maximally improve its mood you have to groom the animal by dragging and dropping a brush onto it. The cheap brush will only increase mood by 2 points max. The expensive unicorn hair brush can increase mood by 5 points at a time. You need to pause a few seconds between each stroke to get the maximum effect.

An animal's health will increase automatically as long as either its food or its mood status is still higher than 50%.

It is no disaster if you get distracted and an animal's stats drop to 0. The only things that happen, really, are that their resale value will be low and you need to spend some time on increasing their stats again. They never die, neither of ill health nor of old age.

FULL GUIDE HERE