Losing Braincells While Trying to Find Camouflaged Reindeer

[Fark]

Recently I was feeling confident ingame after a few successful hunts and quests so I accepted the "Animal in Forest Cover" quest. You probably already know where this is going.

I spent 2-3hrs irl searching in a spruce mire, aimlessly wandering trying to find the tracks of the demon stag. Long story short I've just quit the game and registered this account, specifically to ask why this godforsaken quest is in the game, if not to burn the image of thousands of spruce trees into my retina.

P.S please for the love of people's sanity significantly decrease the search circle if you read this Sami.

[MrMotorhead]

I feel your pain, there are a number of quests that involve a search, forest cover is perhaps the worst of these because the only thing that you can find is tracks.  Here are the tips I can think of to help.

• Search from the center of the circle on the map, the location always seems to be the very center of the search circle.
• You can use your tracking skill in the zoomed out map, maybe try using it a few times on each square.
• Sometimes the tracks are mislabeled, you might find bull tracks if you're looking for a cow (how would they know?!).

Bear in mind there's no great penalty for failing a quest, you can sometimes go back to the NPC and tell them you give up.  That might help you get another quest in a more timely manner, but I think I've had two quests active at a single time before.

I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with the search quests but it always feels rewarding when I find what I've spent time looking for.

[PALU]

The forest cover quest is the worst of them all, in my view. It just gives you a large area, without any context (terrain), and you can easily pass by tracks at a fairly short distance without being able to see them (especially with spruce hiding most of everything), and the tracks can only be seen in reasonable light conditions, which aren't available for much of the day for large parts of the year. The robber quest doesn't specify any terrain either, but in that case you have both tracks and the robbers themselves (which are always more than one), which reduces the risk of missing them when visiting their tile quite a bit.

Explicitly telling the NPC that you give up speeds up getting a new quest, as the game doesn't have to time out the quest before generating a new one (or maybe even start the cool down counter).
The only quests I've had in parallel with other quests are the ones with a very long expiration time where it can take months to actually be able to perform the quest (e.g. acquire wealth to be able to afford a silver item and then actually find someone [typically a trader] to sell you one, before finally being able to perform the quest itself).

[Fark]

I feel your pain, there are a number of quests that involve a search, forest cover is perhaps the worst of these because the only thing that you can find is tracks.  Here are the tips I can think of to help.

• Search from the center of the circle on the map, the location always seems to be the very center of the search circle.
• You can use your tracking skill in the zoomed out map, maybe try using it a few times on each square.
• Sometimes the tracks are mislabeled, you might find bull tracks if you're looking for a cow (how would they know?!).

Bear in mind there's no great penalty for failing a quest, you can sometimes go back to the NPC and tell them you give up.  That might help you get another quest in a more timely manner, but I think I've had two quests active at a single time before.

I have somewhat of a love/hate relationship with the search quests but it always feels rewarding when I find what I've spent time looking for.

I did manage to find the stag, but it took alot of extra time. I didn't zoom out and search tracks, I basically just walked zoomed in. I probably fully explored 40 tiles before finding the tracks... in an already explored area. So either I'm blind or the tracks are refreshed after some time more or less. For the amount of time I invested into this, the reward didn't feel worth it at all, most other search quests at least give you a terrain feature to look out for which can cut down on time but its a shame there isn't one for this quest.

[PALU]

I've had new footprints appear once when I had to sleep while in the area. In the morning there were fresh footprints that weren't there the day before, so it is possible for new footprints to be generated, but it's also very easy to just miss the ones that are there because something obscured them, or you just passed a couple of tiles too far away from them.