📔 Devlog

Taming and training are different things now

The biggest change this month. Taming and training used to be the same stat. They're separate now.

• Tamed — earned with 🍖 Treat on the dog's card. Required to sell a dog at the Market. Everything else (Court, Packs, breeding) works fine on an untamed dog.
• Trained — earned at the new 🎾 Training Academy in the Market tab. Costs 30 🪙 per session, gives +40 training, and adds +40 🪙 to a Market sale at 100%.

Advanced training is new. Once a dog is 100% tamed and 100% trained, it can learn one breed-specific specialty for 100 🪙: Police K-9 for German Shepherds, Malinois and Airedales; Service Dog for Chocolate Labs; Mountain Rescue for Saint Bernards; Tracking for Bloodhounds; Detection for Beagles; Herding for Corgis, Border Collies and Aussies; Ratting for Jack Russells and Mini Schnauzers; Therapy for Maltese, Bichons and Wheatens. Fifteen specialties across fifteen breeds.

Old saves keep their progress. The migration copies tame into trained, so fully-tamed dogs wake up fully-trained. Partially-tamed dogs will need to top up both.

Buyer requests now tell you how

Request cards used to just say "wanted: a Hound at Lv 4+." Useful for filtering, useless if you didn't know how to make one.

Every request now has two lines underneath:

• 📋 Needs: — a compact list of every requirement (breed, level, training minimum, trait, haircut)
• 💡 How: — the exact path from raw dogs to a delivered pup. "Make a Hound Lv 4+ → train to 68%+ → wash to 100% → apply Fluffy Cut → breed for Keen Nose → deliver"

Training minimums are new — requests want anywhere from 40% to 100% trained, not just "fully tamed." A well-bred dog at 68% can still fill a Lv 4 request.

Specialists. About 40% of requests are trade personas now — Officer Hayes wants a German Shepherd with Police K-9, Ms. Halloway wants a Chocolate Lab with Service Dog, Master-at-Arms wants a Rottweiler with Protection. They pay 460–620 🪙, versus 200–400 for a regular buyer.

Haircut filter. Requests only roll haircuts the target breed can actually wear. No more "Hound Lv 5+ needs a Fluffy Cut" dead ends (the only Lv 5+ hounds are short-coated).

No duplicates. Five requests, five different buyers. "Old Tom" doesn't appear twice in one rotation any more.

The "Dogs" tab is now 🐾 Companions with two sub-tabs: 💰 Sell (sales + trends + news) and 🧾 Requests (the buyer cards).

Every breed looks like its breed

Merged dogs used to look mostly the same — same silhouette, different colours. That's changed.

Each Lv 4+ dog now has its actual breed's ears, snout, tail, coat pattern, and colour. Maltese is fluffy white with floppy long ears. Papillon has butterfly ears. Greyhound has rose ears and a long thin tail. Bloodhound has very long ears and a wrinkled face. Corgi has a stub tail. Rottweiler has tan markings on a black body. Beagle has a white-tipped tail. Boxer has a dark mask. Shih Tzu has a flat muzzle. The list goes on.

Thirteen ear shapes, ten tail shapes, seventeen coat patterns, eight muzzle shapes.

Two breeds swapped:

• Cairn Terrier → Mini Schnauzer — salt-and-pepper, bushy white beard, docked tail
• Great Dane → Chocolate Labrador — rich brown coat, floppy ears, happy tongue

Crossbreeds changed too. The old dashed blue halo is now a black-and-white dashed ring — easier to spot, and CVD-safe. And two different crossbreeds can no longer breed together. Only an identical crossbreed makes another crossbreed.

A new nav, and a proper trim

The site got a proper menu.

• 🎮 Play · 🌟 Start Here · 📖 How to Play ▾ · 📚 Reference ▾ · 🪙 Support — five items, each dropdown short enough to actually read.
• Start Here is the old Strategy page, renamed. It's the single best page to land on if you're new.
• How to Play holds Wiki, Sanctuary, Market, Court, and Packs. The manual sub-pages (Taming, Grooming, Kennel, Vet, Lab) live inside Sanctuary.
• Reference holds Breeds, History, and Quiz — the three "look things up" pages, grouped together for the first time.
• Support is a gold pill that gently beats. The whole studio lives inside it now — Support, About, Devlog, Guestbook, Save. No more separate Coziesta dropdown.

The guide pages themselves all got cut roughly in half. Wiki, Market, Strategy, Breeds, Sanctuary, Taming, Grooming, Packs, Court, Kennel, and Lab were rewritten with a simple rule: the game is the manual. The site is the orientation.

Wiki and Market now sit in the same centered box as everything else. They were full-width for a while, which looked like a bug.

Small fixes, and Chuli and Bruno

A grab-bag of fixes this week.

• Dedication modal. An ❤️ button in the game's top bar opens a small dedication to Chuli (Mini Schnauzer), Bruno (Chocolate Lab), and Jake (Maltese). Chuli and Bruno carry red crosses. Jake's still wagging. In-game, the Mini Schnauzer and Chocolate Lab now render with Chuli's beard and Bruno's tongue — those are their portraits.
• Wolf colour fix. The wolf's cyan accent was too close to the violet used by toy-lineage dogs for colour-blind players. The wolf now uses a cream accent with a striped crescent moon — pattern-based, not hue-based. Level badges also moved from bottom-left to bottom-right, because the moon was hiding under them.
• Sick dogs seed themselves. The Lv 5 "cure a sick dog" goal could stall forever because sick dogs spawned at 1% per new dog. One now appears automatically when the goal is active.
• Style button removed. It raised a prestige stat that nothing read.
• Haircuts are breed-appropriate now. Short-coated breeds (Lab, Rottweiler, Pitbull, Boxer, Beagle, Greyhound, Mastiff…) can only take Short Trim and Royal Cut. Fluffy and Show need medium or long hair.
• The Mutt is gone. Two different crossbreeds used to breed a Mutt. Now that pairing is blocked outright — only identical crossbreeds breed.

Player Levels gate the whole game

The game is now gated by Player Level. You start with the meadow and the kennel at Lv 1, and unlock the Shop at Lv 2, the Lab at 3, the Vet at 5, Grooming and the Dog Market at 7, the Court at 8, Packs at 9, and the wolf breed line at 10. Reaching a Lv 8 dog completes the sanctuary.

The yellow banner on the meadow lists the requirements for the next level. It's the fastest way to know what to do next — trust it over the in-game unlock banner, which runs a level early on four tabs.

Wolf economy expanded

The Wolfkeeper's prices now escalate with each delivery — 650 🪙 on the first wolf, rising to 1,100 🪙 by the sixth, and demanding a higher level each time (Lv 3+ at the start, Lv 6+ by the end). Two Lv 6 wolves breeding in Court Recruits become the endgame coin engine.

Wolves that agitate the meadow can now be bitten back by the dogs they anger, dropping a level per bite — and a Lv 1 wolf that gets bitten vanishes entirely. The kennel (which already stores wolves at any level) is now the only safe home for one.

Court returns, quiz expanded, crossbreeds renamed

Court returns. About 20% of regular deliveries now trigger a complaint two minutes later, asking for 50% back. About 25% trigger a follow-up request for a matching-sex dog (1.5×) or, after a refund, a superior dog one level higher (1.75×). A Court Favor bar at the top of the tab tracks your standing.

Quiz. The "which sanctuary dog are you?" quiz now has seven results — the American Bully joined the original six.

Crossbreeds. Mixed-lineage pups are now named "Lineage × Lineage" (e.g. "Toy × Working") rather than by specialty names like Labradoodle. The code is set up for named crosses to return in a future update.

Save backup, and a quiz

Added a save backup tool — two buttons that let you copy your sanctuary out to a file and paste it back in later. This was the most-asked-for thing, and it's the only way to protect a save from a cleared browser.

Also built a small "which sanctuary dog are you?" quiz. Five questions, seven possible results. It's not serious, but it's fun.

Pack Challenges page

New page explaining why each focus pack needs the dog it needs. Bloodhound for Smell, Greyhound for Speed, and the real breed history behind each one — plus a note on why the near-misses don't qualify.

The "why not another Hound?" sections are the bit I'm happiest with. That's the question players actually ask.

Court Dispatches got art

The Court page now has a portrait, a thought bubble, and a row of candidate dogs for each of the five regular clients. All inline SVG, no image files — they scale cleanly on phones and add no page weight.

Fixed a layout bug where the bubbles were stretching to fill the whole column on desktop. They're now capped at a fixed width.

Breeds encyclopedia, devlog, guestbook

Added the breed encyclopedia (every dog at every level), this devlog, and a guestbook framed as the Pack Ledger.

The encyclopedia is the page I kept wanting to link to from the wiki. Now I can.

Welcome page, and a proper nav

The site used to open straight into the game, which meant new visitors landed on a 6×6 grid with no idea what they were looking at and no way to find the wiki. There's now a welcome page with a description, a play button, and links to everything else.

Moving the game from /index.html to /game.html was safe — browser saves are tied to the domain, not the file path, so nobody lost progress.

Support page, and a name

The studio is now Coziesta Games — cozy plus siesta. The support page is live with a Ko-fi link. No ads, no paid unlocks, no tracking, and nothing changes about the game if you don't donate.

The logo reads at 16px, which is the only test that matters.

Wiki, Strategy, and the real history

Three reference pages went up:

• The Wiki — every screen, every button, every number
• Field Notes — strategies derived from the game's own math
• The History Page — the real history of wolf-to-dog domestication, with sources

The History page is the only non-fiction page on the site. Everything else is in-world.

Wolf & Dog Merge Sanctuary is live

The first Coziesta Games release: a merge game about wolves becoming dogs, a demanding historical court, and the working packs you build along the way.

Free, no ads, no account, saves in your browser. Play it here →