Searching for a Wild Hearth is one of three main quests to partake in for players exploring the Hafod region. It relates to the player's interactions with the fanatical Team Wild and Hafod's legendary Pokémon.
Throughout their journey in the Hafod region, the player will encounter a fanatical team known as Team Wild. Through these encounters, the player forms close bonds with his childhood friend, Dylan, and Hafod's new Pokémon professor, Daphne.
Team Wild is a nature-revering group, sharing many features with traditional cults in that they separate themselves from society, demonise outsiders and indoctrinate their members into following their dogma with speeches and songs.
Team Wild is mostly comprised of grunts, members who do the team's dirty work and get in the player's way. Above them are the admins, four young people who have a certain amount of power of the team, Densa, Penna, Squama and Inva. These four are cousins and siblings of one another with a shared grandmother, Team Wild's Boss, Vivi.
Team Wild's overall aim is to reverse progress made in Hafod, to return the region to a 'wild', primordial, golden age. Initially they intend to do this by targeting individual examples of humanity's intervention that they deem 'too far' such as the electrical grid in Cerddinas City or the dam on Route 9.
Read more about Team Wild here!
As Team Wild's plots ramp in intensity, Hafod's champion Toby becomes involved in fighting against the team's radical exploits. After a stand off with Densa in Pennillan Town, she tasks the player with infiltrating Team Wild's underground HQ and rescuing kidnapped poet and historian Sparrow. The player has previously received a special red book from him, filled with many Hafodian myths and legends.
It is on this mission that the player meets Team Wild's boss, Vivi, and learns of her master plan to attempt to awaken the ancient dragons of Hafod and use their powers of creation and transformation to restore what she sees as lost. Unfortunately, Vivi finds the red book and, inside, finds the missing key to the dragons— the final missing stanza of an ancient song.
Afterwards, Sparrow tells the player of the three mountain guardians who, legends say, sleep in the castles atop the three peaks of Hafod. Champion Toby asks the player as well as their friend Dylan and Professor Daphne to track these Pokémon down and see if they can help soothe the dragons once awakened. With help from their friends, the player then encounters and enlists the help of Solfima, Solvitus and Solticor, heading to the Canu'r Gloch chambers afterwards for a final showdown with Vivi and Team Wild.
Read more about the old song here!
Inside the ruins, the player finds Team Wild standing in a large group with Vivi and the admins at the front, singing. As the wall crumbles away to reveal a passage forward into the dark, Vivi and the admins enter and the mass of Team Wild members begin advancing on the player. Luckily, from outside the cavern, a host of characters the player has previously met rush in to help, allowing the player to follow Vivi and the admins deeper into the ruins.
In the climactic encounter with Team Wild in the Canu'r Gloch Depths, Vivi ultimately fails to reshape Hafod into an arcadian paradise as the two dragons are too busy fighting one another to do listen to her pleas. Outside, the weather turns wild and unpredictable as the four seasonal legendary Pokémon are caught up in the dragon's furor. Then, the mountain guardians appear and calm the dragons and Vivi is forced to come to terms with the fact that things have to change. After the player encounters the dragons, Vivi is separated from her family and the player, turning to stone just as the dragons do. Team Wild disbands and the admins disappear thereafter.
Read more about Hafod's myths here!