The ship was ordered as part of a construction program intended to begin replacing the old Jäger-class gunboats that had been built a decade earlier.

Unlike the older ships, Wolf was intended to serve abroad to protect German economic interests overseas.

Wolf spent nearly her entire career in active service on foreign stations over the course of three cruises abroad; she returned to Germany only for overhauls and modifications.

The next cruise, which lasted from 1886 to 1895, initially returned to East Asian waters, but she spent most of her time abroad in the South Pacific.

The two Albatross-class gunboats and the rebuilt Cyclop were too few for the task of patrolling the Far East, so another three vessels were ordered according to the fleet plan that had been approved in 1872.

Wolf initially visited Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Hainan Island, and Beihai, along the south China coast.

[1] In early 1880, tensions between Japan and China threatened to erupt into war, which prompted the German vessels in the region to assemble at the mouth of the Yangtze River to await developments.

By 10 May, the crisis had been defused, allowing the German ships to disperse; that day, Wolf got underway to visit other ports in the region.

Wolf embarked Adolf Lüderitz and a geologist to survey the coast as far north as Sandwich Harbor and the mouth of the Swakop River.

[8] Wolf was recommissioned on 8 April 1886, under the command of KL Paul Jaeschke, to replace her sister ship Iltis in East Asia.

Wolf joined the rest of the squadron—which at that time also included the screw corvettes and Bismarck and Olga and Nautilus—in Hong Kong on 21 July.

By this time, cholera had spread to the southern Chinese ports, so Wolf sailed to northern China in an attempt to avoid the disease.

By October, Wolf had moved to Taipei on the island of Formosa, where unrest had broken out, though the Germans did not need to intervene in the city.

While in Surabaya on 3 April, the ship received orders to sail for Samoa; Olga and the gunboats Eber and Adler had been anchored in Apia when a major tropical cyclone struck the island.

Wolf arrived in Apia on 14 June, and at the end of the month, she received orders to sail to Jaluit, where she was to embark Malietoa Laupepa, who was the exiled former ruler of Samoa, and return him to rule the islands.

The squadron was disbanded in March 1893; most of the ships were sent elsewhere, leaving Wolf alone with Iltis to protect German interests in East Asia.

In early July, Wolf sailed to Bangkok, Siam, in response to rising tensions between that country and France, which soon ruptured into the 1893 Franco-Siamese crisis.

The French imposed a blockade during the conflict, but no attacks on Europeans materialized, allowing Wolf to return to China on 30 August.

[12] The First Sino-Japanese War broke out in July, and from 13 to 15 August, Wolf carried Germans living in Seoul, Korea, to Yantai.

By that time, Wolf and Iltis were in poor condition after years abroad; the squadron commander, Konteradmiral Paul Hoffmann, proposed restricting the ships to river operations.

[12] The naval command initially planned on sending Wolf back to East Asia after completing the overhaul, but decided instead to convert her into a survey ship.

Over the course of the ship's time in west African waters, she would take on 20 to 30 local men to serve as assistant sailors and boiler room personnel.

Survey work had to be suspended during the wet season, and Wolf would sail south for a refit, usually at Cape Town, but sometimes at Luanda, Portuguese Angola.

[13] Surveying activities in 1898 were interrupted in February when the governor, Theodor Seitz, ordered the ship to carry a force of police from Douala to Buea to suppress unrest.

While on the way back north, she stopped in Luanda, where she joined the gunboat Habicht; the two ships sailed together to Swakopmund, German Southwest Africa.

The years 1899 and 1900 passed largely uneventfully, apart from a change of command from Schröder to KL Eugen Weber in February 1899 and an overhaul in Cape Town from 30 June to 8 August 1900.

On 7 March, Wolf helped to pull free the Woermann-Linie steamship SS Alexandra Woermann, which had run aground in the Wouri River.

On 20 June 1904, she departed Kamerun to visit Swakopmund at the request of the local colonial government; Wolf was needed to transfer a group of fifty-four Hereros from the steamship SS Teck to South Africa, where they had taken jobs.

Wolf initially transferred them to a barge in Lüderitz Bay, before taking them to the passenger steamer SS Emilie Woermann, which carried them for the rest of their journey.

In 1905, the protected cruiser Vineta visited Kamerun, and her commander, Kommodore Ludwig von Schröder came aboard Wolf for a tour of the coast near Douala.