Pet Ownership

Follower Slots

Follower slots limit the number of high-level pets, summoned creatures or hirelings a character can control at any given time, while still allowing the diversity of hunting with a pack of lower level creatures.

Every player has five pet control slots, the number of contol slots required by a particular pet varies, governed mostly by how powerful it is.

The following table includes examples of pets requiring differing numbers of control slots.

Bonding and Resurrection

Bonding with a pet results in the following benefits:

• The pet will recall with the owner and will not need to be lead through a gate
• Should the pet die, a pet ghost will remain which may be resurrected by a tamer with the required level of animal lore and veterinary skill, by an npc veterinarian or through use of a ‘elixir of rebirth‘ potion.
  This potion can be used to resurrect a pet, regardless of whether the user has taming skills. It can be used on a pet not owned by the user, in which case the pet’s owner will see a gump requesting acceptance of the resurrection.
  The pet can be resurrected instantly if it, and its owner, are within a house the potion user owns, co owns or is friended to. If not within such a house the potion cannot be used until 5 minutes after the death of the pet. If the potion user has high veterinary and animal lore skills the pet will be restored with some health.

To begin the bonding process, feed the pet at the first opportunity. The process takes one week, at the end of this period feed the pet again, if successful you will see the message ‘your pet has bonded with you’ and the tag ‘tame’ will change to ‘bonded’. This bond is broken if the pet is transfered, released or goes wild.

A pet ghost can be resurrected by any character with at least 80 veterinary and 80 lore skill. If the pet is resurrected by someone other than the owner, the owner will be prompted to accept the resurection via a gump. The pet cannot be resurrected if the owner is not on screen.

The death of a pet is not without some penalty, 0.1 skill points will be lost from each of the pets skills for each death if it is resurrected by a tamer and by .2 if resurrected by an NPC Vet. These can be trained back up.

Commanding Your Pet

Tamed pets respond to a series of commands. provided the owner has enough taming and animal lore skill. These commands can be given through speach or through the pet’s context menu (single left click on the pet) Here is a list of valid commands:

Context Menu	Command	Effect
	(Name) come	Summons the pet to your location. The pet will pathfind to your location. It will not attack anything, even if it is attacked.*
	(Name) Drop	Drops its loot to the ground (use when pet bonds, BEFORE the pet’s first death). Can also be used after fighting an archer
	(Name) Follow	Follows targeted being
	(All/Name) follow me	Causes all or one pet follow you, ignoring any attacks upon it.* pet must have a clear path, it will not pathfind
	(Name) friend	Allows targeted player to give your pet commands
	(Name) guard	Causes the pet to guard you. Pets can only guard their owner.
	(All/Name) guard me	Causes all or one pet to guard you
	(All/Name) Kill (or attack)	Causes the pet(s) to attack the selected target
	(Name) release	Releases the pet back into the wild caution, while the context menu initiates a confirmation gump for this act, the command does not
	(All/Name) stay	The pet(s) will stay in the current spot
	(All/Name) stop	Cancels any current orders to attack, guard or follow. The pet will stop attacking. It will not attack anything, even if it is attacked, and may wander.
	(Name) transfer	transfers complete ownership to the targeted player

These commands must be used in the format listed, the adding of punctuation, eg ‘Rover kill!’ or including them in a sentence, eg ‘Rover kill this creature’ will not work. It is however possible to make a macro to whisper the command while saying something more in keeping with a role played character.

*'[name] come’ and ‘All Follow Me’ commands must be preceded by the ‘All Stop’ command if the pet is already engaged in combat. If the stop command is not given the pet will attempt to obey the ‘follow’ or ‘come’ command but will continue to defend itself against attack.

An anomaly worthy of note is that a pet told ‘follow’ cannot pathfind, but that same pet told ‘[name] come’ mysteriously acquires the abilty to negotiate obstacles.

Stabling

Any pet you are mounted on when you log out will log out with you. In theory autostable will stable other pets when you log out, unless the pet is a pack animal with a loaded pack, however taking your pet to the stable and handing it over to the npc stable master is much safer.

To stable a pet go to any town stable and say ‘stable’ or ‘stall’, this brings up a targeting cursor to select the pet you want to stable The cost of this is 30gp which will be withdrawn from your back pack or bank box.

To re-claim your pet say ‘claim (petname), alternatively ‘claim list’ will give you a numbered list of pets currently stabled from which you may select one. Using the word ‘claim’ alone will give random pets to the maximum of your control slots. It is not necessary to return to the same stable, you can claim your pets from any stablemaster.

A pack animal can not be stabled, or autostabled, if it has items in its pack. You will be prompted to unload it when trying to stable.

When transferring between shards with pack animals, the animals are placed in the transfer crate, not in a stable, and not in autostable. The crate is stored on the player.

If you log out with a loaded pack animal beside you it will stay in game and eventually go wild, dropping the content of its pack on the ground where it will decay. If the pack animals are still in the world after server maintenance then they will be placed within the offline auto stables for 24 hours. If the owner does not log in before the 24 hour period they will be deleted as they would have gone wild by this point. 

All characters were originally allowed to store 2 pets with an npc stablemaster. The ability to store more is governed by the total combined skill points in animal taming, veterinary and animal lore and the expansion packs Stygian Abyss and Time of Legends both of which add 2 to maximum allowed.

• add one slot for each skill at 100 skill (ie 100 tame /100 lore /100 vet = 8, 10, 12 slots)
• add one slot for each skill at 110 skill (ie 110 tame /110 lore /110 vet = 11, 13, 15 slots)
• add one slot for each skill at 120 skill (ie 120 tame /120 lore /120 vet = 14, 16, 18 slots)
• The Animal Taming Mastery, ‘Boarding’, also adds stable slots for master tamers and above while the mastery is active up to a final total at 120 taming of 21.
• A stable slot increase token is available from Ultima Store at a cost of 500 sovereigns, this increases stable capacity by 3 slots. Up to 7 such tokens may be applied to any one character, taking the maximum possible total from all sources to 42.

The command ‘stablecount’ will tell you the number of pets you have stored and your total storage allowed. Example: ‘2/6 stable stalls used’

Training Pets

Pets have a number of skills that can be trained, divided into two groups, ‘combat’ skills and ‘knowledge and lore’ skills. Any pet with GM or better Wrestle skill has a chance to parry, though the skill does not show any points until GM is reached. By use of the more advanced process,  Animal Training, some pets can learn additional skills, but this can cause the loss of innate magical skills and should only be undertaken with care. All skills below 100 when tamed may be trained up to 100. Where a creature has skills above 100 pre-tame there will be a skill drop of 10% on taming. The skill shown when tamed becomes the pet’s ‘cap’ in that skill. It can be trained back up to that level after a death, but not beyond it unless Animal Training is undertaken; through which skill caps can be increased by use of power scrolls.

Example:

• Rune beetle with poisoning skill, wild 123.4
• Reduction on taming 12.3
• Post tame poisoning skill cap 111.1

Pets also have strength, dexterity and intelligence stats. If any of these are below 125 they will increase during training to 125, any stats above 125 are fixed and cannot be increased except through Animal Training. Some pets with extremely high stats are weakened upon taming, reducing their post-tame stats to half that of the wild state. Pets affected by this are:

• Cu Sidhe
• Greater Dragon
• Hiryu
• Lesser Hiryu
• Reptalon

Some pets have the special requirement of needing to be ‘subdued’ before they can be tamed. Most notably this includes Giant beetles, Fire beetles and Iron beetles taming attempts cannot commence until you receive the message *The creature has been beaten into subjugation*; this occurs when health drops below 20%. Undertake this task with care, the margin between ‘subjugated’ and ‘dead’ is exceedingly small.

Pets Versus Players

All pet damage is reduced by 30% when targeting players.

Pet Messages

Having dealt with messages you may give to your pet, here are the messages your pet may send to you.