"All animals are equal, but some animals
are more equal than others."
- George Orwell
If you wish to control dragons, ride hiryus, firesteeds, nightmares, unicorns or ki-rins, you will absolutely need this skill. You will also need that skill to tame any other wild animal in the forest. However, pack horses, regular horses, rideable llamas, swamp dragons, ridgebacks, ostards and beetles will obey players with no taming skills. If you owned one of these pets and they went wild because of lack of feeding, you should be able to retame them even with no taming skills only because they were tamed to you once. In all other cases, you will need taming. Complementary skills for tamers are Magery (so you can gate new tames until they've bonded as well as heal/invis them), Peacemaking (so it is easier to tame an animal or lure him away when he's stubbornly trying to fight something while severely wounded), Veterinary (to keep your pet healed and to be able to ressurect them), Alchemy (if you're heavily into champ spawns, harrowers and Doom) and Animal Lore (so that your pet listens better to orders and is easier to tame.
Taming is another tough skill to raise. You want to start with the highest taming possible (50). I can tell you right now, retaming the same creature over and over again will not work. You will need to tame a wide range of different creatures to GM. To keep track of your tamed creature, you should always rename your pet. I personally will follow the rename the pet with my initial and #1 if I was the first tamer to get to it, or #2 if the was the 2nd tamer, etc. It will avoid you going back to a pet you've already tamed and indicate to other tamers that this pet is a potential retame for them and which rank in the retame they would be.
| Skill |
What to Tame |
| 0% |
Buy skills from Herdsman NPC or Veterinary |
| 30% |
Cow, Goats, Pigs, Sheep |
| 43.1% |
Hinds, Timber Wolves |
| 49.1% |
Forest Ostards, Desert Ostards, Horses, Hinds, Timber Wolves |
| 55.1% |
Polar Bears, Walruses, Brown Bears (as of 61.1) |
| 79.1% |
Great Harts, Grizzly Bears |
| 91.1% |
Bulls |
| 103.1% |
Dire Wolves, Ridgebacks |
| 115.1% |
Ki'rins, Unicorns |
When attempting to tame aggressive creatures like dire wolves, imps, fire lizards, alligators and such, paralyze them first, move away and few tiles and start taming. If you fail twice, move back and paralyze again before you try taming because the spell will have just about worn off. For higher-level monsters like drakes, dragons, WWs, firesteeds and nightmares you can try to fight them first, until they're almost dead but not so much that they will attempt to flee. Once they're quite weaken, try to tame them. The downside with that method is once tamed, your pet may be attacked by creatures that will spawn. And since it's quite weakened at that point, he may not survive the battle. The upside is they are much slower while weakened so you don't have to run so much for your life while trying to tame, and they cast less on you. Also, paralyzing creatures while attempting to tame them will make them suffer stats loss. If this is a pet you intend to keep, avoid paralyzing them. Your best bet is therefore to use peacemaking. It doesn't affect your pet's stats and it allows you to tame without sustaining damage
Note that you cannot tame a pet if this creature is incapable of reaching you through pathfinding. This means, if you use anything to block them (player vendors, any blocking items either crafted or part of the landscape) will make it impossible for you to tame them.
Taming an animal that has already been tamed by someone else is harder than animals which have never been tamed before. The advantage though is that you will get better gains off them. But at higher levels, you will only gain off successes, so don't waste time with multiple retames. I generally don't bother with creatures tamed more than three already. ALWAYS release your pets once you're done. There's nothing more infuriating than to arrive on a taming ground where all the animals are tamed and their master is long gone. By the time they go wild again, they're often too angry to be retamed. If you're alone in the area, just kill the pet so another can spawn. If there are other tamers around, let them have the retame and only kill pets once you get the message that the pet has had too many owners to be tamed.
When taming on hunting grounds (especially the WWs, Daemon Temple and Destard), remember that being nice and courteous will take you a long way. If you ask kindly that hide hunters wait for you to finish taming a bull (as they don't spawn as much as other animals) before they kill it for its hides, most people will be more than happy to indulge. Ice Island is also a good area to tame polar bears, walruses and white wolves, especially in Felucca since, as we all know, that facet is a lot less crowded.
When selling your tamed pets, the buyer will need to have the following skills for the pets to accept them as their new master:
| Taming |
Lore |
Type of Animal |
| 0% |
0% |
Horse, llama, ostard, ridgebacks, swamp dragons, beetles |
| 45% |
0% |
Frenzied Ostards |
| 83% |
83% |
Drakes |
| 90% |
90% |
Unicorn, Ki-Rin, Dragon, Nightmare, White Wyrm , Rune beetle |
| 101% |
101% |
Fire Steed , Hiryu |
The higher your taming/lore skills, the more pets you will be allowed to have in your stables. Also note that the higher the level of the creature, the more control slots they will require.
You can bond with any pets that you can tame. For lower level pets however, you will not need taming skills to be able to bond with them (i.e. any pets requiring no minimum skill to have them transferred to you). When bonded with you, your pet will recall with you so you will no longer need to gate. Upon death, the pet will survive as a ghost that you will have a limited time to get him resurrected (80 vet required). Note that a resurrected pet will suffer permanent statloss. To bond with your pet, just feed him once to start the bonding timer. After 7 real life days, your pet should bond upon the next feeding.
Always carry a pet summoning ball for your mounts and dragons. If your pet died and wandered off, you could lose him permanently. Your ball will bring him back to you. Make sure to insure your pet ball so that it doesn't get looted off your corpse should you die.
For any other questions related to pets, please visit the Pets page under the Q&A menu.
