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Beastwhispering — tame wild Outward animals as pets

Beastwhispering is a mod for Outward that lets you tame wild animals into persistent pets. A tamed creature follows you across zones and reloads, feeds and bonds with you, keeps its own species stats, fights at your side, and grows more useful the more it trusts you.

At a glance - Type: gameplay mod - Requires: BepInEx 5 (Mono branch), SideLoader, and its kits (ForgeKit, SkillKit, CompanionKit, StoryKit, AggroKit, and — through CompanionKit — DonorKit and NetKit) — all pulled in automatically. See Installing. - Config: BepInEx/config/cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg - Commands: BepInEx/config/bw_cmd.txt

For players

You tame an animal, and it becomes a companion that stays with you — through doors, zone changes, resting, and even quitting and reloading the game. From there it is a small creature to look after: it gets hungry, it feels the weather, it grows loyal (or drifts away if neglected), and it fights what you fight. A native Companion tab in the character menu shows its full sheet at a glance.

Only certain species can be tamed — see Creatures.

⚠ Known issue — taming is single-player only. Using chow on a wild creature currently only succeeds in a single-player session. An already-tamed pet is fully playable in multiplayer: it follows, fights, feeds, bonds and persists in co-op just as it does solo. Tame your companion solo, then take it into co-op. This is a bug, not a design decision, and we are working diligently to resolve it.

Everything after taming works in co-op as well as solo — host and guests each keep their own pet, which follows, fights, feeds, bonds and persists per player. Both machines must be running the same version of the mod set; a mismatched pair refuses to link up rather than misbehaving quietly.

Getting started

The core loop:

  1. Find a tameable animal (a wild Hyena is the easiest first target).
  2. Get its taming-food recipe. Once you've learned the Scatology pet skill (bought from the pet trainer — see Skills), tameable creatures drop a recipe scroll when they die. Read the scroll to learn the recipe. (You can also stumble onto a recipe through Outward's freeform cooking — see Taming.)
  3. Cook the taming food ("chow") at a cooking pot from the recipe's ingredients.
  4. Use the chow near a wild one of that species. The wild creature becomes your pet.
  5. Feed and bond. Feeding restores its health and raises loyalty; a hungry, cold, or neglected pet loses loyalty and can eventually leave.
  6. Fight together. Your pet auto-assists what you attack, and you can teach it signature skills.

You keep one pet at a time. Full details in Taming.

Default keybinds

Key Action
F7 Tame the nearest wild creature
F8 Feed the pet the first inventory item its diet accepts
F9 Recall the pet to your feet (also re-forms a missing pet — the fix for a stuck pet)
F10 Run the self-test
F12 Log a diagnostic snapshot

All keys are rebindable in cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg ([Keys]). Keybinds are shared across every mod in this family, so a clash is reported at startup — see the config reference.

Pages

Page What it covers
Taming Recipe scrolls, cooking chow, taming a wild animal, recall and release
Feeding & diet What each species eats, hunger, healing, special food kinds
Loyalty & bonds Loyalty tiers, what raises and lowers them, bond buffs, HUD icons
Temperature & blankets Comfort bands, cold/heat effects, blankets and weather foods
Combat & companion How your pet fights, the Companion tab, species-true stats
Creatures Which creatures are tameable and their signature traits
Skills The learnable pet skills (Hunt as One, Command Pet, Communion, and more)
Config reference Every setting in cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg
Dev verbs The bw_cmd.txt command channel for testing
Data manifests The per-species data files and how to add creatures

Credits

The mod's artwork — the skill and passive icons, the item icons, and the paw-shaped companion status badges — was drawn by Proboina.

See also