Combat & companion — fighting at your side¶

A tamed pet is a real combatant. It joins your fights, keeps the tamed creature's own attributes, and can be taught signature skills. A native Companion tab in the character menu shows its full sheet.

How your pet fights¶

Auto-assist. When you engage an enemy, the pet engages it too, chasing and attacking what you fight. It falls back to following you when the fight ends.
Species-true stats. The pet keeps the tamed creature's own resistances, protection, health, natural attack, and movement speed — a Hyena hits and moves like a Hyena. Those stats are scaled by loyalty, so a Trusting pet is meaningfully tougher and stronger than a Broken one. (Species weaknesses carry over too — devotion shrinks them, neglect deepens them.)
Signature attack — "Hunt as One." A learnable skill that fires the pet's signature attack while you land a synced strike on the same target. Each species' signature is different: a status-inflicting bite, a bracing counterattack, a ranged bolt, and so on (see Creatures). A bracing species also taunts as the stance opens, pinning its current target's aggro onto the pet for between one and five seconds depending on loyalty — a deliberate way to pull a dangerous enemy off you.

Combat ranges (how far the pet will engage, its melee reach, and how far it leashes while fighting) are all tunable in the config reference ([Combat]).

Commanding your pet¶

The Command Pet skill cycles through three orders — Engage → Follow → Stay → Engage — and its quickslot icon always shows the order your next press gives:

Engage — send the pet at your locked target (at any range), or at the nearest enemy in a cone in front of you if you have no lock.
Follow — the pet stands down, stops scanning for targets, and returns to following you; the encounter actually ends (combat music stops).
Stay — the pet stays passive and holds the spot it is standing on. Passive here means it will not defend itself: attacked while staying, it does not retaliate and can be killed where it stands. That is the trade-off for telling it to hold — park a pet with Stay, do not post it as a guard. It stays put until you give another order, or until you walk far enough away (the normal leash distance, [Pet] LeashDistance) that it teleports to you — at which point it is following again and the icon updates on its own. Recalling it (F9) or changing area ends a Stay the same way.

A staying pet does not defend itself — it is as passive as a following one. In co-op, a guest's staying pet shows as following on other players' screens (a cosmetic limit of the current stance mirror).

Command Pet, Hunt as One, and the other pet abilities are learnable skills — see Skills.

The damage governor¶

By default, a pet only reaches its full damage once its owner has learned the Wild Unknown skill. Until then, every hit the pet deals is scaled down (to 50% by default) — a deliberate progression gate. Learning Wild Unknown removes the penalty. This is separate from, and stacks with, the global and per-species damage-scale settings used for balance tuning. It is a DAMAGE penalty only — it has nothing to do with travel: a pet follows its owner across every region regardless. See Skills and the config reference ([Combat]).

The Companion tab¶

Beastwhispering adds a Companion tab to the character menu, alongside Inventory, Skills, and the rest. It shows the pet's full sheet in one place:

Vitals — health, and any over-time recovery in progress.
Bond — loyalty, current tier, and how far to the next tier.
Needs — hunger, comfort (what it's wrapped in / sipping), and overall mood.
Combat — its damage and signature attack, its live resistances, and its current combat state.
Bond buffs — what the bond is currently granting you.

With no pet, the tab shows a styled empty state. Cycle to it with the menu's tab controls like any other tab.

Naming your companion¶

The header at the top of the tab — where your pet's species is shown — is the name field. Click it (or press the pad's top-right face button, Y on an Xbox layout) and type a name; Enter, or A on a pad, confirms it. Escape or B cancels and changes nothing. Clicking away elsewhere keeps what you typed.

Once named, your companion is called by that name everywhere: the tab header, the caption above its health bar, and every message about it — feeding, gifts, bandaging, crossing into a new region. Confirming an empty name removes it and the pet goes back to showing its species. Names are capped at 20 characters.

In co-op the name travels with your pet, so other players' game logs identify it the way you do.

Turn the whole thing off with [PetPanel] EnableRename = false in BepInEx/config/cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg — see the config reference.

Known issues & limitations¶

The pet is not a second character. It has no gear slots, no skills of its own to assign, and no inventory; everything it does comes from its species data and the skills you learn.
Ranged signature attacks are only reachable on species you can't yet tame. The tameable roster's signatures are all melee, Brace or hex bites — see Creatures.
Sigil synergies, worn-gear effects, the scavenge bonus and the damage-scale settings are newer, lightly-exercised systems. They are all data-driven and each has its own kill-switch in the config, so if one behaves oddly you can turn just that system off.
In co-op, some effects the host resolves show no floating damage numbers on a guest's screen, and a guest's Companion tab reads "no anchor" on the anchor-health rows. The damage itself lands.