Feeding & diet — keeping your pet fed¶

Feeding is the heart of the bond. A fed pet heals, gains loyalty, and slowly regenerates health over time; a pet left unfed grows hungry and drifts away. Each species eats different things.

How feeding works¶

Offer the pet food two ways:

F8 — feed the first item in your inventory that the pet's diet accepts.
The right-click Feed action on a food item.

A successful feed:

Restores health immediately (a small heal, per food).
Raises loyalty — Preferred food and the stronger Bond food each grant a fixed amount (see Loyalty & bonds).
Starts an over-time health regen — a vanilla-style Health Recovery buff that heals the pet gradually for several minutes. A new feed replaces any running regen. A species' own taming chow always grants the strongest regen.

Diets: Preferred vs Bond food¶

Every species has its own diet list. Foods come in two kinds:

Kind	Loyalty	Notes
Preferred	+10 (default)	Ordinary foods the species likes.
Bond	+20 (default)	The species' favourite — usually its own chow. Outranks Preferred when both match.

Those are face values. Loyalty gains land at 5% of them by default (a preferred meal is worth +0.5), with the remainder banked on the pet so it still adds up over many meals — bonding is meant to be slow. See Gains are slow — losses are not.

A diet entry can be a specific item or a whole food category (any Meat, any Fish, any Vegetable, and so on) — a Pearlbird, for instance, takes any mushroom, for a slightly smaller loyalty and health gain than a vegetable. The exact per-species diets live in the data files — see Data manifests.

Hunger and satiation¶

Pets get hungry on a timer. If a pet goes a full "day" without eating, it loses loyalty to hunger, and a hungry pet shows a status icon on your HUD. A recently fed pet is satiated and refuses all food — even its Bond food — until it has digested. This means you can't spam-feed to farm loyalty; you feed on a rhythm.

Hunger timing is tunable, and can differ per species. See the config reference ([Systems]) and Data manifests.

Special food kinds¶

Beyond ordinary diet food, several consumables do more than fill the belly:

Food kind	What it does
Taming chow	The food used to tame the species. As a Bond food it also feeds and grants the strongest health regen. See Taming.
Weather foods & drinks	Warming/cooling potions, teas, and water give the pet temperature relief when fed, on top of any normal meal. Every pet can drink water (off-diet and even when satiated). A fed Weather Defense Potion goes further: total immunity to weather for 10 minutes, and every pet drinks it. See Temperature & blankets.
Buff foods	Certain species turn specific consumables into a temporary combat buff (for example, the Veaber and mineral dust, or a Hyena/Armored Hyena fed Alpha Jerky or Raw Alpha Meat — a temporary damage buff scaled by loyalty). Whether a buff food also fills the belly depends on the species' diet, and the two are decided independently: a buff food the diet doesn't accept (mineral dust, Alpha Jerky) is buff-only — no hunger, no heal, and never picked by the auto-feed key. A buff food the diet does accept (Raw Alpha Meat, which both hyenas eat as meat) is fed as a normal meal and grants the buff, for a single item.
Relics	Some species accept one specific vanilla relic for a permanent, stacking bonus, up to 5 stacks — after that the relic is refused and not consumed. These are not meals; they don't fill hunger or heal.

Relics are matched per species, so each species (including variants) takes exactly one relic:

Species	Relic
Pearlbird	Pearlbird's Courage
Veaber	Leyline Figment
Hyena	Metalized Bones
Armored Hyena	Metalized Bones

Offering a relic to a species it doesn't belong to is simply "not interested" — the pet then judges the item against its ordinary diet instead.

Which foods, buffs, and relics a species takes is data-driven per creature — see Data manifests.

Limitations¶

A satiated pet refuses everything, including its Bond food and a relic. Wait out the satiation window rather than assuming the feed is broken.
Buff foods, relics and the over-time health regen are newer systems. Each is data-driven per species and each has a config kill-switch, so a misbehaving one can be turned off on its own without disturbing ordinary feeding.
Bandages are applied through the pet's own action, not the Feed action — a bandage is refused as food.