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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.

A diet entry can be a specific item or a whole food category (any Meat, any Fish, any Vegetable, and so on). 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). See Temperature & blankets.
Buff foods Certain species turn specific reagents 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 physical damage buff scaled by loyalty).
Relics A few species accept a specific vanilla relic for a permanent, stacking bonus — feeding a base Pearlbird its Courage relic, or a base Veaber a Leyline Figment. These are not meals; they don't fill hunger or heal.

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

See also