Loyalty & bonds — earning (and keeping) your pet's trust¶

Loyalty is a 0–250 value that measures how strongly your pet is bonded to you. It rises when you care for the pet and falls when you neglect it. Loyalty drives the pet's tier, its bond buffs, the pet's own power at the highest tiers, and — at the extreme low end — whether it stays with you at all. A freshly tamed pet starts at 55 — or far higher once you know The Wild Unknown (see below).

Loyalty tiers¶

Loyalty falls into fourteen tiers. The first eight are the classic bond (0–124); the six above them are the long tail, where the bond starts making the pet itself stronger.

Tier	Loyalty	Lock	Meaning
Gone	0		The bond is broken — the pet leaves.
Broken	1–14		Barely holding on.
Fraying	15–39		Uneasy and weakening.
Guarded	40–54		Wary, but the bond is forming.
Cautious	55–74	🔒	Wary still, but staying.
Steady	75–89		A solid, reliable companion.
Trusting	90–99	🔒	The pet trusts you deeply.
Devoted	100–124		The classic bond at its peak.
Unshaken	125–149	🔒	Nothing rattles it. The pet grows stronger from here (+1 power step).
Boundless	150–174		A bond without limit (+2).
Sworn	175–199	🔒	An oath neither will break (+3).
Fierce	200–224		The bond burns fierce (+4).
Mythic	225–249	🔒	Sung of in far places (+5).
Eternal	250	🔒	The bond at its absolute peak (+6).

(Tier names were re-spelled on 2026-08-26 — Cautious/Steady/Trusting/Devoted/Unshaken/Boundless/Sworn/Fierce replaced Steady/Trusting/Devoted/Soulbound/Kindred/Sworn/Fierce/Fabled at the same ordinals. Every threshold, lock and payout is unchanged; existing saves need nothing.)

A freshly tamed pet starts at 55, i.e. Cautious, and the ladder above it is a long climb by design.

Locks — a bond, once earned, holds¶

Every tier marked 🔒 is a lock: once your pet reaches it, its loyalty can decay down to that tier's floor but never below it. A Trusting pet can never fray back to Broken, and a locked pet can never be abandoned — neglect still costs you the tiers above the lock, and the pet still goes hungry, cold and sluggish, but the bond itself is safe. The lock is saved with the pet. Turn it off with [Loyalty] EnableLocks = false if you prefer the old all-or-nothing bond.

Payouts — eight levels, same ceiling¶

The bond buffs and other payouts (bond buffs, kill favor, scavenge dice, feed buffs, the execute heal, the Synergy resistance ceiling, the Hyena's dodge chance — 10% at the bottom of the ladder, 18% at Eternal) step through eight payout levels across the whole ladder. The old top-of-ladder amounts now sit at Eternal; a Trusting or Devoted pet pays half of that, and every tier in between is a step on the way. Several tiers share a level (Guarded/Cautious, Steady through Devoted, Unshaken/Boundless, Fierce/Mythic), so a new tier name doesn't always mean bigger numbers; the Companion tab's "next tier" preview always names the tier where the buffs actually grow.

Power — the pet itself grows¶

From Unshaken up, each tier adds a power step to the pet's own stats: +1 to all resistances, protection, barrier and status resistance, and about +5% max health and damage per step — so an Eternal pet has +6 of each, ×1.34 health and ×1.37 damage over a Devoted one. This is where the old species-relic bonuses moved; see the [Loyalty] section of the Config reference.

The whole ladder — floors, payouts, locks, power steps — is one table you can retune without a rebuild ([Loyalty] LadderOverride).

The Wild Unknown head-start¶

Learning The Wild Unknown breakthrough deepens every bond: a pet you tame afterwards starts two tiers higher (at that tier's floor — loyalty 90, Trusting, with the default start), and the pet you already have is raised to that same floor once when you learn the skill. It's a one-time gift, not a safety net — if the bond decays below it afterwards, that loss is real.

The tier strip¶

The Companion tab (Bond section) draws a row of 14 small boxes just above the Loyalty bar — one per tier, filling green from the left as the bond deepens and greying again if it slips. A tiny padlock marks each lock tier (4, 6, 8, 10, 12 and the top). The padlock is faded and open until your pet has reached that tier, then solid gold: that floor is secured and decay can never take the bond below it again. Turn the padlocks off (a plain gap remains) in BepInEx/config/cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg:

[HUD]
## Draw a tiny padlock at each lock step of the 14-tier loyalty strip in the Companion tab.
ShowLoyaltyLockGlyphs = true

What changes loyalty¶

Event	Change
Feed Preferred food	+10
Feed Bond food	+20
Any enemy dies near you while the pet is out	+20 (lands as +1)
A Hunt as One cast grants Synergy	+20 (lands as +1)
A For the Kill execute lands the killing blow	+60 (lands as +3)
First crossing of a region pair	+5
A day without feeding	−15 (species decay; more in bad weather)
The pet is critically hurt	−10
The pet is downed in combat	−20

Cold or heat also accelerates the daily decay — see Temperature & blankets.

Gains are slow — losses are not¶

A bond is meant to be hard won. Every gain in that table is scaled down to 5% of its listed value before it lands, so a preferred meal is worth +0.5, not +10. Every loss lands at its full face value.

Fighting together is the fast lane. The three combat rows above carry face values chosen so that, after that 5% scaling, a kill is worth exactly one loyalty and a For-the-Kill killing blow three — which is why they are the only way to climb to Cautious and Trusting at any pace. Exactly one credit is paid per death: an execute kill upgrades the plain kill credit instead of stacking on it. Building a Trusting pet is the work of many sessions of feeding, fighting and travelling together; neglecting one still costs you quickly.

Nothing is lost to rounding. The fraction a gain doesn't deliver is banked on that pet and the next gain adds onto it, so twenty preferred meals hand over exactly the ten loyalty a single unscaled meal used to. The bank is saved with the pet, so partial progress survives quitting.

The practical consequence: after one meal the loyalty number often doesn't visibly move. That is the system working, not a failed feed — the petstatus dev verb reads out how much is banked toward the next point.

If you'd rather bond at the old pace, set LoyaltyGainPercent = 100. Note it scales the combat rows too, so raising it makes a kill worth twenty loyalty rather than one. At the default rate a bond feed is worth one point, so each of the six upper tiers is roughly twenty-five bond feeds apart.

Config lives in BepInEx/config/cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg:

[Systems]
## Loyalty a freshly tamed pet starts with (0-250).
InitialLoyalty = 55
## Percent of every POSITIVE loyalty gain that actually lands.
LoyaltyGainPercent = 5
## Fighting alongside the pet raises the bond (kills, Synergy, For-the-Kill killing blows).
EnableCombatLoyalty = true
## How near you (metres) an enemy must die for the kill to credit the bond. 0 = no distance check.
KillCreditRadius = 40

[Loyalty]
## Loyalty LOCKS: a reached lock tier's floor is never decayed below.
EnableLocks = true
## Retune the whole 14-tier ladder: 14 rows of floor[:payout[:lock[:power]]]. Empty = the shipped table.
LadderOverride =

Abandonment¶

If loyalty falls to Gone (0), the bond breaks and the pet leaves for good — its save is cleared. Keep a neglected pet fed and comfortable to pull it back from the edge before it reaches zero.

Bond buffs¶

A bonded pet passively strengthens you. Each species grants a small stat buff scaled by the loyalty payout level, so an Eternal pet gives the full bonus, a Trusting or Devoted one half of it, and a Broken one almost nothing. Examples from the shipped roster:

Species	Bond buff (at full loyalty)
Hyena	Physical damage
Pearlbird	Movement speed
Veaber	All elemental damage (Ethereal, Decay, Electric, Frost, Fire)

Some species also grant extra backpack capacity as part of the bond. The exact buffs are data-driven per creature — see Data manifests.

Bond buffs unlock through a skill. By default the passive bond buffs (and the bag capacity gift) are gated behind the Communion pet skill — you learn it to start receiving them, and the Companion tab shows what the bond is granting. See Skills.

HUD status icons¶

Your pet's state shows as indicator-only status icons on your own HUD, so you can read it at a glance without opening a menu:

Hunger — a Hungry icon appears as the pet approaches a full hunger day, a Starving icon at a full day.
Bond — icons mark a fraying or broken bond, and a steady or devoted one.
Temperature — cold/freezing and hot/overheating icons (see Temperature & blankets).

A well-fed, comfortable, well-bonded pet shows nothing — the icons are warnings and highlights, not clutter.