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Beastwhispering skills — the beastwhisperer's tree

Beastwhispering adds ten learnable skills, sold as a single skill tree by a trainer NPC. They turn a tamed animal from a pet that merely follows you into a genuine combat partner — and gate some of the mod's deeper systems behind real progression.

For how taming itself works, see Taming; for how the pet fights, see Combat & companion.

Where to learn them

The skills are taught by Maren the Beastwhisperer, a trainer who stands in Cierzo (near the blacksmith). She is a normal Outward trainer — talk to her, choose "Train with me.", and the standard trainer window opens. That window handles everything the way any vanilla trainer does:

  • Silver cost per skill (shown in the table below).
  • Prerequisites — a skill greys out until you've learned the one it branches from.
  • The breakthrough — the tree has one breakthrough skill (Wild Unknown). As with vanilla trees, you may learn only one breakthrough per tree, and the top rows unlock only after you take it.

Maren and her dialogue are built on StoryKit, the NPC/trainer library. If she isn't where you expect, the mod can re-place her (see the marenhere verb in Dev verbs); she can also be disabled entirely from the config.

The tree

The tree is called Beastwhispering. It has a passive spine up the middle — Scatology → the row-2 branch → Wild Unknown (the breakthrough) → the row-4 branch — with the active combat skills hanging off the outer columns. Rows are listed bottom (entry) to top.

Skill Type Cost Prerequisite Effect
Scatology Passive 50 — (entry) Slain tameable creatures may drop their taming-food recipe scroll. This is the discovery path for taming any species.
Command Pet Active 100 Scatology An Engage / Disengage toggle. Engage: send the pet at your locked target, or the nearest enemy in front of you. Disengage: recall it to your side to wait passively until told again.
Beast of Burden Passive 100 Scatology +5 carrying capacity on your equipped backpack while a pet travels with you.
Release Pet Active 50 Scatology End the bond for good — the animal returns to the wild and the pet is gone.
Wild Unknown Passive · breakthrough 500 (breakthrough) Two effects. Your pet may follow you across region travel (the long, ration-consuming journeys) instead of the bond breaking; and, understood at last, it fights at full strength. Without this skill the pet holds back, dealing reduced damage.
Hunt as One Active 500 Wild Unknown Command the pet to unleash its signature attack; you strike alongside it on the same target for bonus damage. Landing both halves builds Synergy (a stacking damage buff).
Communion Passive 600 Wild Unknown Attunes you to the pet: unlocks the bond's passive gifts (per-species stat buffs and the bag-capacity bonus), shown as a tier-coloured badge you can read at a glance.
Heal Pet Active 500 Wild Unknown Channel your bond to restore the pet to full health.
For the Kill Active 600 Hunt as One Spend every stack of Synergy in one coordinated execute — you and the pet strike together, hitting harder for each stack consumed, and the pet's species leaves its own debuff on the prey.
Gift of the Wild Active 600 Heal Pet Ask the companion for a gift. What it brings — if anything — depends on its species and how deep your bond runs. (Pearlbirds gift feathers you can fletch onto arrows.)

Costs are the silver prices Maren charges and may be tuned in the config.

Skills that gate other systems

Four of the passives are not just abilities — they switch parts of the mod on:

  • Scatology → recipe-scroll drops. Until someone in your session has learned it, tameable creatures don't drop the recipe scrolls you cook their taming food from. (Any player character in a co-op session counts, not only the host.)
  • Wild Unknown → full pet damage + region travel. Without the breakthrough your pet's damage is throttled, and taking a ration-travel journey breaks the bond on arrival. With it, the pet hits at full strength, travels with you, and each first crossing of a new region pair grants a little loyalty.
  • Beast of Burden → carry capacity. The +5 backpack capacity follows the bond, not the body — a downed pet still carries for you.
  • Communion → bond buffs. The pet's passive player buffs (stat bonuses from its species, plus the bag-capacity gift) only apply once Communion is learned. Before that, a pet grants no passive buff.

Each of these gates can be turned off in the config (see Config reference, the [Skills] section) to restore the older "always on" behaviour.

Using the active skills

The active skills (Hunt as One, For the Kill, Heal Pet, Gift of the Wild, Command Pet, Release Pet) work like any Outward skill: assign one to a quickslot and press it. Command Pet's quickslot icon changes to name the action your next press will perform (Engage or Disengage). Hunt as One and For the Kill play a real weapon flourish, so they work with a melee weapon or a bow equipped.

See also