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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 One button, three orders in a cycle: Engage → Follow → Stay. Engage: send the pet at your locked target, or the nearest enemy in front of you. Follow: recall it to your side to wait passively. Stay: it holds the spot it is standing on — until your next order, or until you get far enough away that it has to come find you (then it is following again). Stay is fully passive: a staying pet will not defend itself. If something attacks it while it holds the spot, it will not fight back, and it can be killed there. Use Stay to park a pet somewhere safe, not to post a guard.
Beast of Burden Passive 100 Scatology +10 carrying capacity while a pet travels with you, split between the two of you: +7 on the pet's own inventory and +3 on your pouch. Your backpack is not affected.
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) Your pet fights at full strength (without it, its damage is throttled — 50% by default), and every beast you tame afterwards starts two loyalty tiers higher. As the tree's breakthrough it also opens Hunt as One, Communion and Heal Pet. It does not affect region travel or the first-crossing loyalty bonus — you get both without it.
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). Some species also taunt with it — the Armored Hyena's Brace stance pins its target's aggro onto the pet, for longer the deeper the bond.
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. Without the breakthrough your pet's damage is throttled; with it, the pet hits at full strength (and new tames start much more loyal). It does not gate travel or the first-crossing loyalty bonus: your pet follows you across every region and earns that bonus either way, skill or not.
  • Beast of Burden → carry capacity. The capacity follows the bond, not the body — a downed pet still carries for you. It is split 70/30: 70% onto the pet (on top of whatever its species can already carry) and 30% onto your pouch. The total is one setting, [Skills] BeastOfBurdenCapacity in BepInEx/config/cobalt.beastwhispering.cfg (default 10, so +7/+3); 0 switches it off. This skill adds nothing to your equipped backpack — the backpack bonus a Phytosaur grants is a separate per-species gift.
  • 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 (Follow, Stay or Engage). 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