The Mechanics of taming: A how-to guide

GHILL

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Gavin Hawkeye Hill
Hi, and welcome to this tutorial on taming. By the end of this tutorial you will have learnt how to prepare yourself for taming, how to carry out the taming procedure and how to take care of your new pets.


BEING PREPARED
The first thing you have to do, is make sure you have chosen a good whip. For the purposes of taming lower damages whips are more important than higher damage whips because you will not want to kill your target. The new Viper(L) in auction does 3 damage and is designed soley for whipping. While these are atm very rare and expensive, it is the recommendation of this guide that any serious tamers invest in one of these at some stage.

Having equipped yourself with a whip you will also need to ensure that you can survive long enough to tame. Conditions may arise that you are swarmed by the type of mobs you are trying to tame, as has happened to me. Also it is not always possible to tame the creature quickly, therefore you need to be able to absorb some damage. It is recommend for snabblesnot tamers to equip themselves with goblin armour, and pixie for daikaba and exarasaur tamers.

Now for the most important thing(yes, more important than a whip). Nutriobars. Without these your wasting your time. Each successfully tamed creature will require 200 nutriobars, in order to be given commands. Any less than this and the creature will even refuse to move. Do not tame a creature unless you can give it 200 nutriobars.

TAMING YOUR CREATURE

1) Find your target for taming. Ensure that it is a tamable creature by checking that is has a yellow bar above its health. This bar is known as the creatures SPIRIT.

2) Its a good idea to make sure that you drag it away from any other creatures that might harass your efforts, so give it a whack with your whip and lead it somewhere safe.

3) Now your ready to make your attempt at taming, and by hitting it you will have noticed a red bar appear above the yellow bar. This is its respect for you. This will increase for every time you hit the creature, until it is full. Allowing yourself to be hit by the creature, will result in a loss of respect.

You'll also have noticed that the spirit bar has dropped, indicating you have damaged its will against you.

4) Your objectice in taming is to bring the creature to the following state: Extremely low spirit, full respect, and critically low health. Only in these conditions can a creature be tamed. Attempting to tame before this will only fail and inform you that one of these factors is missing.

5)It can be very difficult, especially with higher damaging whips, to empty the spirit bar without killing the creature. There are two important steps in counter-acting this. The first, is to choose a creature of larger maturity. Olds and above make good taming targets. Secondly, if the creature becomes weak, allow it to regenerate its health, while running around it to avoid being hit(for loss of respect). By doing this the process of taming becomes relatively easy. Just be careful not to take a chance, you might do high damage and kill your target. Also be aware of critical hits.

6)Once the conditions are right, before the creature runs away or hits you more click the Attempt Tame button in the actions book(I highly recommend you hotkey this button). The spirit and respect bars will disappear as you attempt to tame the creature.

This will result in one of the following scenarios.

[br]Click to enlarge[/br]

You fail, and the creature has not been tamed. If this is the case do not fret! You are free to try again. A failed attempt results in the creature regaining some of its spirit, so you will have to allow it to regenerate before making another attempt. However after a failed taming attempt, the creature will not be hostile until attacked again, allowing you to stand and wait without being attacked.

[br]Click to enlarge[/br]

Congratulations, if you see this notification it means you are now the proud owner of your target creature.

TAKING CARE OF YOUR PET/TRAINING YOUR PET

To aid you in keeping track of your pets condition I will describe the 3 NEW bars that have appeared. The Spirit and Respect bar are gone, replaced by(from top to bottom)Trust(Green), Food(Violet/Purple) Experience(Blue).

The first thing you'll have to do with your new pet, is to feed it. In order to give a pet basic commands you have to feed it with 200 nutriobars. To do this, simply select 200 nutriobars from your inventory and drag them onto your pet. Your pet will consume the bars and convert them into energy. Note that if you release your pet into the wild, the remaining energy on the pet will be converted back into nutriobars and placed within your inventory.

An item has been released to improve the TRUST your pet has in you. This item is a brush, I haven't personally seen the brush looted yet but know that it exists. At this time I can't really tell you how to use it but I guess its fairly obvious :) Trust is important in your pet, the level of trust your pet has will determine whether or not it will perform your commands. While you can perform low level commands with little or no trust, asking it to impress people with tricks requires high trust to do.

Experience is gained from asking your pet to perform challenging tasks. Commands such as MOVE, and STOP will not give XP, instead you should train your creature by asking it to GREET. The Greet command tells your creature to greet the person they are looking at. Snabblesnots have been seen to bow and to raise their snouts in a wave like gesture.

Once your experience bar is full you will hear a nice little sound that will inform you that your creature has gained a level, the first time I heard it I thought my pet had hoffed. Each level your creature gains will unlock new features of your pet, including the ability to impress people with tricks, of which I have seen Snabblesnots doing Handstands, and the ability to name your pet and command it to follow you. Remember that doing tricks will use of your pets energy faster. A pet that is not being used can have as much as 3 or 4 months of use from 1000 nutriobars, however performing tricks and gaining XP will drain your pets energy faster. Be aware of this.

Of course, as much as you love your new pet you will not always want it hanging around you. You could leave it sitting in the wild but this is a BAD IDEA. If you neglect your creature you will incur penalties to Trust, Energy and XP. Therefore you need to ensure that if you are logging out, or leaving the area, or simply do not wish to have your pet around that you place it into the care of a stable.

To do this, take your pet close to the stablemaster, stand beside the stablemaser yourself, and click the Stable command. Your pet will now safely transfer into a deed in your inventory, with which you can keep track of all your pets statistics(can also be done by scanning live pets).

To get your pet back out of the stables simply goto ANY stablemaster, and double click your deed. Your pet will appear in front of your very eyes.

COMMAND DESCRIPTIONS

NOTE: All commands performed on a pet, require that pet to be targetted(selected) for them to work.

MOVE: Presents you with a targeting cursor, clicking the cursor on a piece of land in view will make your pet move to that place.

STOP: Does exactly what it says on the tin.

FOLLOW: A level 3 skill that lets the pet auto-follow you much like the player ability.

STABLE: Allows your creature to be stored for safe-keeping. Creatures in stables can last long periods of times on minimal food.

GREET: Commands your pet to greet someone.

IMPRESS: Commands your pet to do a trick for someone.

HINTS/ISSUES/OTHER

Tamers should be aware that pets move painfully slowly. In order to move them over large distances simply give them the move command, and then go to wherever you want them to go, even if they are no longer on screen. Then click where you want them to go. You won't have to worry about your pet, eventually it will reach where you have told it to go(be mindful not to leave it out of your sight for over 10 minutes though). I found this very handy. Whenever I tame a creature I simply goto the stable and get it to move there, I can then go about some other business and come back to stable it in 5-10 minutes.

It is possible to have multiple creatures being tamed at once. That is, you can whip more than one creature to weaken it to be tamed. And if it fails you can attempt to tame one of the other ones. This allows you to tame much faster than waiting for a single mobs health to regenerate.

If you are intending to become a professional tamer, I would highly suggest you invest in buying a Viper limited whip. These whips are designed to do low damage specifically for the taming process. If your wondering if there is a profession for tamers then yes there is. Not everyone can tame because not everyone has a whip or the required skills to tame, therefore professional skilled tamers could provide those people with pets at a reasonable price. I myself sold a snabblesnot young for 15 ped, at full trust, no xp and no energy.

Concerns for selling pets should be. A) To cover the cost of 200 nutriobars lost in the sale. B) To cover the cost of your whips decay over all your attempts. C) To cover a cost of your time spent doing this, and to cover providing a service for those unable to do it themselves.

LIST OF KNOWN TAMABLE CREATURES:
Snabblesnots
Exarosaurs
Daikaba

KNOWN ISSUES: At this time there is a bug that when you first tame a creature you may be unable to stable it, after attempting to stable the creature you will no longer be able to feed it though it can stick do tricks and move. I have reported this issue to MA in the hopes of a quick resolution.

SKILLGAINS FROM THE TAMING/TRAINING PROCESS:
Animal Lore, Zoology, Animal Taming, Courage, Intelligence.

I hope that this tutorial has given you all the information you need, constructive critism is welcome and if I've missed out any information that you discover, please feel free to post it up here.
 
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I want a new emoticon now that has your avatar say <in a cartman voice>Respect mah authoritah!!!</in a cartman voice>
 
Lol, funnily enough I've said that ingame too :) I used the intimidate emote :p
 
awesome i wonder if there are any other unlockable actions in level 3 when you gain trust?


i guess the brush is not on the Technician so tool makers get to work...
 
Your the man Gav :D I think im slowly starting to understand the process of taiming now.. :silly2:
 
Updated, added list of known tamable mobs(personally confirmed) and added instructions on stabbling(with which I had some issues with).

As for your comments Rex I'm not sure, my creature got reset in XP by a bug, and also had its energy to reset to the amount I fed it, but I got full trust. A wierd bug that sorta works to my benifit. I'll be able to confirm that soon I guess.
 
GHILL said:
3)A failed tame attempt - Upon failing to tame, the creature will gain some spirit from having resisted you. its respect and health will however remain the same. You will have to allow the creature to regenerate enough to take more hits. HOwever, after a tame attempt a creature will not attack you or anyone around you until it is hit again, it is essentially 'tamed' in that it won't be hostile.

So easy sweating then? An interesting question is whether you can sustain your pet by using the sweat in a direct swap for nutrio bars to the MF users? :laugh:
 
Wistrel said:
So easy sweating then? An interesting question is whether you can sustain your pet by using the sweat in a direct swap for nutrio bars to the MF users? :laugh:

Silly me, read it wrong lol
 
Okay there seems to be some kind of bug with regards to the stabling process which works as follows.

When you first tame a pet, you will be unable to stable the creature. not only that but the creature will not auto-stable if you leave it for 10 minutes. This affected my first creature and was only fixed when the server crashed and the pet auto-stabled. Currently there is no fix other than to simply leave it at the stable and hope it eventually comes back to you as a deed. Also, I have noticed that when you have attempted to stable a creature you can no longer feed it. This makes me even more suspect that the creature HAS been stabbled but there is some glitch that prevents it from completing the process.
 
dragged nutro bars to hotkey
tamed snable
used feed hotkey
all nutro bars dissapeared (around 300)
pet walked off
pet dissapeared
relogged
no nutro bars, no pet

/crying *a lot
 
I used 600 bars to tame my snablesnot female young, then draged her down to camp caravan to stable her, No stable there so logged off and came to post here:) I wonder what the decay will be like when i relog in 10 mins:)

[br]Click to enlarge[/br]

-------------
ok just logged back in after 10 mins and this is what you get:)

[br]Click to enlarge[/br]
 
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Since I can't tame atm due to a bugged pet I've went through and polished up the guide into something a bit more presentable and easier to understand. Enjoy.
 
There are two types of craftable brush lvl 2 tools.

Basic Animal Brush (U)nlimited bp produces (L)imited tool.
Advanced Animal Brush - (L)imited bp produces (L)imited tool.

maybe there will also be Animal Brush Mentor Edition in the future:)

edit..updated BP info
 
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To Kalashi
Same thing happend to me but i wrote a suportcase and get my nutriobars back :)
 
Kalashi said:
dragged nutro bars to hotkey
tamed snable
used feed hotkey
all nutro bars dissapeared (around 300)
pet walked off
pet dissapeared
relogged
no nutro bars, no pet

/crying *a lot


OWNED by pet
 
GHILL said:
Since I can't tame atm due to a bugged pet I've went through and polished up the guide into something a bit more presentable and easier to understand. Enjoy.

And what an excellent guide it is too Mr Ghill!

I wasted an awful lot of time yesterday, because I had misunderstood how the process works. Then I read your guide.... :)

Many thanks!
 
Super guide Gavin.. I'd posrep you if I could.. but it seems I gave you some rep not long ago..

They lose 50 energy and 50 respect when you logout.. ouch. =((
 
Buzz Lighyear makes brushes (L), their tt value is arpound 80 peds.
I guess some other crafters have bprints and materials too.
 
a very nice guide ghill, thx :)
 
Hi, gonna add to this a supportcase that I submitted a few days ago. And MA's reply.(This is just part of a larger support case)

2005-11-29 XXX
Hi there, since this report case hasn't been closed I have another bug regarding the new taming system.

Yesterday I went to retrieve my pet snabblesnot old female from the stables to perform some tricks to be recorded. Imagine my surprise when I am informed that the snabblesnot starved while in stables, despite not needing fed until mid december.

As a result my pet has lost all its trust(a considerable 100% trust which won't be cheap to replace) as well as energy and a level for which it cost energy to get.

I'm well aware of the fact that you guys won't make any monetary compensation for any bug issue however I would plead to your common decency to at least restore my pet to the condition in which it was on, and to create some sort of fix for this situation.
2005-11-29 MindArk Support:
Hi,
We are investigating the issue why some creature take some time before they are stabled. When animals become auto stabled they will as you said lose some stats. The food the animals needs in stable is less than it needs when it is out of stable, that is why it is always hungry when food level is low when leaving stable despite the fact it will survive longer according to the deed.
/Regards
 
GHILL said:
2005-11-29 MindArk Support:
Hi,
We are investigating the issue why some creature take some time before they are stabled. When animals become auto stabled they will as you said lose some stats. The food the animals needs in stable is less than it needs when it is out of stable, that is why it is always hungry when food level is low when leaving stable despite the fact it will survive longer according to the deed.
/Regards

Does this make sense to anybody else? I dont quite understand the spattered English :X The last sentence doesn't make sense to me, and I've spoken English all my life - I can't decode it for the life of me :X I can read that it needs less food stabled, but then why did Gav's pet starve? So confused.... :confused:
 
Darn MA they gave you the new copy and paste answer to the stabling issue intstead of actually reading what you had to say. You should send in another support case
 
Very Nice Guide.
One thing I would add to it is, what skills are needed to tame which Mob.
This is driving me nuts. I have the AT and AL skills over 400 now, and Zoo over 350, Snables and Exarosaurs are tamed within a couple trys, but Daikibas still say Not Skilled Enough, all sizes of them :confused:
Anyone know if theres another skill used that may be to low?
 
+ rep ! amazing guide
 
Steele said:
Very Nice Guide.
One thing I would add to it is, what skills are needed to tame which Mob.
This is driving me nuts. I have the AT and AL skills over 400 now, and Zoo over 350, Snables and Exarosaurs are tamed within a couple trys, but Daikibas still say Not Skilled Enough, all sizes of them :confused:
Anyone know if theres another skill used that may be to low?

I can't say with absolute certainty the requirements for Daikaba, however I can say that someone I know with 500 or a little more, in taming is able to tame a Daikaba Stalker. Obviously this is subjected to the other skills which affect taming which are, animal lore, courage, intelligence and zoology. Perhaps scanning animals can assist you?
 
I'm below 300 in AL and below 500 in AT and I can tame a Daikiba Young but not Stalker
 
how is the best way to skill this?
witch a viper it still takes over 10 min to tame a exa young
 
Amanda,

Start with a normal whip - bring the health etc down quickly and the respect up rapidly - then use the L whip for the last few health bars to ensure that you don't kill it.

Using a viper to bring down the health will take to long - the animal may regenerate faster than you can whip.


Gl
 
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