Beastwhispering — tame the wild animals of Aurai

Tame wild creatures and keep them as real, persistent companions. A tamed pet follows you, fights beside you, and survives zone changes and save/reload — it's not a summon, it's a character in your game the same way you are.

⚠ Updating from a build made before 2026-07-30? Your save loses every Beastwhispering item (chow, recipe scrolls, blankets, sigils, feathers), every Beastwhispering skill you have learned, and the fletching enchantment on arrows you already fletched — the mod moved onto its community-allocated item-id range and the old numbers no longer resolve. Your pets are not affected: bonds, loyalty, names and stats are stored by name, not by item id. A fresh character avoids the loss entirely. Full detail in CHANGELOG.md.

This is actively-developed software. It is playable and it is being tested, but you will find rough edges. Back up your saves before you install. See the release notes for known issues.

Currently tamable: Hyena, Armored Hyena, Veaber, Pearlbird — each with their own diet, combat style, and species-specific bonuses.

• Taming & bonding — win a wild animal over with the right food, then build loyalty over time through feeding, care, and fighting alongside it.
• Combat — Hunt as One and For the Kill give your pet (and you) real combat presence, not a passive follower.
• Care — feed, manage temperature/comfort, and keep your companion alive through the world's hazards.
• Persistence — your pet remembers you. Loyalty, stats, and bond state survive quitting, reloading, and traveling between regions.
• Co-op — tame and play with a companion in a multiplayer session.

Roadmap

The tameable roster is small right now, and that's deliberate, not a shortcut. Every release keeps adding more of Aurai's creatures — but each one is built as a deep, lore-accurate companion in its own right, not a reskin with a different portrait. We'd rather ship fewer pets that each feel like a real reason to pick that species — a distinct playstyle niche, abilities and stats grounded in how the creature actually behaves in Outward's world — than a long list of interchangeable ones. If your favorite creature isn't tameable yet, it's very likely on the list; it just hasn't gotten its due care yet.

Requires: SkillKit, CompanionKit, ForgeKit, StoryKit, AggroKit (installed automatically as dependencies).

Note on Pearlbirds: Pearlbirds live only in Chersonese. If you tame or keep a Pearlbird companion, the game will briefly load into Chersonese and back on its own to fetch their body — a short, automatic loading screen, not a bug.

Beastwhispering changelog

0.2.1 — 2026-08-01

Documentation only — no code changes from 0.2.0.

• Document the known issue: taming only works in single-player. Using chow on a wild creature currently only succeeds in a solo session. An already-tamed pet is fully playable in multiplayer — it follows, fights, feeds, bonds and persists in co-op exactly as it does solo — so tame your companion in single-player and then bring it into your co-op session. This is a bug, we are working diligently on it, and the note comes out the moment it is fixed.

0.2.0 — 2026-07-30

• Pin BW's direct SideLoader dependency, not just the transitive one
• Thunderstore release prep: changelogs + real category tags for BW
• Fix the passive icons: 84x128, not square — and make the checker catch it
• Regenerate the For the Kill icon: wolf jaws closing on the skull
• Cap all-status build-up resistance below the engine's refusal sentinel
• Release-readiness fixes: a private hostname was shipping into player configs
• Opus review fixes: the changelog the release train would have mangled
• Pre-release review fixes: the public wiki, the unguarded scroll seam
• Close the review items; fix a live double-claim that killed both blankets
• Review fixes: the shared kits must not enforce OUR id allocation
• Fix the id stamper writing "$187000" into all 14 SideLoader packs
• Thunderstore release prep: BW/SkillKit/StoryKit manifests + descriptions
• DonorKit gets a painterly butterfly net; Disengage now reads "return and stay"
• HealPet: bandaged paw + a bold green cross that can't be clipped
• Draw every custom id from the community-allocated pool (87000-87999)
• Lane 3 review fixes: honesty gates on the container + scavenge-sim verbs
• Lane 3: container + caravan queue-unblocker verbs
• Fix pet-sigil V9: Spark now combos off pet circles (ProximityCondition alias)
• Hyena/Pearlbird tuning wave: HAO taunt, gifts, bone relic, feed rule
• Unify the BW iconography: one tan skill field, one item field, vanilla slot aspect
• … and 310 more (see git history)

⚠ Read this before updating from any build made before 2026-07-30

Your existing save loses every Beastwhispering item, skill and enchantment.

The Outward modding community allocates ranges of custom item ids so that no two mods ever ship the same number — a number that lands in your save file permanently the moment you pick the item up. Beastwhispering had been using a range it simply chose for itself, which nobody had granted it and which could have collided with any other mod you install. It now uses 87000-87999, the range allocated to it.

Every id changed, so the game no longer recognises the old ones. On an existing save you will lose:

• every Beastwhispering custom item — chow, recipe scrolls, blankets, pet sigils, Pearlbird feathers;
• every Beastwhispering skill you have learned (re-learn them from Maren — all ten are still in her training tree);
• the fletching enchantment on any arrows you have already fletched.

Your pets are not affected. Their bonds, loyalty, names and stats live in Beastwhispering's own save files, which store species and item names, never item ids. A bonded pet survives the update intact.

Starting a fresh character avoids the loss entirely. There is no migration: the old numbers were never ours to keep, and carrying them forward would have meant shipping a known collision risk into a public release.

Co-op

Host and guest should both run this build. The companion channel's version gate is exact, so a mismatched pair still joins the Photon room but the ck channel never goes ready — pets desync rather than the session being refused, and the log carries a handshake-mismatch warning. Matching builds is the standing rule for co-op and this release does not change that.

Under the hood

• Ids are now recorded one-per-row in a checked-in ledger, generated from that single source into the code, the SideLoader packs and the item registry, and gate-checked in CI — including a scan that fails the build on any hand-typed id.
• A blanket added through the Blankets.txt config drop now needs an explicitly allocated id and is refused with an explanatory message if it has none. Previously it silently invented one by hashing the blanket's name, which could land on another mod's item.