The breeding loop
Breeding is how a good tame becomes a great one. The loop is the same for every species: a male and a female in range, both set to wander, with mating enabled. When they mate, an egg-laying species drops a fertilized egg; a mammal carries the baby and gives live birth after a gestation period.
Start with the species you already use. Breeding your first Rex matters more than breeding your fifth Dodo.
Eggs and incubation
A fertilized egg is an item. Pick it up, and keep it somewhere with the right temperature — too hot or too cold and it dies of incubation failure.
Every egg has a temperature window, and the window is shown on the egg itself. The standard setup is air conditioners near the egg, or campfires and standing torches for eggs that need heat. Drop the egg on the ground in that spot and check it. The egg’s status tells you whether it is getting close, too cold, or too hot.
Incubation takes real time, so start it before you log off rather than before a boss fight.
Gestation
Mammals skip the egg entirely. The female carries the baby, her food drains faster than usual, and she gives birth when the timer ends.
Gestating females cannot sprint for long and should be kept safe. A pregnant Brontosaurus that wanders into a pack of carnivores is a wasted week of breeding.
Hatching and the food bar
The moment a baby hatches, its food bar starts dropping fast, and babies eat far more than adults. Put food in the baby’s own inventory before it hatches — troughs only work once it reaches the juvenile stage (10.1% maturation).
Babies cannot eat from a mount’s inventory, and they cannot forage. An unattended baby starves in minutes, which is the most common way a breeding project dies.
Imprinting
While a baby grows up, it periodically asks for attention: a cuddle, a walk, or a specific food. Each request you complete adds to its imprint percentage, and a fully imprinted baby gets a large permanent boost to its stats when it matures.
The permanent 20% stat gain stays with the creature no matter who owns it; the extra 30% damage and damage resistance only applies when the original imprinter is riding.
Imprinting is optional, but it is the single biggest power difference between two babies of the same species. For a fighting line, it is not optional in practice.
Maturation
Babies mature over hours, eating constantly the whole time. Two things make the wait shorter:
- Maewing — load food into its inventory and enable nursing from its radial menu; it feeds nearby babies like a moving trough.
- Cryopods — popping a baby into a cryopod pauses its maturation timer completely, which is how breeders bank a batch of babies and raise them all at once.
Mutations
Every baby has a chance to roll a mutation: a random jump in one stat plus a colour change. Mutations are how a line gets past the wild stat caps.
The hard rule is the limit: a creature can carry twenty mutations on each side of the ancestry, forty in total. Once both parents are at 20/20, mutations stop entirely — no stat gains and no colour rolls.
To stack mutations cleanly:
- Breed your best male to a group of females and watch for the mutation you want.
- When a baby rolls it, that baby replaces the parent of that sex in the breeding pair.
- Keep the mutation counters separate in your head — a clean male with two mutations bred to a clean female keeps the count low and the stats climbing.
Breeding two heavily mutated creatures together can reset your progress if you lose track of which counters are full. Track the counters, not only the stats.
Stealing eggs instead
Wyverns and Rock Drakes cannot be bred from wild adults in the normal way — their eggs are stolen from nests, and the mothers defend them. That makes them the exception to everything above: you incubate a stolen egg, and the baby is imprinted and raised like any other.
A sane first project
Pick one species, tame a matched pair with good base stats, and imprint one baby to completion. That baby is better than anything you can find in the wild, and it becomes the parent of everything after it.