Every taming calculator gives back the same three figures: how much food the creature will eat, how much narcotic holds it under, and how long you will be standing there. All three depend on the creature’s level and on the rates your own world runs, which is why a number pasted from someone else’s server is usually wrong in yours. This page breaks down what each figure means, shows how to calibrate a base estimate to your settings, and gives you the knockout and kibble numbers that can actually be checked.
What the three figures actually measure
| Figure | What drives it | What you control |
|---|---|---|
| Food | Creature species and level, and the type of food offered | Which food you bring (kibble, raw meat, berries) and how many portions |
| Narcotics | How long the creature stays unconscious, so how far its torpor drains | How much narcotic or biotoxin to pack, and when to top it up |
| Time | Portions needed and the gap between feeds, scaled by your server’s taming rate | The rate itself on single-player and non-dedicated worlds |
Food goes in the last hotbar slot on knockout tames, and the creature eats on its own timer. Better food fills the taming bar further per portion, so it also protects taming effectiveness. Narcotics tame nothing on their own: they only stop the creature waking mid-tame, which is why a long tame burns through more of them. Time is the output, not an input. Shorten the other two and it falls.
So read a calculator’s result as a packing list rather than a stopwatch. The food count and the narcotic count are what you load into your inventory; the time estimate is what you budget around them.
Inputs a calculator cannot guess for you
A per-creature estimate is only as good as the four things you hand it. Miss one and the output drifts:
- Creature and level. Knockout and food figures are per species and scale with level; there is no global “average tame” to fall back on.
- Your server’s taming rate. A private world, a non-dedicated session and a rented server rarely share one setting.
- The food you intend to use. Kibble, prime meat and berries do not fill the bar equally.
- Your knockout weapon. Published tools let you record your own weapon damage, because the same creature is a different job with a crossbow than with a longneck rifle.
That leads to the honest way to use any base estimate: take the 1x figure for your creature, then calibrate once against the world you actually play. Tame a low-level creature on those settings, note the real duration against the quoted one, and the ratio between them is your conversion factor. Divide later 1x quotes by that factor. A hypothetical 30-minute quote on a world you measured at 3x becomes 10 minutes; the arithmetic is yours to redo, and the factor holds until you change the rate. If you cannot spare a calibration tame, treat the quoted time as an upper bound and pack extra narcotic instead of trusting it.
Knockout numbers you can verify today
Two published weapon figures are worth carrying into the field. A crossbow with a tranq arrow delivers 70 torpor on impact plus 87.5 over the next five seconds — 157.5 per shot. A longneck rifle with a shocking tranq dart delivers 312 plus 130 over five seconds, or 442 per dart. A bola roots small creatures for 30 seconds; large ones such as a Rex are immune.
| Target | Reach for | Watch for |
|---|---|---|
| Small, early-game tames | Wooden club, slingshot or tranq arrows | Bola first, or it bolts while you line up the shot |
| Mid-size, higher level | Crossbow with tranq arrows | Count shots against the 157.5 figure rather than firing until it drops |
| Very large, high-torpor (Rex, Giga) | Longneck with shocking tranq darts | Over-tranqing: excess torpor damage lowers taming effectiveness |
The last row is the one that costs people levels. Hitting a creature harder than needed does not shorten the tame; it damages the effectiveness bonus you were taming for. Pick the weapon that reaches the torpor you need, not the biggest one in the pack. For a hypothetical target that needs 1,000 torpor, seven arrows (7 x 157.5 = 1,102.5) or three darts (3 x 442 = 1,326) clear it. The darts overshoot by far more, and that margin is exactly what can dent effectiveness. Two darts and one tranq arrow (884 + 157.5 = 1,041.5) lands closest to the target.
Feed the right kibble, not the nearest one
Kibble comes in six tiers, and species are mapped to a tier — the data behind our kibble calculator lists which creatures take which. Basic kibble needs 5 Mejoberry, 10 Amarberry, 10 Tintoberry, 1 Cooked Meat, 5 Fiber and a water container at least a quarter full. Superior kibble needs 2 Citronal, 2 Rare Mushroom, 1 Prime Meat Jerky and 1 Sap. Look up the creature, read its tier, then work backwards from that recipe: that is the entire supply chain behind the food figure above.
The tier is also a lever on taming effectiveness, which decides how many bonus levels the tame keeps. The taming effectiveness page covers that mechanic, while choosing a knockout tool by target and the full taming walkthrough cover the rest of the process, including passive tames that never need a narcotic at all.
One deliberate gap: there is no per-creature food, narcotic and time table on this page. Those values shift with patches and with server settings, and the sources available here do not carry a verifiable per-species table to check them against. A made-up number is worse than no number. Get the per-creature estimate from a calculator, then calibrate it to your own world with the method above.