for the wannabe creature handler

[Murashu]

Guide to Creature Handling

 

 

 

updated 6/21 due to patches and input from peers, thanks for the info[/i/

Terretes Guide to Creature Handling 2.0

So, there you are. You’ve completed your Scout training, you’ve mastered Hunting and Exploring, and now you're looking to become a Creature Handler. Before you begin, you need to find yourself a trainer. There is a Creature Handler trainer on all the starter worlds, though not always in every city. Below is a list of where you will find some of them:

 

- On Rori, she's only in Restuss and not in Narmle.

- On Tatooine, he's is at -2500, 3000 (or -3000, 2500...whichever matches up better with Mos Espa). I think it's the first one. He's at the "entrance" to the city and is standing with a bantha and a couple of other creatures.

- Nashal, Talus behind the spaceport. Also near the shuttleport; if coming from Daeric, this is closer.

- Bora Gurfel, Corellia (spelling?) south of the bank, hospital and cantina. This is the most northeast town. Very useful for handlers that like to hang around Dathomir or other planets only accessible from Corellia.

- Naboo at Kaadara, get out of the starport, take right until guild hall, just next to it !

- Coronet, just outside the bank

 

Now you're a Creature Handler. What next?

 

Taming

Your first task is to get a pet. This, of course, is the hardest part of being a Creature Handler, so we’ll tackle it first.

 

Finding your first pet

Go out into the wild on any planet and start looking for clusters of animals. There are some creatures that either do not have babies or are rarely seen with them, but most creatures commonly have babies.

 

As a novice, it is highly recommended that you look for non-aggressive, non-ferocious, non-killing creatures to start with. When you see a group, examine each animal in the pack and look for:

Aggressive: No

Ferocity: 0

Killing: No

You check all the adults, because there are herds of herbivorous, non-aggressive animals that can have one in the pack that is not only aggressive but will also deathblow (Killing=Yes). Vigilance and patience will keep you from having to run back, and Creature Handlers should never be in a hurry.

 

Once you find a group, target each, looking for one that is much smaller than the others and has (baby) in it’s name. Once you find one, examine it, looking for Tameable: Yes. There are many creatures described as youth, fledgling, etc that are not actually babies, and only babies can be tamed.

 

Convincing your pet to come with you

The following section goes through how to tame an aggressive, killing creature. My recommendation is that you tame non-aggressive ones this way as well, if only to get practice in the process.

 

First step is to mask your scent. No matter how long it stays up, no matter how often it goes down, stop and put it back up because this will make the difference between living and dying for a Creature Handler.

 

Second step is to take your weapon out of your hands. It won’t help you tame, it looks hostile (no confirmation if this is in the game code or not), and if your potential pet attacks you and you auto-shoot it, the chances of you being able to tame it again later are drastically reduced…creatures tend to remember you when you shoot them.

 

Third step is to walk. Creatures react poorly a lot less often to something that is masked and walking than stinky and running..

 

Taking the above steps in mind, circle the pack until the baby is the closest one to you. Frequently, if you’re lucky, the baby will wander from the pack and you’ll have time alone with it, but more than likely it’s so close to its parents that it’s underneath them.

 

Target the baby and begin walking towards it very slowly, stopping to refresh your maskscent every time it goes down. Eventually, the baby will get a “?” over its head, then a “!”. If it’s an aggressive mob, it will run at you and behave threateningly…immediately try to tame the creature and put it on autofollow so you stay with it.

 

Otherwise, it will likely bolt away from its parents and away from the pack. If it does that, back away from the pack and run around it to the baby…don’t bolt through the adults chasing the baby…that will get you eaten. Once you get within 10 meters of the baby, try to tame the creature and put it on autofollow so you stay within range.

 

More often than not, you won’t get the baby on the first try. Simply press Tame again and keep at it, making sure to stay within 10 meters or you’ll be told you’re too far away. You may also be told that you are unable to tame this creature. This means that your Creature Taming level is not high enough to allow you to tame it. Go tame some smaller creatures and come back to this one when you’ve advanced your Creature Taming.

 

Aggressive babies may get mad and attack you. Your options here are to stand and be incapped/killed, try to run away, or kill the baby.

- Killing the baby means you don’t get to tame it. I don’t recommend this option.

- Taking the incapacitation is the best solution, as long as the baby doesn’t kill. Once you’re incapped, the baby will forget you and you get to start fresh.

- If the baby kills, then running away is your best option. Use burst run while hammering on the Peace button, and most of the time the baby will give up the chase. Unfortunately, the baby will remember you for a long time, so taming them is not an option for awhile. While running, make sure you find a nice spot for your body on the off chance it doesn’t give up the chase. Few things are more annoying than having your body in the middle of a Rancor PoI.

 

To my knowledge, every baby is tameable, so all it takes is patience. I’ve failed 45 times in a row, dying 8 times in the process, on the more difficult creatures but I was always eventually successful. How long/often you try is totally up to you. Some creatures will never have babies (i.e. Krayt Dragons) and some will require Master Creature Handler to even consider trying to tame (i.e. Bull Rancors), but if it has (baby) after it’s name, it can be tamed.

 

One last note…if someone attacks the herd while you are taming it, it will almost always disrupt the tame and make it very hard to tame the baby. If this attacker is in your group, then YOU will become the target, as creatures can somehow tell who is linked to whom. So, if you’re in the middle of a delicate situation, trying to tame a killing, ferocious creature, and your group mates get bored and decide to pick a fight, you will very likely be the one making the corpse run.

 

Training

When you successfully tame a creature, you will be given a message to that effect, and will be told how much creature handling experience you were awarded. At this time, it is imperative that you immediately train it to follow you before you store it, as creatures have a tendency to run off on their own, even after being stored and called, and you’ll have a very difficult time training it while chasing it.

 

So, click on your new pet, bring up the radial menu, select “Train”, then “Follow me”. A “?” will appear over the baby’s head, indicating it is ready to receive the command. Type “follow” and press enter. You will receive one of two results:

- The baby did not understand, and a larger “?” over the baby’s head. Simply repeat the above steps over and over again, until…

- You see “You have taught your pet a new command,” with an experience reward. This indicates the pet has learned that word for that command and will execute that command when they see that word.

 

When you successfully train the pet the command, repeat the command again to have the pet execute it and follow you. At this point, you can either store the creature or have it follow you around.

 

Once you’ve trained a creature a command, you can reteach that command again with 100% success, but you only get experience for the first time. This is useful when you want to make your creature, then want to use a simpler command after it’s named. See below…

 

Naming your creature

Naming your pet is quite easy...simply train them four commands with what you want them named as the first word of the command. Training follow as “bob follow”, guard as “bob guard”, attack as “bob kill”, and group as “bob group” will bring up a bubble over the pet saying “Bob?” and the pets name will change to Bob. Obviously, until you get four commands to teach your creature, you are not able to name them.

 

Why would you want to name your creature? When you advance in your profession, you may have two or three creatures out at one time, and may want them doing different things. This requires either that you teach each of them a different set of commands, or simply give them names.

 

However, this can also create cumbersome work in crisis situations as well. If you have Bob, Jim, and Steve as your pets, and you want them to attack the same target, then you have to type “Bob kill”, enter, “Jim kill”, enter, “Steve kill”, enter. So there may be some commands that you don’t want to put their name on, and others that you do. The good news is, it is not required to use the name in any command after you’ve named the creature, and you can have some commands with the name and others without. If all three pets have “kill” for their attack command, and you say “kill”, then all three pets will attack your currently target.

 

As mentioned above, once you train the creature to attack with “Bob kill”, you can then retrain it with just “kill” if you want all your active creatures to attack on a single command.

 

Commands

When you click on your pet, you have access to a radial menu with the following options:

Examine – Brings up the status of your pet.

Store – Removes your pet from play.

Feed – Gives your pet food from your inventory.

Train – Tells your pet to listen for a command so you can train them or retrain them. The following are the commands you can eventually train your pet, as you advance up the various arms of the Creature Handler tree:

 

Attack – tells your pet to attack your current target.

Guard – tells your pet to guard your current target, having them attack anyone that attacks that target.

Stay – tells the pet to remain in place.

Follow other – tells your pet to follow your current target.

Follow me – tells your pet to follow you.

Group – invites your pet into your current group, allowing you to see his HAM and status.

Get patrol point – adds a patrol point for your pet at its current location.

Clear patrol point – clears all patrol points for your pet.

Patrol – tells your pet to immediately begin walking the patrol points set above.

Wedge formation – tells your pet to get into a wedge formation with your other pets.

Column formation – tells your pet to get into a column formation with your other pets.

Befriend – tells your pet to accept orders from your current target.

Transfer – transfer’s ownership of your pet to your current target.

Release – lets your pet go back to the wild, making them untamed.

Trick1 – tells your pet to do the first trick it knows.

Trick2 – tells your pet to do the second trick it knows.

 

Stored Pets

Pets are stored in your datapad, with your waypoints and your schematics. If you bring your datapad up, you can Examine, Call, or Destroy your pet. Destroying your pet does just that, destroy them, remove them as a pet. Examine does the same as the Examine radial menu on the pet itself. Call brings the pet to you and has them on the field. There is a limit to the number of pets you can have on the field and stored in your datapad, based upon your Creature Maintenance skill…not what level of Creature Maintenance you have, but the actual Creature Maintenance skill that is visible as a +# on your character sheet. This skill can be modified by race and items so two people with Creature Maintenance III might have different Creature Maintenance skills.

 

Note: I need to find Holo’s post on this to get the exact numbers. I know, as a Master, I can have 12 pets in my datapad and 3 on the field at the same time. At novice, I believe it was 4 pets in my datapad and 1 pet in the field.

 

Combat

Keeping in mind that your pet is a baby of its race, you need to not expect them to be a rough-and-tumble combat monster like its parents were. However, since the primary way to get experience for a creature handler is having your pet fight, junior gets to cut their teeth very early in his career.

 

The amount of experience you get from your creature fighting is dependant upon the respective levels of the target and your pet, and has nothing to do with you or your ability. Consequently, you will need to look at the HAM’s of potential targets and try to find something close to your baby’s ability to defeat. My recommendation is to carry and equip a weapon you don’t know how to use when doing this to get a more accurate /consider. For example, I don’t have any skill in unarmed, so my /consider to potential targets is very much like my baby’s when I don’t have a weapon in my hand.

 

Once you find a likely victim, there are a number of ways for you to initiate combat. You can simply tell your pet to kill the target. While this has the benefit of being simple, it will also very likely get your pet incapacitated. The best solution I’ve found is engage the mob yourself, especially if it’s a lower level one, and let your pet beat on it. The longer your pet lasts, and the more damage it does, and the more difficult it is compared to your pet’s ability, the more experience you’ll get.

 

In my opinion, the very best way to get creature handling experience is as part of a group, especially one with brawlers in it. That way, your pet gets to contribute damage and get experience without having to be the primary tank. This also has the advantage of your pet being able to beat on even fight or even red /consider mobs, and accumulate very nice experience, without being stepped on overly much.

 

Another suggestion is to focus on the mid-level bugs for pets, like anglers, mites, and sand beetles as they typically have ranged attacks. If you are closer to the mob and can draw agro, then your pet lives through the entire combat, giving you more experience instead of having to take the downtime to heal your pet between fights.

 

Maintenance

Periodically, your pet will tell you they’re hungry or want to play. Hungry is simple, as they eat the same things you do. Simply have food in your inventory, radial click on your pet and select Feed. Feeding your pet helps them grown as well as regenerate damage.

 

Playing with your pet means having them do their tricks. In addition to relieving what amounts to “battle fatigue” for your pets, it also helps them grow up and get big and strong. Combat also helps them grow. While pets grow in storage, they grow significantly faster if they are out and seeing some activity, like playing, fighting, and eating. Pets that sit only in storage grow and heal at a much slower rate.

 

Pets heal at the same rate as players and can be healed using stimpacks and other medical supplies. They do not get wounds and are not deathblowed, so they never “die” in the game. Some Creature Handlers invest in the medic tree to allow them to heal their own pets, but that is up to the individual CH as that costs a number of learning capacity points and some CH’s may not be willing to sacrifice them for that.

 

Advancement

There are four paths through to Master Creature Handler: Taming, Training, Empathy, and Management.

 

Advancing in Taming gives you bonuses to taming, making it easier to tame less aggressive pets, and possible to tame the more vicious or difficult ones out there. Choose this when you’re ready to tackle bigger pets.

 

Training gives you more commands to use as well as increases your chance in being successful in training the commands you do know. The higher this is, the less often you’ll fail while training the various commands.

 

Empathy helps you get in touch with your pet as well as also helps in training. It gives you the playful commands, like the tricks.

 

Management gives you the formations and helps you have more pets.

 

Personally, I recommend going up in the skills in the following order: Management, Taming, Empathy, Training.

 

I hope this helps. Catch me in game, Terretes Cyndrome, if you have any questions, or reply here if you have any suggestions, corrections, or issues.

[Ride]

Wow...

 

Thank you for that. When I get the game, I will try to use that.

 

Thank you again.