A pet of your own

In short: Sunfer in Twin City gives you a pet for free if you earn it — five tasks that end with you catching a stray in the pheasant fields yourself.

Who: level 10 to start, level 20 to finish. Where: Sunfer stands west of the arrival square in Twin City, at (408,388); the stray lives in the pheasant fields to the south-east. What you get: a companion that follows you and picks things up off the ground so you do not have to stop for them.

A pet cannot fight. It cannot be hurt, it cannot be killed, no monster will go for it and no other player can touch it, and it will never make you stronger or make anything drop more often. What it does is save you steps — and once it has grown, it saves you a lot of them.

What a pet actually does

It walks with you. When something you told it to collect falls near you, it goes and gets it, and the item lands in your bag as if you had clicked it yourself. It respects the same rules you do: it will not touch loot that still belongs to whoever killed the monster, and it will not fetch anything if your bag is full.

It is allowed to fall behind while it works. A pet with something to fetch will trail as much as 30 cells back without hurrying — you will see it stop, pick something up, and jog after you. Past that it gives up on whatever it was going for and comes back to you, and if it has been left really far behind it stops walking and leaps.

There is no pet combat and no pet stat. It saves you walking, and that is all it is for.

Silver is the exception, and it is worth understanding. A pet is careless with coins: it hands over only part of a purse and loses the rest on the way home — a tenth at level 1, rising to two fifths when it is fully grown.

That is why it leaves the purses at your feet alone: anything within three cells of you is yours to walk over and collect in full, and the pet only goes for what you would have to walk to. Fighting with area spells scatters purses across the whole screen and you collect almost none of them — those are what it brings back, and a tenth of those is a tenth of silver you were never going to pick up.

It does not report every purse. Once a minute you get one line: how much silver it brought back and from how many purses. Treasures — a Meteor, a DragonBall, a piece of gear — are announced one by one, because those are news.

Earning one: "The Stray"

Something has been raiding Sunfer's feed store. Talk to her and she will set you on it, one task at a time.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• Ask Sunfer where it is. She tells you the direction and roughly the cell, worked out from where the strays actually live. Look for a grey rat nosing about among the birds — it wanders, so it is never quite where it was.
• It will run from you. That is not a bug — the first time you reach for it, it bolts. So does the second. It has no reason to trust you yet.
• Drumsticks only drop while you are on the feeding task. Pheasants, Turtledoves and Robins carry them, roughly one bird in two. If you are not on that task, they do not drop at all, so do not go stockpiling them in advance.
• Any iron ore will do. The mine hands out ten grades of it; Sunfer takes the poorest one you are carrying and does not care which. If you have never mined: the Mine Admin at the west end of Twin City sells the pickaxe for 1,000 silver and sends you down; equip it and swing at the rock, and iron comes up within a minute.
• The catch takes a few tries. Hold the sack, click the stray, and expect it to slip away once or twice before it decides. Chase it — it does not go far.

When it finally walks into the sack, it is yours on the spot. No trip back to town.

Feeding it

One meal lasts one hour of the pet being out with you, and it can hold three at once — fill it up and it works three hours without a break. It only gets hungry while it is actually out: send it home and it stops eating, log out and it stops eating, so a week away costs it nothing. A hungry pet still follows you everywhere — it just stops fetching until you feed it, and it tells you when that happens.

You can feed it anywhere, from the /pet window or with /pet feed (one meal, no window). Doing it out in the field costs double, because you are paying for scraps; Sunfer feeds it properly for half that, so a trip to Twin City is worth making when you are passing.

A meal costs more as the animal grows: 4,000 silver at level 1, rising to 33,000 when it is fully grown. That is the only running cost a pet has, and it is pitched at under a tenth of what a level-20 hunter earns in the hour it buys.

Growing it

Two things teach a pet, and nothing else does.

Feeding it. Every meal is worth 3,750 experience — as much as thousands of purses. So a player who simply keeps their animal fed still grows it, whether or not they farm: at level 1 a single meal is two and a half levels.

What it carries home. Every purse it brings you is worth 1, and every treasure — a Meteor, a DragonBall, a stone, a gem — is worth 10.

A purse is a purse. It counts the pile, never what was in it. A forty-silver pile in the Twin City fields teaches your pet exactly as much as a four-thousand one in the Ice Crypt, so a pet grows from what it does rather than from how strong you already are. A beginner's pet and an endgame farmer's grow at the same rate.

Growing a pet is long by design — it is a companion, not a weekend project. The whole climb for the stray is about 271,000 experience: the fastest farmer in the game, an archer on Cyclone whose pet brings back some three thousand purses an hour, needs about 40 hours of work; an ordinary farmer nearer sixty; feeding it twice a day and nothing else gets there in about five weeks. A bought coat needs half of that. Everything it needs is on the "How it grows" page of the /pet window, including exactly how far it is from its next level.

A pet gets quicker on its feet with every level, not only at the end: the pace grows evenly from level 1 to 30.

Gear takes bag slots, so those two switches are for when you want them: a pet on a good spawn with "Elite gear" on can still fill a bag in an evening, and that is exactly what some players want and others do not.

The stray you catch needs twice the experience per level that a bought coat does. That is the only difference between them — the free pet is slower to grow, never weaker. Same reach, same carrying list, same share of a purse.

Coats

A coat changes nothing about what a pet can do — only what it looks like. Sunfer keeps them, and they are not cheap: the plainest costs 50,000 CPs, which is about half what a +10 item costs. A coat is meant to be a thing you saved for.

Nothing costs more than 200,000 — that is the ceiling, and the dearest coats share it rather than climbing past one another.

The coat you catch in the questline is yours for nothing, and a bought coat never replaces it — you own both and can switch whenever you like.

The pet tab

Your character window (the status window) has a fifth tab: the paw under the four you know. It shows the animal's name, coat, level, experience, how long it is still fed and how far it reaches, with the six things it can carry as tick boxes -- click one to switch it (a box stays crossed until the level that opens it). Four buttons: Feed (one meal at the field price), Call (out, or home again), Coat (the next coat you own) and More (the full window: a name, a fill-up of meals, how it grows, the coat shelf with Sunfer's prices, and its record -- purses carried, silver handed over, treasures, meals). /pet still opens the full window.

The /pet window

Type /pet anywhere, or click the paw button on the bottom bar (right of the Item Lock icon), and your pet's window opens. Everything lives there, in pages:

You do not need to be near your pet, and it does not matter if it is out or at home — the window works either way.

Three things have a short form for the middle of a fight, no window needed: /pet out calls it, /pet home sends it back, /pet feed buys one meal at the field price.

Where to find them