Publish 16 brought tamers a treat they have been dreaming of for a long time: pet bonding and resurrection.

Bonding

Pets will bond to their owners after one real-time week of ownership. The bonding timer starts the moment you first feed your pet after you tamed it, so make sure you don't forget to feed! If the animal's minimum taming requirement is higher than 29.1, you must have the minimum skill to tame it before it will bond with you. This means any miner can bond with their stable-bought pack horse for example, but if you buy a dragon from someone and can't tame your own yet, you can not start the bonding process until you reach the needed skill level to tame one yourself. There is no limit on how many pets you can bond with.

The bonding process itself is rather uncomplicated: once you feed your pet again after one real-time week has passed, the pet will be bonded to you and display a [bonded] tag instead of the usual [tame] tag.

Owning a pet that is bonded to you is quite different from just owning a regular, tame pet. The bonded pet will recall with you, eliminating the need of casting the gate travel spell all the time and if it dies, it will turn into a pet ghost which can be resurrected.

The bond is only broken if the pet goes wild, is released or transferred to another player.

Resurrection

The most important fact about pet resurrection is that it works only on bonded pets.

When a bonded pet dies, it turns into a pet ghost. This ghost willl obey the movement commands (follow, come, etc.) but no others. It will not dissipate or lose loyalty as fast as a tame pet, but cannot be stabled. Any player with at least 80 skill points in Veterinary and Animal Lore can attempt to resurrect the pet with bandages. The owner or a friend of the pet must be present to confirm that they want the pet to be resurrected.

Resurrected pets suffer skill loss of at least 0.9%, the lower the skill, the higher the loss. Pets resurrected by someone other than their owner receive twice the penalty. This skill loss is permanent (it will not revert after a certain time period has passed, like faction stat loss for example), but with a bit of training you will be able to get your pet back to its former level, or even beyond that.