(Tamable: dragon, nightmare, swamp dragon, white wyrm, fire steed)

The creatures mentioned above have an additional difficulty level tied into their taming requirement: as soon as you attempt to tame them, you will receive the message "you seem to anger the beast", and they (even the otherwise non-aggressive swamp dragon) will start to attack. Target peace does not help, each time the peaced creature is angered, it will still attack, but stop as soon as you manage to start taming.

Finally starting a taming attempt does not automatically guarantee success, the chance of successfully taming the creature is still calculated by checking your taming skill against the creature's difficulty. To determine your success chance, please refer to the Taming and Control calculator linked above.

The frequency with which this message occurs is completely random and not skill related, and it does not decrease as your taming skill goes up. It is possible but rare to be able to start a taming attempt without getting an angering message, just like it is possible to go through 30 angering messages before finally getting an attempt in. Your chance of actually being able to attempt taming the creature is about 1 in 20.

(Tamable: small hellcat, large hellcat and leader variety, hellhound and leader variety, lava lizard, drake, dragon, nightmare and fire steed)

Some creatures have the ability to breathe fire. This fire breath can not be countered by magical means, neither magic resist nor spell reflection. Dragon scale armor (made from red dragon scales) however does offer some protection against fire breath if you are wearing a full suit. On the other hand, you will be a lot more vulnerable to poison while wearing such armor. The power of the breath weapon is directly linked to a creature's hitpoints (5% of the creatures remaining hitpoints) - the lower on life it is, the less damage it does. This is one of the reasons why many people choose to beat down a dragon's health before taming it.

Fire breathers are of an especially aggressive nature and even tame ones will often attack hostile creatures where pets without breath attack will wait patiently until ordered to attack, unless their opponent targets them first of course. A firebreather's preferred targets are poisonous creatures, which they will attack before anything else, so it is always a wise decision to pay special attention to your pet's health bar if you are in an environment with high-level poisonous creatures (best example: the higher levels of the arachnid champion spawn in Felucca and Ilshenar). A second trait of their aggressive nature is their "target switching" behavior when wild. They may be engaged in combat with another opponent, but every time the game screen is refreshed (by various actions: casting a spell, mounting/dismounting, resurrecting a player etc.) or you move within a certain radius of the firebreather, it will redirect its attack.

Upon being tamed, firebreathers lose their "target switching" behavior, but will still be aggressive towards poisonous creatures. This does not include poisonous pets though - a bug that caused tame firebreathers to attack tame poisonous creatures thus possibly getting them guard killed was fixed over two years ago.

(Tamable: kirin and unicorn)

There are some creatures in the game that are not aggressive to creatures with a positive karma status, but will attack anything with negative karma on sight. Pets inherit the karma level of their owner, so depending on your status you and your pet(s) may or may not be attacked by creatures of good alignment.

With two exceptions (centaur and serpentine dragon), these creatures highlight blue unless they attack or are attacked. Serpentine dragons, while of good alignment, still have the nature of firebreathers and will attack even positive karma players. If players retaliate and kill the serpentine dragon, they will lose karma depending on their karma level.

(Tamable: imp, unicorn, kirin, nightmare, dragon, white wyrm)

Unlike players, creatures with magical abilities are not limited by skill level in what spells they can cast but only by their available mana pool - a nightmare with magery in the 40s will flamestrike just as well as a white wyrm that has grandmastered this skill, but the spell cast by the wyrm has a higher damage potential. These differences can be overcome by training your pet's magery skill.

Another difference between the game AI and player spellcasting ability is that NPCs do not "fizzle" spells and can still cast while paralyzed. They will also try to break paralyzation by casting on themselves.

Magical creatures can not cast all the spells "in the book". They are restricted by a hard coded list, so for example no matter how well trained your dragon is, he will never be able to resurrect you.

(Tamable: horse, ridable llama, forest- desert- and frenzied ostard, ridgeback, swamp dragon, unicorn, kirin, nightmare, fire steed, giant beetle)

There is a wide variety of mounts available for all players, and in regards to their properties as mounts they all follow the same rules.

• Neither of them moves faster than any other while mounted, so the belief of some people that you arefaster riding a llama than riding a horse is just a superstition.
• All of them lose stamina at the same rate and need to be fed or to rest for a while to restore it. Stamina is restored by feeding your mount a stack of food as opposed to only one piece which is enough to restore loyalty to the maximum level. (For more details see Pet Handling > Diet & Preferred Food)
• Ridable pets can be mounted while engaged in combat. Attempting to do so performs a command check with a 25% penalty which has to be successful in order to allow you to mount, although, it will not reduce loyalty if you fail. This means anyone has a 75% chance of mounting a horse (no control requirements), but someone with 70% control over their nightmare only has a 45% chance. The alternative is to use the "stop" command (which also requires a successful skill check but has no penalty) and mount instead of double-clicking repeatedly.
• A mount that is not commanded needs to be fed every so often to keep it from going wild. If you don't have the animal lore skill, it is a good practice to feed your pet about every 5 hours.
• The different types of mounts spawn with different stamina levels, but all of them can be trained up to a maximum of 125. (For more details see Pet Handling > Training)
• You don't have to stable a ridable pet when you log out. You can log out while mounted, the pet will log out with you.

Mounts are grouped into four classes:

• No ownership requirements (horse, ridable llama, forest ostard, desert ostard, giant beetle)
  These do not have a control requirement and can be commanded and bonded by anyone regardless of their taming and animal lore skills. Their minimum taming requirement is 29.1, horses can also be bought from any stablemaster.
• Minimal ownership requirements (ridgeback, swamp dragon)
  Ridgebacks and swamp dragons have a fairly high minimum taming requirement (83.1 and 93.9 respectively), but can be transferred to and owned as well as bonded by anyone regardless of skill. There is no real "ownership requirement", but you will have to obtain one of these mounts from a tamer skilled enough to tame them.
• Specific ownership requirements (war horse, kirin, unicorn)
  War horses can only be mounted by members of their respective factions with a status of at least tier 2, but do not require a skill requirement to own and command. Only females can tame and mount unicorns and only males can tame and mount kirins, but both genders can have either creature transferred to them and can command them.Unicorns and kirins have a minimum taming and bonding requirement of 95.1 and follow normal ownership and orneriness rules of high-level pets in addition to the gender specific requirements.
• Skill level ownership requirements (frenzied ostard, nightmare, fire steed)
  These creaturs can only be controlled by and transferred to players with sufficient skill levels in animal taming and animal lore. They follow normal ownership and orneriness rules of high-level pets and require their owner to have the respective minimum taming skill to bond.

(Bought from NPC: pack horse, pack llama. Tamable: giant beetle, 29.1 min. req.)

Pack animals have the ability to carry loads of up to 1600 stones and come in two varieties: pack horses and pack llamas. They can not be found in the wild but must be purchased from an NPC animal trainer or rancher.

Regular riding horses and llamas can not be turned into pack animals and pack animals can not be ridden, but it is a popular scam to rename "a pack horse" to "a ridable packhorse". Like any other low-level mounts, they do not have a skill requirement for commanding, ownership or bonding. In Trammel and Ilshenar only owners and people who are friended to the animal can access its packs, but in Felucca it is possible to steal from any pack animal, so be careful.

(Currently known types: arachnid, bear, bull, canine, demon, equine, feline, ostard)

Pack Instinct is a new feature introduced with publish 16. It adds a damage bonus to each creature of the same pack instinct type under your control. 2 pets get a bonus of 25%, 3 get 50%, 4 get 75% and 5 get 100%.You can add any type of creature of the same pack instinct to your pack in order to get a bonus, just be aware that they might require differing numbers of control slots. A canine pack for example could include one hell hound, one dire wolf, one white wolf, one grey wolf and one timber wolf. If you wanted a hell hound leader in the pack, you would only have 3 more open control slots though, since the leader takes up two.

(Tamable: slime, snake, giant spider, giant scorpion, giant ice worm)

Some tamable creatures have a natural ability to poison. How frequently they poison an opponent in combat is directly tied to their posioning skill level, which improves through training along with the melee skills. Once they reach a skill level of 99.0 they have a chance to inject poison of one level above their normal ability, the chance to poison an opponent also receives an additional boost at 100.0.

The giant beetle and giant ice worm represent their own class of tamable creatures with a special requirement: "You must subdue the creature before you can tame it!" Once their hitpoints have been dropped sufficiently, you will get a message telling you that "The creature has been beaten into subjugation." and you can now proceed to tame.

If their health regenerates past the point of subjugation, you will have to repeat the process, but be careful not to kill the creature!

All creatures that require subjugation suffer an additional permanent loss of 50% to all stats and skills as well as the normal skill loss after they have been tamed. Please note that stats can only be trained up to 125, so your pet will not be able to reach it's original stat level again.

Unicorn and kirin are not only of good alignment, have spellcasting ability and can be used as mounts, they each have one special trait that sets them apart from all other creatures:

The unicorn is immune to all poison and thus a valuable asset in battling any poisonous monsters. Also, if their rider becomes poisoned and falls below 40 hit points, they will cure her (only while mounted, and only once in a one-hour period). This cure is always successful, regardless of the level of poison.

The kirin calls down the force of nature on any creature or player that brings its rider below 30 hit points. This wrath is in the form of a 35-100 damage lightning bolt and cannot be resisted. (This is also limited to occur only once in a one-hour period.)