Getting started with pets

How the Beast Cage works, the two progression systems, the daily-skill routine, and what to prioritize first.

Pets are passive combat and economy buffs housed in the Beast Cage. Every unlocked pet’s passive bonuses stack continuously on your squad stats — no slot limit, no rotation, no swap-out cost. The active skills are the variable: each pet has one on-use ability you must trigger manually.

The defining quirk: pets unlock by kingdom (server) age, not by spending or player level. A whale on a young server has the same pets as a F2P on the same server. What spenders accelerate is the materials to level and refine pets, not access to the pets themselves.

The Beast Cage

Every pet you unlock joins the Beast Cage permanently and its passive stat bonuses apply at all times — to every march, every garrison, every event. There’s no active-pet slot, no swap-out, no decision about which pet is “equipped.” Levels and refinement keep paying out forever.

Each pet also has one active skill that you must manually trigger from the Beast Cage screen. Actives are on long cooldowns and never fire automatically. If you don’t open the cage and tap the button, you don’t get the buff.

Two progression systems

Easy to conflate — they consume different materials and serve different goals.

Leveling and skill upgrades

Pet Food is the only material that levels a pet up. Nothing else feeds pet level. The other three pet materials never go into the pet itself — they only feed the active skill.

Pet level matters because every 10 pet levels unlock the next skill tier. Without crossing those level thresholds, the skill can’t be upgraded past the tier you’re in. This is the source of most of the confusion about how pet progression works.

Once a skill tier is unlocked, you upgrade the skill rank inside that tier using three materials:

Take every priority pet’s active skill to rank 4 using Growth Manuals and Nutrient Potions — those two materials surface in event shops and alliance stores often enough to be sustainable. Pushing skill rank past 4 requires Promotion Medallions, which are the hardest pet material to farm. Reserve them for your top one or two pets.

Refinement (Taming Marks)

Refinement is a parallel system that improves a pet’s secondary stat bonuses — six per pet (Infantry Health, Infantry Lethality, Cavalry Health, Cavalry Lethality, Archer Health, Archer Lethality). It uses Common Taming Marks and Advanced Taming Marks, and it has a gacha layer: each refine randomly raises or lowers one of the six stats, and you choose whether to keep or reroll the result.

Stats lock into rarity tiers as they grow — Grey, Green, Blue, Purple, Gold — and once a stat hits a higher tier, it cannot fall back. This is where most pet-related material spend happens at the endgame.

See the refinement guide for the full strategy.

The generation system

Pets unlock by kingdom (server) age. Earlier generations are smaller-scale utility pets; later generations are large rally and capacity buffers.

Gen 4+ pets are Legendary rarity with level cap 100 and provide large two-hour combat buffs (squad capacity, attack, lethality, defense, health). They are the rally force-multipliers.

The active-skill daily routine

Because actives don’t auto-fire, building a habit matters more than perfecting which pet to level first. A reasonable daily flow once you’re past Gen 2:

1. Cheetah — Scent Mastery generates Pet Food. Pop first; the food feeds itself.
2. Lion — Gift of the King generates Badlands drops (Charm Guides, Forgehammers, Truegold). At max skill level the cooldown is 23 hours, so you can fit one activation per day.
3. Lynx — Comforting Embrace restores governor stamina. Pop before you spend stamina on other systems.
4. Bison — Grip of the Titan instant-completes a gather. Use on a high-value tile.
5. Gray Wolf — Construction Aide before queueing a long building.
6. Combat actives (Moose, Grizzly Bear, Mighty Bison, Giant Rhino, Great Moose, Black Panther, Regal White Lion, Ironclad War Elephant) — pop immediately before rallies in major events.

Missing a day on Lion is the single largest pet-related opportunity cost in the game.

Where pet bonuses apply

• Passive squad bonuses (the largest share of pet power) apply to every march and garrison continuously. This is the bulk of refinement’s value.
• Mystic Trial Expedition stat — pets contribute automatically. No manual dispatch or selection needed. Pet level and refinement compound here without any per-event input.
• Active skills apply only when you trigger them, within their stated duration.

Beast Whisperer — don’t miss it

Beast Whisperer is a one-time event that fires when your kingdom hits the pet unlock day. It drops the largest single batch of Growth Manuals and Nutrient Potions the game offers and it does not return. New players joining an older server have already missed it; players on a younger server should clear every task tier the moment it appears.