Animal Taming

Animal Taming lets you turn wild creatures into loyal pets — from a simple horse to a fully levelled Dragon. This page covers the taming process itself, how pet control and commands work, and what happens when things go wrong (low loyalty, death, or a lost pet). For pet levelling, abilities, feeding and bonding, see Beast Mastery.

Requirements to Tame

Before you can start taming a creature, all of the following must be true:

Skill — your Animal Taming must be at least the creature's minimum taming requirement (see Tamables for the full list).
Follower slots — you need enough free follower slots for the creature. Every player has a maximum of 5 follower slots.
Previous owners — a creature can have at most 5 owners in its lifetime. Each previous owner adds +6.0 to the taming skill needed.
Subduing — some powerful creatures must first be beaten down to below 10% health before they will accept taming.
Special restrictions — a few creatures only accept tamers of a certain gender or race.

The Taming Process

Use the Animal Taming skill and target the creature.
If the creature can anger, there is a chance it turns on you instead — the further your skill is above its requirement, the safer you are. At 20+ points above the requirement the anger chance bottoms out at 10%; at or below the requirement it is 95%.
If it does not anger, your character starts sweet-talking the creature. This takes 9–12 seconds (3–4 attempts of 3 seconds each).
At the end, a skill check decides success. The check ranges from 25 points below to 25 points above the creature's (owner-adjusted) requirement — so more skill means better odds.

During the attempt you must stay within 8 tiles, keep line of sight, and stay alive. If the creature takes any damage during the attempt, taming fails. After an attempt (success or fail) there is a 30 second cooldown before you can tame again.

Taming attempts also passively train your Animal Lore skill.

Controlling Your Pet

There is no random "control chance" roll on UO Sagas. Instead, a pet simply obeys you if you meet its skill requirements — and refuses everything if you don't:

Your Animal Taming must be at least the pet's minimum taming requirement.
Your Animal Lore must be at least 80% of that requirement.
If the pet's loyalty drops below 25%, it ignores all commands until fed.

Common mounts and beasts of burden — Horse, Pack Horse, Pack Llama, Desert/Forest/Blizzard/Skadi Ostard, Necrophorus — skip the skill check entirely and can be controlled by anyone (only loyalty matters). Exception: a Necrophorus that rolled the Rage ability requires full taming skills, like a Nightmare.

Pet Commands

Speak the command in-game, either to one pet by name or to all pets at once:

Command	Effect
`all follow me` / `[name] follow me`	Pet follows you
`all follow` / `[name] follow`	Pet follows a target you choose
`all kill` / `all attack`	Pet attacks a target you choose
`all guard me` / `[name] guard`	Pet guards you
`all stay` / `[name] stay`	Pet stays in place
`all stop` / `[name] stop`	Pet stops what it is doing
`all come` / `[name] come`	Pet comes to your position
`[name] drop`	Pack animal drops its load
`[name] friend`	Add a pet friend (can command the pet)
`[name] transfer`	Transfer ownership to another player
`[name] release`	Release the pet back into the wild
`[taming`	Opens the Taming Control window — all orders, combat range and Strict Orders in one panel

Most commands are also available from the pet's context menu (single-click the pet).

The Taming Control Window

Instead of speech commands you can manage all your pets from one panel. Open it with the [taming command, or single-click any of your pets and pick the control entry from its context menu (works within 16 tiles).

The window shows a card for every pet you currently control and refreshes automatically when their status changes. Per pet you can:

Give orders with one click: Kill (select a target), Guard, Follow and Stay — the same orders as the speech commands, without typing.
Set the combat range for pets that fight at range: Close (1 tile), Medium (5 tiles) or Long (10 tiles). The pet keeps that distance to its target while fighting. Melee-only pets don't offer this setting.
Toggle Strict Orders — see below.
Open the pet's Animal Lore page (level, XP, stats) via the diamond button.

A collapse button switches the panel to a narrower compact mode if it takes up too much screen space. Dead pets appear greyed out: you can't change their settings, and orders that need a living pet are rejected until the pet is resurrected.

Strict Orders

With Strict Orders enabled, a pet acts only on your explicit commands and ignores every distraction:

It will not auto-retaliate when attacked — while following you under strict orders it refuses new combat targets entirely. The exception is Guard mode, where it still defends itself and you.
After killing an ordered target it returns to Follow and waits for your next command instead of picking a new enemy on its own.

Strict mode is ideal for travelling through aggressive areas without your pets running off, and for precise target control in tough fights. Toggle it per pet in the Taming Control window; the setting is saved with the pet.

Loyalty

Loyalty is your pet's happiness. It slowly decays while the pet is out in the world and is restored by feeding (drop the right food on the pet — roughly +10 loyalty per successful feed).

Non-bonded pets: full loyalty drains in about 24 hours.
Bonded pets: full loyalty drains in about 48 hours.
Loyalty does not decay while a pet is stabled or being ridden.
Below 25% loyalty the pet shows distress and stops obeying commands.
At 0% loyalty the pet goes wild — the bond breaks and you lose it.

Feed your pets before logging off. See Beast Mastery for food types and the full loyalty table.

Pet Death and Recovery

Bonded pets that die become ghosts and follow you. They can be resurrected with the Veterinary skill (bandages) or the magery Resurrection spell. Bond your pets — the safety alone is worth the wait (see Beast Mastery for bonding).

Non-bonded pets — and pets lost in other ways — are not gone forever on UO Sagas. The shard has a pet recovery system:

When a pet is killed, cut down by guards, goes wild from neglect, is released, or is otherwise removed, it is not deleted. It is moved into a recovery holding area instead.
Recovered-away pets are kept for 14 days, with their level, abilities and name intact.
Within that window, contact the staff (in-game help/Discord) — they can look up your lost pets and summon them back to you.
After 14 days the pet is permanently purged.

So if your levelled Dragon dies unbonded in a dungeon: don't panic, but don't wait two weeks either.