Hytale Animals Guide

Hytale’s animals are much more than just background creatures; they are pillars of your progression and gameplay experience. Whether it’s harvesting hides to upgrade your gear, luring sheep into a pen for wool, or riding a horse to traverse the world quickly, mastering wildlife interactions is essential.

While features like breeding and permanent domestication are not yet fully implemented, the foundations are laid for deep and rewarding systems. In the meantime, use current feeding, capturing, and hunting mechanics to optimize your resource gathering and exploration. The world of Orbis is vast, and its animal inhabitants are there to help you (or challenge you!) at every step of your adventure.

Understanding Hytale’s Animals

Animals in Hytale are an integral part of the ecosystem, offering opportunities for exploration, survival, and even base building. You will encounter a wide variety of creatures, ranging from passive and skittish wildlife to aggressive beasts and useful mounts.

Currently, most animals are wild by default. Interactions are governed by complex “Utility AI”: creatures react to sound (your heavy armor), sight (vision cones), and the day/night cycle (some sleep and regenerate health). Interactions are primarily based on attraction, movement, and temporary control, rather than permanent domestication. However, the developers have ambitious plans for deeper breeding and taming systems.

Main Resources Obtained from Animals

Hytale’s animals provide a range of essential resources for your progression:

• Meat: Vital food source for exploration and survival.
• Hides and Leather: Key materials for crafting equipment and upgrades.
• Wool: Obtained from sheep, useful for crafting.
• Manure: Periodically produced by well-fed livestock, this is an indispensable fertilizer for accelerating agriculture.
• Eggs: Laid by chickens, another food source or crafting ingredient.
• Bones and Feathers: Small drops that have various applications.
• Magical Fluids: Such as Mosshorn Milk, which possesses unique transformation properties.

Obtaining Resources: Hides and Leather

Animal hides and treated leather are fundamental ingredients for crafting in Hytale. They are necessary for making sleeping bags, tanning racks, backpacks, and improved tools, weapons, and armor. You will also need them to upgrade your crafting benches. Hides are obtained by hunting animals across Orbis. Their “density” generally corresponds to the size of the animal. Raw hides can be refined into leather using a Tanning Rack.

Light Hide and Leather

Light hide and leather are used for many early-game upgrades, including iron tools, weapons, and armor.

Important: Only adult versions of these animals drop hides. Baby animals never drop light hide.

Best Hunting Spots:

• Forest edges near the start point: These areas offer high numbers of rabbits and chickens.
• Open Plains Biomes: Home to many chickens and boars.
• Cave Systems: Rats are found in caves, ideal for incidental collection while mining.

Medium Hide and Leather

Medium hide and leather are used in crafting Thorium and Cobalt tools, armor, and weapons.

Best Hunting Spots:

• Howling Sands Biome: Highly recommended, but keep an eye out for suspicious “cacti” (Cactees).
• Zone 4 Volcanic Caves: Raptors are an abundant but dangerous source.

Heavy Hide and Leather

Heavy hide and leather are used for Adamantite gear and the final upgrade of your base workbench.

Best Hunting Spots:

• Emerald Grove: Mosshorns are the safest source (passive).
• Borea (Zone 3): Rams and Polar Bears are frequent on slopes and ice.

Storm Hide and Leather

This type of hide is used for the final backpack upgrade and crafting Mithril tools. Availability: Storm hide does not appear to drop naturally from creatures in the current version (v1.0).

Animal Interactions: Current Mechanics

Current interaction mechanics focus on survival, temporary management, and agriculture.

Feeding and Luring (The Manure Economy)

Feeding animals does not permanently tame them, but offers temporary control and kickstarts agricultural resource production.

• Attraction: Lures animals to you or a specific location.
• Manure Production: A well-fed animal will produce Manure. This is the only way to obtain effective fertilizer for your crops.
• Visual Effects: Triggers hearts, indicating the animal is satiated (ready to produce manure).

How to do it:

1. Hold the right food: Wheat (Cows/Sheep), Carrots (Pigs/Horses/Rabbits).
2. Use Feed Bags: Place them on the ground to create an automatic gathering point.
3. Guide animals into pens: Essential for concentrating manure production in one place.

Capturing and Moving Animals

Capture Crates allow players to pick up and transport small animals.

• Affected Animals: Rabbits, chicks, piglets, and small passive creatures.
• Note: Large adult animals do not fit in crates.

Horse Riding and Other Mounts

Mounts have stats adapted to their respective biomes. They are not “owned” by the player and may wander off if left alone.

• Horse: Versatile, medium speed. Ideal for plains (Zone 1).
• Camel: Faster on sand, suffers no movement penalty in the desert (Zone 2).
• Ram: Capable of climbing steep slopes more easily than other mounts (Zone 3).

Future Breeding and Domestication

Currently, animal breeding (reproduction with babies) is technically present in the code but disabled or very limited in v1.0. The Memories system at the Forgotten Temple suggests the future unlocking of “Beastmaster” skills.

Bestiary Summary

Basic and Passive Animals

These animals are the foundation of the agricultural economy and early game.

Predators and Aggressive Beasts

Zone 4 Dinosaurs (Devastated Lands – Underground)