Unleashed

The Beastmaster had pets. They followed you around. Sometimes they attacked things. Sometimes they ran into walls. Sometimes they forgot you existed and stood in the middle of a field staring at nothing while you got eaten by a bear. That Beastmaster is dead. We rebuilt the entire pet system from scratch — new brain, new AI, new UI, new progression, new everything.

The Pet Brain — Actually Works Now

The old pet AI had one critical flaw: the brain fought itself. Rust's built-in animal AI (the FSM, the SenseComponent, the Growl system) all competed with our custom commands. Your pet would start chasing a target, then the vanilla brain would override it and send the pet somewhere else. The result was oscillation — pets running back and forth, never actually reaching anything.

PetEngine is a brand-new plugin that rips out the vanilla brain entirely. No FSM. No SenseComponent. No Blackboard. No Growl. We control the Navigator directly — SetDestination, Think, FullSprint. The pet goes where we tell it, attacks what we tell it, and doesn't get confused by competing AI systems.

The difference is night and day. Pets sprint to targets. They chase without oscillating. They return to you when recalled. They stop when told to stay. It's what pet AI should have been from the start.

6-Slot Stable — Your Zoo Persists

You can now store up to 6 tamed pets in your stable. Pets persist across server restarts. Open the /pet panel and you'll see 6 slot tabs at the top — each one a different pet. Summon one, stow another. Name them with /petname.

The panel shows everything: health bar, XP bar, level, hunger status, behavior mode. Buttons for Follow, Stay, Recall, Stow, Summon, Release. No more guessing what your pet is doing — the CUI tells you.

Pet Leveling — 1 to 20

Pets now have their own level and XP system. Every time your pet deals damage, kills something, or even eats a corpse — it earns XP. As it levels up:

At level 20, a pet has doubled its base HP, +60% damage, and grown noticeably larger than a wild animal of the same type. Your pet bear at level 20 is a visibly different creature than the ones in the wild. The XP curve is tuned so early levels come fast and the last few take real commitment — 32,400 total XP to max.

Automatic Dire Evolution

Remember /empower? The old 120-second cooldown spell that manually transformed your pet? Gone. When your pet hits level 20, it automatically transforms into its dire form:

This stacks with the per-level bonuses. A level 20 dire bear has roughly 4× the HP and 2.4× the damage of a freshly tamed one. It's a genuine threat. You earned it by leveling it — not by pressing a button on cooldown.

Pet Hunger — Feed Your Beast

Pets now get hungry. Every 5 minutes, your pet consumes raw meat from its internal food supply (you feed it by giving it meat). If it runs out:

• • Hungry — no immediate penalty, but the clock is ticking
• • Starving — your pet takes 1 HP/sec until fed or dead

The hunger status shows on the mini-HUD next to your pet's level. Keep meat on hand. A Beastmaster without food is just a sad person standing next to a dying animal.

New Commands

The old /pet command just toggled attack/recall. Now:

• • Companion — opens the full pet management CUI panel
• • Sic 'Em — direct attack command. Your pet charges whatever you're looking at
• • Three behavior modes: Passive (won't fight), Defensive (fights back when hit), Aggressive (attacks anything nearby)

Pet XP Attribution

Here's the detail that matters: pet kills are attributed to you. Your class earns XP when your pet kills an NPC. The kill credit chains through — pet damage → pet kill → owner XP. You level your class while your pet does the fighting. That's the Beastmaster fantasy working as intended.

What We Removed

• • Empower Pet — replaced by automatic dire evolution at level 20
• • Old Pet Command — split into Companion (panel) + Sic 'Em (attack)
• • The old brain — vanilla FSM, SenseComponent, and Blackboard all removed. Pets run on PetEngine now

The New Beastmaster Identity

Before: a class that sometimes had a pet following it. After: a pet commander with a 6-animal stable, a leveling system that rewards investment, a hunger mechanic that demands attention, and AI that actually does what you tell it. The Beastmaster isn't a melee class with a pet gimmick anymore — it's a pet class with melee backup. The zoo runs the show now.

See the full BeastMastery tree at the Beastmaster class page.