How To Raise Your Pet’s Affinity In Elin

Party management is a big part of Elin, and eventually you’ll reach the point where you can’t handle everything as a solo operator. Companions are good, but pets have their own advantages. Managing them comes with a whole host of additional complexity that isn’t always intuitive. Thankfully, the one resource that Elin gives in abundance is time to learn and grow.

What starts with the relative simplicity of being gifted a pet grizzly bear will quickly evolve into a complex mess of breeding, genetic engineering, and diet planning. Here’s everything you need to know to get started and raise a pet able to conquer the Nefias alongside you.

How To Collect Pets

There are a few different methods for collecting pets. The first one most players will encounter is Fiama, who gifts you a creature of your choice as part of the tutorial questline.

Further along the homestead questline, you’ll encounter the Steel Dragon, Corgon, who can also be recruited. Animal tamers will sell an assortment of pets.

Outside of quests and vendors, you have a couple of options for gaining new critters. Capturing is easier than raising them from an egg, but hatched pets have stronger stat growth than their wild counterparts.

Regarding capturing a creature, you’ll receive monster balls, small orbs you can throw at nearly defeated enemies to capture them. Common balls can appear in regular stores and are available at the prize counter of the Fortune Bell Casino. High-level balls can be purchased from Miral and Garokk’s workshop.

They can be thrown the same as any item or potion, and the hover menu will tell you if an enemy is too powerful to be captured by the ball you’re using. You can then pick up the ball containing your new pet and throw it again to release it.

The other option for gaining new pets is to hatch them from fertilized eggs. These are rare but can be gotten in a few ways:

• Eggs are frequent loot from birds nests in the field biomes.
• If you want to gain a stronger version of a pet you’ve captured, you can set them to livestock and collect eggs from them. These have a small chance of being fertilized so you can hatch a new one.
• Feeding a creature love potions has a small chance of giving you an egg — even if they’re not normally capable of laying eggs.

Fertilized eggs can be placed in a bed or incubator and hatched into a tame creature. Placing it in a bed can take a few days, and be careful that you don’t eat it by accident.

How To Raise Your Pet’s Affinity

Growing affinity with a pet gives a few different benefits. The primary benefit is faster growth for characters at high affinity. Additionally, a high affinity lets you retrieve equipment you’ve given them without upsetting them.

While visiting the drug dealer, be on the lookout for acid-proof liquids. These can be applied to your equipment to make it immune to stat-decreasing acid damage.

How To Keep Fragile Pets Safe

You lose lots of affinity when your pet dies, and you have to wait a week for them to respawn. A good way around this is to let them ride you using the Symbiosis skill.

The Symbiosis skill works similar to the Ride skill, but in reverse: Your pet will ride on top of you and the majority of attacks will target you instead. It still has access to its abilities and can act normally, with a minor penalty to speed and cast success rates depending on your skill level.

The greatest advantage of symbiosis is that your symbiote pet cannot be killed even if an enemy successfully targets it. When reduced to 0HP, it’ll be rendered unconscious until it heals, but will remain attached to you.

What To Feed Your Pet

Pets follow broadly the same rules as other companions for how their stats grow. You’ll need to give them a diet that represents the stats you want them to gain.

The gourmet feats are very helpful for knowing all the traits that foods have, but they aren’t strictly necessary.

Before trying to assign your pet a role, you’ll want to check what you’re working with to begin with. The stethoscope item is sold by Talesinger Farris and lets you view the character sheets of friendly NPCs.

Stethoscopes are consumed on use and cost a good deal of Oren, so you’ll want to take a screenshot or otherwise note down the info you get.

From this you’ll be able to see what attributes your pet has, its potential to grow, and any traits it has inherited. The silver bell for example has the following standouts on its sheet:

• Only one percent of the hitpoints a normal character has but immunity to almost all damage from an innate feat.
• Its speed attribute is a ludicrous 300, acting more than twice as often compared to most creatures.
• Lastly, its weapon masteries show a high potential in marksmanship. That information is hard to intuit from watching the armless things in the wild.

From here you’re able to create a plan for what to feed it. In this case, endurance-raising foods won’t help since this diet relies on damage immunities for survival. Foods that improve its attack power will be multiplied by that high speed.

Pets are able to use equipment the same as humanoid companions and will arm themselves with the best gear they’re able to find. This does mean the kitten riding on your head can take the guns from an unlocked firearms drawer. If you don’t want them to do this, you can instruct them not to use shared equipment.

How To Train Your Pet

Combat skills are gained through use, but if there’s a large disparity, you don’t need to nurse your kitten through level one dungeons while you wait for it to grow. Instead, you can use the gallows given during the tutorial quest:

• Placing a creature (including yourself) in a gallows will cause your pets and companions to target it for practice, growing their attack skills.
• Placing your pet in the gallows will train its defensive skills.

Don’t worry about people dying while used as a communal punching bag: Your pets and townsfolk will always stop short of lethal damage. Take a fishing break and tune out the sounds of violence.

How To Teach Your Pet New Skills

Unlike your character, pets can’t learn a new level one skill by throwing platinum coins at the right trainer. You’ll need to use gene editing to give them any abilities they don’t start with. You can get these in a few ways:

• Genes are dropped randomly by any enemy, with stronger genes dropped by elite variants. The “evolved” versions of creatures are powerful elites that have gene abilities not native to their type.
• The garden of the little sisters, found southwest of Derphy, sells a unique set of genes that can be used to change the combat AI of a creature.
• Statues of Mani, the machine deity, will give you a high-level gene when interacted with. These appear in the wilderness and dungeons or as a high-level drop from fishing.

The tool for gene editing is sold by Nino at the Tinker’s Camp. It costs a small fortune in gold bars so you’ll be hamstringing the development of your homestead if you try and buy it early on. Unless you’ve already found a gene you want to use, it’s normally best to wait until the late game.

You’ll also need electricity to power it, needing you to steal, build, or wish for a generator.

The simpler genes cost fewer feat points, making them a tempting option if your only goal is teaching a skill. Activated abilities, such as fire breath or taunt, are expensive but open up a lot of options.

Once a creature gains a skill from a gene, it becomes able to start raising it normally. This makes those simple genes with one or two points in a skill very useful for raising a pet into a specific role.