Pets in Black Desert Online are a pretty important part of the gameplay. If you don’t want to spend 5,000 grinding to get a free pet, you’ll need to spend some cash shop credits to get a pet from the cash shop. It’s pretty easy getting your hands on a new pet and there are some guides on how to breed pets and what sort of skills each pet has in the game.

The first guide comes courtesy of YouTuber Pvt Wiggles, who has been vigilant in offering lots of hints, tips and guides for new and advanced players in Black Desert Online to make the most out of the features in the game. He goes through in explicit detail how to obtain a pet, how to train a pet, how to feed a pet, and how to breed a pet. You can check out the video below.

So what are the benefits of having a furry animal accompanying you by your side all day and night long? Well, pets can loot for you, give you buffs, and accompany you around the world. Pets are available in the cash shop. You can easily get to the shop by pressing F3 or heading there by pressing escape.

No matter what pet you go with, they will be able to retrieve items for you that drop nearby. At level 1 they will loot a single item every 10 seconds. As you get stronger and grow in level, the radius at which the pet will go to retrieve items will expand and the time will drop to around 4 seconds to loot an item, allowing them to retrieve more items at a greater distance.

Dogs in particular can also alert you to possible PvP encounters – a player that has their PvP flag turned on will alert your pet dog to their presence.

Cats can detect gathering resources nearby, such as mining nodes, herbs, plants and anything that can be mined or gathered. They will instantly alert you to their location if you’re into gathering or mining.

Hawks can mark nearby elite mobs and put them on your radar for you so you know who is really bad in that area and who could potentially drop some good stuff for you.

Penguins will increase your auto-fishing speed by 20%. It’s not much but it can easily help you gather fishing resources pretty quickly.

Foxes will buff you so that hypothermia and dehydration in the desert is decreased by 20%. That’s not a bad buff to have when you travel through the dangerous dunes of the desert.

If you buy a pet from the cash shop it will be sent to your special inventory tab. You can easily access this by clicking on the icon that appears under your energy bar.

You’ll need to keep your pet fed, though, if you want them to keep looting for you. If their stamina meter runs out from a lack of food, they’ll stop looting for you. In order to feed your pet you’ll need to buy food from a stable manager. You can also craft organic food for your pet if you’re too cheap to buy it from a stable manager.

You can also breed pets by going into the pet menu and clicking on the exchange button. You can see how to breed pets using the guide below from YouTuber Gapa Game.

You can add two of any of the same animals together to breed. Once you breed the animals the two parents will be lost and you’ll only be stuck with whatever is left as the offspring. The benefits of breeding is that the offspring can reach higher tiers than the standard pets.

Black Desert Online is available right now from Daum Communications and Pearl Abyss. You can learn more about the game by paying a visit to the official website.