System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Beast Kennel

24 pets to buy, not tame — including some that gather resources instead of fighting, and some that only heal

Press [K] to open the Beast Kennel and buy a companion. Every pet in the game is purchased with cash rather than tamed from the wild, ranging from a plain Cat or Dog up through a Baby Dragon and a pair of unsettling internet-legend cameos. Every pet you've ever bought stays owned permanently — summoning and dismissing them costs nothing and can be done as often as you like.

Three roles, not just one

Most pets are straightforward fighters, but two smaller groups do something else entirely:

Farming summons — the Lumber Wisp, Ore Golem, and Scrap Gremlin — fight when something's actually attacking you, but gather wood, ore, or both the rest of the time. What they bring in is rolled through the exact same drop logic the player's own gathering uses, so a farming pet's yield can never drift from what you'd get gathering it yourself by hand.
Healer summons — the Poultice Moth, Chapel Candle, and White Hart — never look for a target and never attack at all; they simply stay near you and heal in small, frequent amounts. They're deliberately weak individually (the Chapel Candle's roughly 4.6 HP a second loses outright to anything actually trying to kill you) so a healer reads as a slow floor under a long fight rather than a panic button.

Everyone else is a straightforward combat pet, on a spectrum from a starting Worm or Fly through the 900-coin Baby Dragon and the two most expensive pets in the kennel.

How many you can field at once

The number of pets summoned simultaneously is capped by a single flat rule: one, plus one more for every 250 Total Level, capped at a maximum of 10 regardless of how high a character's level climbs. Nothing else — no item, no perk, no skill — adds to this number.

That's a deliberately simplified rule, and it wasn't always this clean. An earlier version also let the separate Summoner skill push the cap higher on its own (+1 per 12 Summoner levels) — retired outright on request, so training Summoner still earns experience and still counts toward Total Level like any other skill, it just no longer raises the pet cap by itself.

Calling a pet pays Summoner XP — and reloading used to pay it for free

Deliberately summoning a pet — from the kennel, from a loadout slot, or through the game's own published trigger — awards a flat amount of Summoner experience for the act itself, separate from and on top of whatever a pet earns you later by actually fighting. According to the development log, this once created a real, repeatable exploit: the same function that pays out on a deliberate summon was also called every time the game restored your already-active pets after loading a save, and the experience award sat in the code both paths shared. A character with a starter pet — which is every character — could gain a full level of Summoner experience simply by reloading the game repeatedly, with no fighting, no waiting, and no upper limit. Found directly by playing: a character's Summoner XP climbed by an identical, exact amount on two separate reloads in a row, while cash, other skills, and position all stayed flat across the same reloads — confirmed as this one specific act rather than some general side effect before it was believed, since a false "reloading pays you" alarm has cost this project real time before. Fixed by telling the two callers apart directly — the restore-on-load path is now explicitly marked as a restore and skips the award, while an intentional summon through any of its usual triggers still pays exactly as before.

Every pet trains a specific skill in real combat, not just on the dummy

A summon fighting alongside you in ordinary combat pays experience into whichever of Attack, Ranged, or Magic matches how it actually fights — 11 pets train melee, 4 train ranged, and 9 train magic. This isn't always what a pet's look would suggest: five pets that fight up close and read as ordinary biting creatures (the Hat Man, the Lumber Wisp, the Poultice Moth, the Chapel Candle, and the White Hart) are classed as magic on purpose, because the game treats them as enchanted things rather than animals with teeth. Every pet's card states its style directly now, rather than leaving you to guess from its appearance or its projectile colour.

That labelling wasn't always reliable. An earlier version worked out a pet's fighting style by checking the exact colour of the projectile it fired — which meant the classification could be wrong without anyone changing anything about the pet itself, simply by which of several similar colours its shot happened to use. Under that system, five of the seven ranged-looking pets were actually training Magic while their own card called them Ranged, with nothing in the game telling you the two disagreed. Every pet's fighting style is now a plain, explicit label instead of an inference, so the card and the skill actually being trained can never contradict each other again.

A separate, smaller bug affected the amount rather than the skill: very small experience awards from summon damage — the kind a low-value hit produces — were being rounded down to nothing rather than accumulated, so a summon dealing modest damage could train a skill at a noticeably slower rate than the numbers on paper suggested, or in the worst case gain nothing from a hit at all. Fixed by carrying the leftover fraction forward into the next award instead of discarding it each time, so a summon's true training rate now matches what its share of the experience actually promises.

The Training Grounds: a dummy that never dies

The same panel also lets you place a Training Dummy — an indestructible target that refills its health after every hit and taps back at you lightly in return (never below 10% of your own max HP), so sparring on it can train Hitpoints without any real risk. Attack and Defence train from melee hits the normal way; hitting it with a ranged weapon, a spell, or a summon's own attack routes experience into Ranged, Magic, or Summoner respectively, exactly matching what live combat pays for the same weapon.

The panel's own description text hasn't kept up with this. It currently still reads "Ranged and magic are not paid here" — true of an earlier version, but not of the game as it actually behaves today. Weapon-based routing to all five skills the dummy can train was added in a later fix (see Version History below); the blurb describing the feature was simply never updated to match. Trust what's written above this box, not the panel's own wording, until that's corrected.

Version history

The Summoner skill's own route to a higher cap retired. Kept as a second, independent ladder for a stretch (own summons could push the cap past what Total Level alone would allow), then removed on request for a single, simpler rule — a character who could field more pets before this change fields fewer now, which was the explicit point.
Every remaining bonus to the cap removed too — including two the previous version had deliberately kept as "earned rewards." Measured directly: a fresh character had a cap of 1 with nothing equipped, and 2 the moment one specific item was in their bag, which is an exception firing on literally the first turn of the game rather than something anyone had actually earned. Confirmed by searching the whole build by both name and behaviour that the skill tree's own perk supposedly granting an extra summon slot had never worked at all — it's the same fact documented on the Skill Tree page's Extra Leash entry. The cap is now exactly the flat rule stated above and nothing else can move it.
The Training Grounds panel corrected to stop overpromising. The in-game guide had always described the dummy as training five skills, but the code paid only Attack, Defence, and (via a safe tap-back) Hitpoints — measured directly: one spell hit on the dummy gave Attack and Defence experience and nothing to Magic. Rather than leave the promise standing, the panel's own text was corrected to say plainly that Ranged and Magic weren't paid there.
Ranged, Magic, and Summoner training added to the dummy for real, routing experience by whichever weapon actually lands the hit — the same skill live combat would have paid. The panel's own description was not updated to match, and still claims Ranged and Magic go unpaid.
Small summon-damage experience awards stopped being thrown away. Amounts under half a point were rounded straight to zero rather than accumulated, which could silently erase a summon's training entirely once a game rebalance pushed its typical award below that threshold.
Every pet's fighting style became an explicit label instead of a guess inferred from its projectile colour — a guess that had quietly misclassified five ranged-looking pets as training Ranged when the game actually paid them Magic. A 24th pet, a flying magic-user, was added in the same cycle the labelling was fixed, bringing the kennel to its current total.

Trivia

Two of the kennel's most expensive pets are direct references to well-known internet creepypasta-style figures rather than anything from the game's own established lore.
A farming pet gathering for you is genuinely idle-friendly: it keeps working the moment nothing is attacking either of you, without needing any input, and switches back to fighting the instant something does.