Black Desert Mobile Pets And Horses Guide: Everything You Need To Know About Obtaining And Managing Companions

Black Desert Mobile continues to have a growing number of players and fans much like its predecessors have and beyond the graphics and all audio-visual qualities it possesses, the broadness of what it offers as far as gaming experience is concerned stands as its most immersive aspect. Beyond the plethora of skills and customizations Black Desert Mobile offers for each character class, there are numerous other activities to engage in that does not involve combat, and while these life activities in addition to the perks you can get for establishing your base camp, there are very helpful buffs you can obtain from your animal companions.

If you have just started playing Black Desert Mobile and still learning the ropes of the game’s mechanics and numerous features, be sure to read our Black Desert Mobile beginner’s guide as it gives you a quick and simple rundown of the basics you need to familiarize yourself with as well as some tips and strategies to jumpstart your adventure.

Not sure which class to pick? Don’t worry as we have you covered on that as well with our Black Desert Mobile class guide. If you have progressed enough to unlock your base camp and eventually the Node Manager mode, you can learn everything you need to know about both features in our camp management guide and our node manager guide.

Although you will have plenty of resources to enhance your hero early on, there is no wrong time to start grinding for more. You can check our Black Desert Mobile farming guide to help you gather more of the resources you need efficiently.

In this new Black Desert Mobile guide, we will be focusing entirely on the pets and mounts you take with you to battle. While the horse’s faster travel speed and the pets’ innate ability to pick up items are invaluable on their own, both pets and horses can acquire a wide variety of skills to help you in combat as well as well as other aspects of the game. A lot of players may not tend to these companions enough and be simply content with the outright perks they receive from simply having them around. With some effort, you can get a huge boost from both types of companions and the sooner you build them to your liking, the better it will be for you moving forward.

1. Acquiring Pets And Basic Care

While the rest of the methods available to acquire a new pet are rather expensive, progressing far enough through the main story quests guarantees to net you at least 3 free ones. For the most part, though, these will be tier 1 pets and will only have a skill available and pick up loot every a minute and 45 seconds. Pets will continue to be around, earn experience points and gain new levels so long as they are well fed. As such, your main responsibility to your pets is ensuring that you regularly spend time to feed them.

As you head into any town, you can tap on the cow icon at the upper left side of your screen. This will enable auto-pathing towards the shop that sells pet food (or poor feed as termed in the game) and purchase as many as you can comfortably carry. You can easily access the pets window by clicking on any of your pets’ icons at the left side of your screen or via the menu button and then selecting “pets”. On the pet window you can tap on the pet food icon below each pet to feed them once, or tick the check box to feed them till they are full. Keep in mind that hungry pets will act as if they are not around, so if you forget to feed them then the buffs they provide as well as the auto-loot help that they do for you will not be in effect.

If you want additional pets, you should frequently visit the market via the main menu. This is the place to purchase any item being sold by other players using silver. Most of the time, though, you will find that there are no available pets registered. Whenever there are, they get purchased pretty fast but just the same, you can try your luck and hope to snatch one quick. If you have 400 black pearls to spare, you can also purchase a tier 1 pet chest via the pearl shop, which you can access through the gold coin icon at the top of your screen, once a week.

2. Train Your Pets Continuously

On top of feeding, you should continuously train your pets until their skills reach a max level of 10. Their buffs and performance will not be impacted while they are on training. Each succeeding training session costs more silver and takes a lot more time. The only penalty for training pets is that you will not be able to exchange them while they are training. You can spend stamina to automatically finish the training session.

Tier 1 pets like the ones you obtain for free will only have 1 skill available. Regardless of what your pet is, the random skill they come with comes from the same pool, which means that all types of basic pets can have any of the available skills in the game. For the most part, the buff they provide relate to an increase in EXP gained. It could be for combat, dark energy for your black spirit, knowledge gain, or any of the life skills you can partake in outside of combat.

A pet may also come with a boost to your character’s weight capacity. These skills improve based on their skill level so training continuously is a must if you want to have the most out of these buffs.

3. Exchange If You Have More Than 3 Pets

Having a pet at max level and max skill level of 10, respectively, should be fairly easy enough to achieve and at some point in your progress you would naturally want more out of each companion. As you can only have 3 pets out with you in the field, it should only be a part of natural progression to exchange them once you have more than 3 available. This can easily be done via the exchange tab in the pet window.

Exchanging pets is a 2-for-1 process, with two pets within the same tier for a that has a chance of being on a higher tier. Take note that you can only exchange pets when both are at home and not undergoing training. As the new pet can retain the appearance and skill of either one, be sure to choose wisely. You can go with the appearance of pet 1 and retain the skill of pet 2. Levels of the pets exchanged do not affect the level and tier of the pet you will receive.

However, selected skill prior to the exchange will stay at the same level. Assuming that you are fortunate enough to obtain a higher tier pet from the exchange, a new skill will become available for you to train. Item pick-up speed will also increase by 5 seconds.

4. Obtaining Horses

Horses are currently the exclusive mounts in Black Desert Mobile. While you will surely obtain one or a couple by progressing through main quests, there are numerous opportunities to earn more horses to work your way towards getting a much better one. Beyond boosting travel speed, horses also exhibit buffs and skills that will greatly help you on your adventure. As such, while it is easy to be contented with whichever ones you get without effort, taming horses and breeding them should form part of your objectives if you want to become even more formidable. First things first, though, you have to learn how to tame horses in the wild and part of that feat requires patience and determination.

Before you proceed to hunt for wild horses, be sure that you have enough space for them in your stable. Once there is enough room back at your base camp, the next things to prepare are your taming items. Again, visit the shop in any town that sells animal needs. You should grab some horse taming ropes and raw sugar to boost chances of taming horses. Now to look for specific areas with wild horses, you need to check the world map via the main menu and check regions for horse location. An example would be Karanda Bridge within the Neutral Border Zone. Once you proceed to that map, you will be able to see horse icon in the minimap at the upper left side of your screen.

Now comes the challenging part. When you see the horse, you should approach it slowly and do not get too close. At about 10 meters, you will begin to see the taming rope icon appear. Tap on it to initiate the capture mini game. You will slowly approach the horse intermittently and stop whenever it raises its front legs. Once you are close enough, you can either tap the capture button or feed the horse some sugar. Take note that two numbers will appear below the horse. For example, if you see 40/80%, it means you currently have 40% chance of taming the horse but by using sugar, you can raise it by 10% per feed up to a maximum of 80%. The maximum taming percentage reflects the horse’s tier. 90% for tier 1, 80% for tier 2 and so on.

If you fail to ride the horse, you will have to wrestle it into submission. You will see a circle move along a horizontal line and you have to move the circle to the green area using the virtual d-pad when the timer runs out. You need to do this 3 times to succeed. More effectively, tapping up and down rapidly works much better than holding the up and down directions. Once you succeed, you will be prompted to name your new mount and you will find it within your stable when you visit your camp.

As a bonus tip, bring more than enough of both the taming rope and sugar as you may go through several attempts on your first go before you achieve success. Both items do not cost that much and are not heavy anyway so having more than enough instead of having to go back to the shop is a lot more convenient.

5. Levelling Up And Breeding Horses

By default, and even at the base tier and level, horses provide you with faster travel speed along with additional item slots and weight capacity. On top of these incentives, horses have bond skills that offer buffs as well as a horse skill which may help in combat or make the horse itself have a better performance. While you can very much be happy with whichever skills you obtain so long as you own a mount, spending a little more time to enhance your horse can give you a lot more benefits. Take note that as the horse’s tier increases, so too does every bit of benefit it gives you. As such, you should always aim to get a top tier horse, or horses that serve different purposes at a later time.

For starters, actually using your horse to travel around the world will earn it experience points. Horses have a max level of 10 just like pets, so it is fairly easy to get them to that level. The more challenging part comes from raising a horse’s tier as you cannot achieve that with a single horse. More so, you can only do that once you have a stable and maxed out horses of the same tier.

To initiate breeding horses, simply visit your camp, tap on your stable and choose manage. You will be at the horses’ window and you can see the breed tab. You can only select 2 horses of the same tier in that tab and both should be at level 10. Suppose you choose 2 tier 1 horses, you are guaranteed to receive a tier 2 horse. Do note that horses in Black Desert Mobile do not have gender so it is a lot more convenient for breeding compared to the PC and mobile version. The horse you acquire from breeding will have an appearance based on your choosing but unfortunately, both bond and horse skills will be random. At the most, a tier 5 horse will have a bond skill and 4 horse skills.

With this in mind, it is best to grab and level up as many horses as you can for breeding, saving the one with the best skills for your personal use until you successfully breed another. Suppose you have a full stable with 6 tier 1 horses. You should try and max 4 of them out and have two tier 2 horses. If one of the tier 2 horses is better than the tier 1 you are using, then you should breed the remaining tier 1 horses. Otherwise, push through with leveling up the tier 2 horses and then breed them for tier 3. With new slots available in your stable, it’s back to the wild to tame some more, then rinse and repeat.

Being able to secure a tier 5 horse is challenging enough. With random skills that come as a result of breeding, chances are that you will not entirely get the tier 5 horse with the exact skills you want. Fortunately, horses in Black Desert Mobile can change their skills but this will require a change skill coupon, which can be bought using pearls or earned from special events. As such, you should save these items for when you already have a tier 5 horse. You can simply tap on the change skill option at the horse page. As bond skills influence attack, defense, critical rate, HP, or MP recovery; the best one in general is an attack buff. This would still depend on what you need more for your character.

As far as the horse’s skills go, packhorse, which boosts weight limit is a top pick along with enhance bonding as it increases the buff it provides by 20%. Fast Learner is only good for horses that you want to rush to level 10.

And that sums up everything we have for you as far as our Black Desert Mobile pets and horses guide is concerned. As new updates continue to roll in, expect some enhanced effects to come to your furry companions in the game. For now, though, you should continue and push both your pets and your mount to their limit as when these updates come, it will be another level of grind. If you have some additional tips or strategies you would like to share relative to pets and mounts in Black Desert Mobile or if you have some questions about anything we discussed, you can always drop us a line in the comment area below!