Ironwood RPG – Ultimate Guide to Taming

Taming 101

By Rjdunlap.

Taming can feel complex at first but once it’s broken down into steps hopefully it will become more approachable and easier to understand as you get the hang of it. Don’t worry if you don’t fully understand everything. It’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to ask questions. It will be an incremental process for everyone to get their dream team.

There is a pet XP catch-up mechanic based on Taming level and Training Grounds making it faster for you to swap out what you’re using without impacting your expedition success rate while they’re under-leveled for as long.

The best pet team is subjective to you as a player and your build. The game groups activities by challenges and combat zones together. To find the best pet you it can help to know what ‘wedge’ you’re in.

Mountain – 1H

• Weapons: Sword (Offense) or Hammer (Defense)
• Challenge skills: Mining, Smelting, Smithing, 1H, Defense
• Zone: +Mountain, =Ocean, -Forest/Farm
• Drops: Dagger (Dungeon damage), Block rune, Stun rune. Ore/Gems.

Summary: Smithing makes a lot of $. You’ll probably be spending the fewest amount of time you can in combat as you can. Hammer has the best survival out of all weapons, letting you beat Outskirt monsters better than any other. Both runes are BiS for non-combat players looking to survive on the outskirts. Needing to upgrade another gear slot (shield) is an extra cost unfortunately. 

Ocean – 2H

• Weapons: Scythe (Offense) or Spear (Defense)
• Challenge skills: Fishing, Cooking, Enchanting, 2H, Defense
• Zone: +Ocean, =Forest/Farm, -Mountain
• Drops: Telescope (Map find chance), Blood rune, Parly rune. Raw fish.

Summary: Late game dungeon drops can make a lot of money. 2H lets you spend the most amount of time focusing all your energy on combat. Scythe has the 2nd highest DPS, slightly behind bow. Bleed rune is BiS for bow players, while Parry is a good slot for defensive 1H players. You’ll want Damage or Crit runes for yourself though. Fish drops help you not need to fish much, putting you back into the eternal war effort vs mobs.

Forest – Ranged

• Weapons: Bow (Offense) or Boomerang (Defense)
• Challenge Skills: Woodcutting, Farming, Alchemy, Ranged, Defense
• Zone: +Forest/Farm, =Mountain, -Ocean
• Drops: Lantern (Map duration +), Damage rune, Crit rune. Flowers.

Summary: Bow has the highest DPS, but you need to keep using arrows.. More damage = more loot. High attack speed also means less overkill -> higher mobs/hr. Woodcutting is important to everyone, and Alchemy could be important for trade. You get both Damage AND Crit runes drops, which are good to equip for yourself, with bleed runes being BiS over Crit by a small margin.

Step 1: Pick Your Drops

Now that we know what combat zone you’re in.. you’ll want pets to help ‘cover your bases’ since you might already have enough Ore, Fish, or Flowers from your combat areas or higher tier if you’re gathering directly. Between Guild building construction, guild quests, potions, and enchanting there never is really enough bones. While Veggies to make pies are nice to help push dungeons, generally they’re going to be too low tier from your pets and too low in quantity to make a big impact. 

Here is how I personally value drops depending on what I was fighting:

Take some time to think about what you need from your pets, write on a piece of paper or on a notepad application what you’re looking for or have enough of. This might change as you play the game, and you can always come back to restart at this step.

Small Egg Pet Reference

As you can see from the 6 small / starting species, the combinations of drops are limited and there aren’t really teams for optimizing everything you’d probably like. 

Additional combinations will be available inside of medium (lvl 40) and large (lvl 70) eggs. Don’t worry too much about the pet team early on, get to lvl 40.

Step 2: Pick Your Team

Based on how you valued different drops you’ll start putting together some roster ideas to compare. Here are some I’ve come up with:

Balanced diet

• Fish 1, Veges 1, Bones 1, Ore 1, Wood 1, Fish 1
• Darkwing, Otomatoad, Stoddler

Bonez!!

• Bones 2, Ore 1, Veges 1, Flowers 1, Fish 1
• Mibox, Darkwing, Otomatoad

Woody

• Wood 2, Bones 1, Ore 2, Flowers 1
• Stoddler, Caterpillow, Mibox

I just want to smith all day

• Ore 3, Wood 1, Bones 1, Fish 1
• Stoddler, Teeblin, Mibox

Hungry Hungry Hippos

• Fish 2, Flowers 1, Ore 1, Veggies 1, Bones 1
• Otomatoad, Teeblin, Darkwing

Step 3: Understanding Your Pets

IVs

Similar to pokemon each pet is born with different IV values that affect what stats it’ll have at different levels. We can see here how at level 28 this Caterpillow has 2 more HP than its Attack, and 3 more Attack compared to its Defense. Difference between having 48 vs 43 of a stat isn’t much, but it does give the pet an advantage over its peers’ compared to the same level. 

You can start having difficulty achieving 100% success rate on level 25 or 40 expeditions without good IVs and might have to overlevel pets to avoid getting knocked out.

Special Traits

Loot: Pets do more of what they do best, +2% loot find for the party per level

Egg Find: Finding more eggs helps you get better pets and Taming XP. Once you have your line up, it doesn’t matter.

MMR – Magic/Melee/Ranged: Every 3 days the expeditions will change ‘damage type’, if you have Range Evade on your pet, then the entire team will get an improved chance to succeed. You’ll want a balance.

Special Traits 3 or higher is good, 4 is possible on small eggs. You can have four special traits on a pet, but even three is a good amount.

Naming

So you look at your Taming page and you’re greeted with this screen. Unfortunately it doesn’t provide us enough details at a glance to know much about our pets. We can fix needing to click into pets by renaming them with their stats. 

Manual Human Readable

Here we renamed this Mibox 479+ each digit, letter, or symbol in the game in a particular order represents some of its information at its glance. 4 for having (42%) Health, 7 for having (76%) Attack, 9 for having (90%)

• x : 0-9%
• 1 : 10-19%
• ..
• 0 : 100%

Here are some more examples:

I use a + for each 3+ability on the pet regardless of trait (– hunger).

Pancake Plugin

• https://greasyfork.org

Take a moment to go through your pets inventory and rename them using the method above.

Step 4: Slim Gym

Space in your Barn is limited.

For each species you want (or may want if you have room).

Keep one of each of the following: Highest 70%+ Health IV, Highest 70%+ Defense IV, Highest 70%+ Offense IV, 3+ Loot/Egg/MMR, 3+ special trait slots).

Take a moment to look through all those pets that you just named and see which ones you no longer need to keep. Release obsolete pets.

Step 5: Breeding Pool

To start we’ll focus on getting good primary traits: Health, Attack, and Defense.

Cross Breeding

If you don’t have good rolls from the eggs you’ve hatched thus far, there is a way to get some more chaos in your barn. Bring two different species (ones you want for your ideal expedition setup) and every 8 hours you’ll get an independent pet from one of the two species with completely random stats.

Doesn’t matter that the parents here are bad. The children won’t know.

Eugenics

If you have good rolls for the kind of pet you want, congratulations! You’re now graduated to helping your pets make that best baby possible.

When two parents of the same species are together and ‘play’ with each other for 8 hours you’ll get some children that are a mix of the two. Let’s see how we breed him by looking at his parents

Together they had 4 ‘possible’ children, each with an equal chance of occurring.

• 25% -> 832
• 25% -> 872
• 25% -> 837
• 25% -> 877

Meaning it could take 32 hours or more for them to get what you’re looking for.

Tip: Locking in

Say we have these parents together, what is the best child you could get from them?

Let’s start by listing all the possible children:

• 1xx
• 16x
• 1×7
• 167
• 8xx
• 86x
• 8×7
• 867

A child produced from these parents could have over 210% total, even though its parents aren’t that ‘great’. But here with 8 possible children it only has a ⅛  chance of happening. Well don’t worry, we can ‘lock’ pets if we get an improvement.

In this example both a child with 86x or 8×7 could replace the top parent improving future odds of a successful offspring to ¼ 

Step 6: Special Traits

Now that you have all three pets in your expedition with great IV values, it’s time to start breeding to get three or more good traits as mentioned in Special Traits.

Special Trait number is always inherited from the parent with the most slots. You can use the locking in strategy to increment towards your goal.