Crimson Desert Pets: Trust, Sigils and the 100-Pet Cap

The dog is a loot vacuum, and the system runs much deeper

Our mounts guide covered the animals you sit on. This one covers the animals that follow you around picking up everything you were too busy to loot — and it is a far bigger system than the stray dog in Chapter 4 suggests.

How big is measurable. Pearl Abyss published an Update Highlights infographic on August 12, 2026 summarising the run since launch: 17 patches, more than 20 new features and content additions, 120 new mounts and pets, and 70 new outfits, equipment and items. Pets show up across a lot of that: birds in 1.04.00, legendary animals in 1.05.00, twenty species of small animals in 1.08.00, roughly thirty more in 1.09.00, the Kuku Bird Chick in 1.10.00 — and in 1.11.00 the number you are allowed to keep went up by a factor of more than three.

The current build as this goes up is 1.18.02, a hotfix dated August 16, 2026, on top of 1.18.00 from August 15.

Where pets start: a stray and a comrade with a suggestion

Pets are not available from the prologue. They arrive with the camp.

Method.gg's walkthrough puts the introduction in Chapter 4, on a quest called "A Chunk of Meat" — you head out for food with a campmate, Naira shows you a stray dog, and she suggests you take care of it. Fextralife names the follow-up faction quest "Fang Without a Master" — Naira as quest giver at Howling Hill, a stray brown dog as the target. TheGamer names the tutorial differently again, as a Chapter 4-or-later faction quest called "The Greymanes' New Fangs," so the guides are describing steps of one Greymane chain. Either way: get the Greymane Camp running first, because pets are a camp system and unsummoned ones live there.

After that, the loop is open world. Dogs and cats stand around in towns and villages, each carrying its own Trust meter.

Trust is two dials and a daily ceiling

Every claimable animal has a Trust meter that starts at 0 and must reach 100. There are two ways to move it — petting and feeding — and both are capped per in-game day, with the counters resetting at midnight in-game per TheGamer.

Two things fall straight out of that table. First, a legendary fish is a one-shot claim on a cat — 100 Trust in a single drop — which is a good reason not to sell the ones you pull out of the water. Second, the ordinary route is a favourite food plus a full round of petting, then waiting out the reset. Method.gg's phrasing for the dog is exactly that: feed the +35 meat, pet three more times, rest 12 hours, repeat. TheGamer's timing trick is to hit both caps at around 10 p.m. in-game and wait for the midnight reset, so you do not burn a whole day doing it.

Mechanically, petting a dog is a held button prompt. Cats have to be picked up first and petted in your arms, per TheGamer. Feeding is done by dropping the food on the ground near the animal from your inventory rather than handing it over.

When the meter fills, hold the selection button and choose Claim. The animal is registered and appears under the Pets tab in the inventory, where you summon and dismiss it.

What the sources disagree about

The daily feeding cap is the one number the guides do not agree on. TheGamer says an animal can be fed up to three times per day; Method.gg describes the daily feeding budget as capped at 35, which reads as one favourite-food feed. If you are optimising, assume the lower figure and plan for a two-day claim, then discover you were wrong in your favour.

Worth knowing before you start hoarding food: Pearl Abyss's 1.11.00 notes fixed a bug where feeding consumed two food items instead of one on Hard difficulty. If you played early on Hard and concluded pets were expensive, that was a defect, not a design.

What dogs and cats actually want to eat

The favourite-food bonus is the difference between a two-day claim and the four days Method.gg says petting alone takes, so it is worth carrying the right item before you go stray-hunting. TheGamer's field list:

Neither that list nor the wiki's is complete, and they use different names — the Crimson Desert wiki's own cat roster reads Ashen Cat, Longleaf Forest Cat, Moon Cat and Pororin Cat, none of which appear above, and it adds Brown Dog, White Dog and Boarhand to the dog side. Treat both as partial maps of a roster Pearl Abyss has been expanding for five months.

Ten of the eighteen entries above sit in or beside Hernand, which is where the early game puts you. That is why a first pet is cheap and a full collection is a Pywel-wide project.

What a registered pet does for you

One pet is active at a time. What it does while it is out:

• Loots the battlefield. The wiki and TheGamer both describe the same behaviour — an active pet runs across the field after a fight and collects items from defeated enemies. TheGamer's caveat is the important one: there is no loot filter, so it brings back the junk too.
• Gets hurt. If a pet takes damage in combat its movement is restricted. The fix is to clear the remaining enemies first, then use Healing Force Palm on it — the same skill that heals a horse.
• Sleeps with you. Since 1.13.00 on July 3, 2026, a summoned pet rests alongside your character when you sleep in a bed, which pairs neatly with using the house to skip the time of day.
• Wears an accessory. Patch 1.04.00 added an accessory slot to pets specifically so they could "take on a wider variety of roles," in Pearl Abyss's wording. That slot is where the sigils go, and it is the difference between a mascot and a tool.

Pet clothing is a separate, purely cosmetic line. The wiki puts pet equipment at two Pororin shops — one in Pororin Forest Village, reachable after the quest "The Unreachable Village," and a second in southeastern Demeniss. TheGamer is blunt that the hats and outfits confer no gameplay benefit.

Birds do not work like this at all

You cannot walk up to a bird and pet it. Birds got their own capture device in 1.04.00: the Sotdae of Bond, a perch you place in the world and bait.

Pearl Abyss's own description is that you place various types of food a bird might like on the Sotdae of Bond to feed it and gain Trust. The item comes from a quest, and the notes carry a safety net added in the 1.04.00 revision on April 27: if the perch disappears after being placed, recover it through the item recovery function of NPC Carl at the Greymane Camp — the same contact who handles lost trade goods.

KeenGamer fills in the field procedure. Getting the perch means going to Florindale, southeast of the Hernand Highlands, letting the Pororin Patrol sleep-dart you three times, completing the "Authorized Access" stage of the Trembling Woods faction quest with the Pororin Forest Guardians, and retrieving the Pororin Relic from a giant tree creature. You then place it with Ctrl+R on keyboard or LB+Y on controller, load it with insects, oats, seeds and fruits, and wait for birds to land and eat their way to 100 Trust before selecting Take In.

Where you plant the perch decides what lands on it. KeenGamer's placement notes: blue jays, ringneck parrots, crows and sparrows at the Greymane Camp cliff edge; seagulls at the Demeniss port and riverbanks; white pigeons in the Trader's Expanse mountains; eagles in the Crimson Desert mountains. Bird pets also do not wear the dog-and-cat armour, so the shopping list is different.

Fextralife splits bird diets by type — birds of prey want meat, songbirds want seeds, grain and fruit — which matches the perch's bait list rather than the breed-specific favourites that dogs and cats use.

The three sigils that give a pet a job

This is where a follower stops being decoration. Three sigils exist for the pet accessory slot, and all three come from the same vendor.

Two notes on that table, because the sourcing is not uniform. Pearl Abyss's 1.13.00 note describes the Hunter's Sigil as a bird item specifically; KeenGamer's guide claims broader coverage, with dogs gathering plants, cats retrieving small animals and birds collecting insects. The official wording is the safer bet. And the Sigil of Valor has a paper trail worth reading: the 1.11.00 notes originally announced Iron Eagle and Phoenix support, then the line was struck through and marked Removed: 2026/06/12 on the same day, and the change actually shipped three weeks later in 1.13.00 as "Improved the Iron Eagle and Phoenix so that they can equip the Sigil of Valor."

Game8 prices the Sigil of Valor at 8 Silver, and Game Rant prices the Sigil of Bonding at 8 Silver Coins — trivial money by the time you can reach the shop. Game Rant also flags a stock limit: if you want more than 3 Sigils of Bonding, wait 7 in-game days and come back.

Lacey is the whole shop, and she does not stand still

All three sigils come from Lacey, a Shai vendor attached to the secret pet shop in Pororin, and she has no fixed shop marker. Game8 places the shop at Grace Estate, southeast of Hernand, and says Lacey typically roams Florindale, Pororin's northern subsidiary village; KeenGamer's reliable spots are the path out of Florindale and the big tree in its centre in the morning. Game Rant's identifier is the practical one: light green hood and backpack.

Access is gated by the same Pororin unlock the perch needs, and guides name that gate two ways — Game Rant and the wiki call it "The Unreachable Village", Game8 and KeenGamer call it the Trembling Woods faction quest — both involving three tranquiliser darts from the Pororin Patrol on approach. Complete it once and access is permanent.

The legendary pets, and the mercury number that changed

Pets have their own legendary tier, separate from the eight legendary mounts. Pearl Abyss added two of them in 1.05.00 on May 2, 2026: the Iron Eagle and the Hyacinth Macaw. The same patch added Carry, Lower and Pet interactions for goose and duck pets, and improved the minimap to display owned pets when you are in the Greymane Camp.

The Iron Eagle is where a stale number is still circulating. Method.gg's guide states that mercury is worth +5 Trust per turn-in, so you need 20 mercury to fill the meter. Pearl Abyss's 1.08.00 patch notes, dated May 22, 2026, say otherwise: "Increased the trust gained by feeding mercury to the Iron Eagle from 5 to 15." At 15 a pour, 100 Trust takes seven feeds, not twenty. Carry a few spare, but do not farm twenty.

Mercury itself is the awkward part. Method.gg gives two sources: buying it from an NPC at Scholastone once you are at 100+ Trust with them, or farming the silver liquid puddles on Silver Wolf Mountain by freezing them — Charged Shot with Frost Imbue in Method.gg's recipe, which is a combat-skill prerequisite as much as a gathering one.

The Phoenix is the odd one out because you kill it rather than befriend it. TheGamer's route is bow it out of the sky in daylight, skin it for the feather, then take the feather to a Witch, open Craft Abyss Gear, and craft Sigil of Solidarity (Phoenix) from the rightmost tab — the same sigil mechanism the legendary mounts use. Once summoned, TheGamer describes it as a gatherer rather than a fighter: it collects materials you missed while you explore, and flies, so it does not get underfoot.

The cap is 100, not 30

This is the number to correct before anything else. The Crimson Desert wiki says you can register a maximum of 30 pets. Fextralife says 30. TheGamer says you can keep up to 30 in total.

Pearl Abyss's 1.11.00 patch notes, dated June 12, 2026, say this instead:

"You can now register up to 100 pets. However, you can only summon up to 50 pets at camp even if you have more than 50 pets registered."

So the ceiling more than tripled two months ago, and all three of those references still carry the old figure. Two separate numbers are in play now — 100 registered, and 50 that can be summoned at camp at once — and neither changes the rule that only one pet follows you into the world at a time. The rest wait at the Greymane Camp, where the minimap has shown them since 1.05.00.

Unregistering is available from the same menu and is permanent, per the wiki, so treat it as a deletion rather than a stash.

The challenge that raises it

The extra slots are not free. They come through a challenge, and 1.11.00 both added new ones and retro-granted reward items to anyone who had already finished the existing pet challenge.

The one the guides document is a Life challenge under White Crow's Gaze called Pets. Game8 and Fextralife agree on the shape: unlock it by picking up a Sealed Abyss Artifact from a stone altar in Delesyia, following the road east from Delesyia South Gate. The objective is to tame 30 unique pets, where Fextralife reads "unique" as visually distinct — same breed, different fur pattern or colour, still counts.

Game8 lists the completion rewards as Abyss Artifact x1, Faded Abyss Artifact x1 and Companionship III x1. That last one is an Abyss Core, so the pet collection loop feeds directly back into your build sockets. One procedural detail worth knowing: to use a Sealed Abyss Artifact from your inventory you have to stand still with weapons sheathed.

The failure modes

Four things Pearl Abyss has patched that tell you what goes wrong:

• Full inventory ate your loot. Before 1.10.00, if a pet picked up an item while your inventory was full, the item vanished instead of being obtained. Fixed — but the underlying lesson stands: a pet with no loot filter fills bags fast.
• Feeding on Hard cost double. Fixed in 1.11.00, as above.
• Renamed pets lost their names on growth. Also fixed in 1.11.00 — "Improved pets so that their names are kept when they grow" — which matters for the Kuku Bird Chick and Baby Wyvern, both of which grow into special mounts.
• You were killing animals you should have picked up. The 1.18.00 notes improved the knowledge system so that knowledge of certain animals can be gained by picking them up instead of killing them. If you have been clearing wildlife to fill Knowledge entries, try grabbing them instead.

Quick Action Checklist

1. Clear Chapter 4 and get the camp running — Naira's stray-dog quest is the tutorial and pets live at the Greymane Camp.
2. Carry the favourite food for the breed you are targeting. +35 beats +10, and petting caps at +25 a day.
3. Do not sell legendary fish — one of them is a 100-Trust instant claim on a cat.
4. Always pick Claim at 100 Trust, then check the Pets tab to summon.
5. Empty your bags before a big fight. Your pet loots indiscriminately and a full inventory used to eat the drops.
6. Heal an injured pet with Healing Force Palm after the last enemy is down, not during.
7. Get into Pororin — three tranquiliser darts and the faction quest — for the Sotdae of Bond and Lacey's sigils.
8. Buy the Sigil of Valor (8 Silver) if you fight in the open world, the Sigil of Bonding if you want the cat on your shoulder, and the Hunter's Sigil for a bird.
9. For the Iron Eagle, turn the Hawkstone Ruins cogwheel at 5 AM and bring mercury — at +15 since 1.08.00, not the +5 the old guides assume.
10. Grab the Sealed Abyss Artifact east of Delesyia South Gate, stand still with weapons sheathed to use it, and work toward 30 unique pets for the Companionship III core.