Hytale's world of Orbis is packed with wildlife — chickens, rabbits, pigs, horses, cows, squirrels, and more — but interacting with those animals has been one of the early access period's biggest gaps. For most of Hytale's early access life, true taming and breeding simply didn't exist. A recent update has started to change that, introducing food-based taming for different animals. If you're playing on an older build or want to understand the full picture of how animal mechanics have evolved, here's everything you need to know.
Quick answer: A recent Hytale update (update 4, technically pre-release 3 of update 3) substantially adds taming — you can now feed food to different animals to tame them. On earlier builds, taming is not functional, but you can lure small animals with a Feed Bag and relocate them with a Capture Crate.
Taming Animals With Food (Latest Update)
The most recent Hytale update adds a proper taming system. You can feed specific food items to different animals to tame them, which should make them stay near you and stop fleeing. This is a significant change from the earlier early access builds, where feeding animals food like carrots or apples produced heart particle effects but never actually resulted in a tamed companion. If you're on the latest version, experiment with different food types for different species — the system now responds meaningfully to feeding.
No official confirmed date has been announced for the next major update beyond this one, so keep an eye on patch notes for further refinements to breeding and taming.
Feed Bag — Luring Small Animals (All Builds)
Even before the taming update, Hytale included a craftable Feed Bag that prevents certain small animals from running away when you approach. It works on piglets, chicks, and rabbits. When you place or hold a Feed Bag near these creatures, heart effects appear above their heads, and they stop fleeing. The effect is temporary and does not constitute true taming — the animals won't follow you permanently or breed — but it's useful for corralling skittish critters long enough to capture them.
You craft the Feed Bag at a Farmer's Workbench. Here's what you need for both the workbench and the bag itself:
| Item | Materials |
|---|---|
| Farmer's Workbench | 6 × Any Tree Trunk, 3 × Any Stone |
| Feed Bag | 10 × Wheat, 5 × Any Vegetable, 5 × Any Fruit, 10 × Essence of Life |
Wheat can be found growing wild, often near dilapidated cabins scattered across the landscape. Essence of Life sounds exotic, but it drops fairly regularly when you harvest plants.
Capture Crate — Relocating Baby Animals
The Capture Crate is the most practical tool for building a farm in Hytale, especially on builds where taming isn't fully functional. It lets you scoop up small and baby animals with a single left-click, then release them with another click wherever you want — like inside a fenced enclosure at your base.
The Capture Crate works on baby cows, baby horses, chicks, piglets, rabbits, and even non-livestock animals like squirrels. It does not appear to work on flying birds or full-sized adult animals like adult horses. A solid strategy is to lure a skittish animal close with a Feed Bag, then quickly swap to the Capture Crate and grab it.
Crafting a Capture Crate requires a Level 2 Farmer's Workbench, which itself has an upgraded recipe:
| Item | Materials |
|---|---|
| Farmer's Workbench Level 2 | 5 × Softwood Trunks, 5 × Wheat, 5 × Lettuce, 50 × Essence of Life |
| Capture Crate | 4 × Any Wood, 50 × Essence of Life |
The Essence of Life cost is steep — 50 units for the workbench upgrade and another 50 for the crate — so stockpile it early by harvesting every plant you come across.
Horses — Mounting, Dismounting, and Keeping Them Around
Horses can be mounted by approaching one and pressing the F key. They're fast and useful for exploration, but on builds without full taming, dismounting a horse causes it to wander off or bolt entirely. You can't build while mounted, which makes constructing a pen around a horse you're currently riding impossible.
The practical workaround is to build a pen or a stable before bringing a horse to it. A two-block-high fence is the minimum needed to keep a horse contained — anything shorter, and it will jump out. Once you have an enclosure ready, ride the horse into it, dismount, and quickly seal the opening.
On earlier builds, there's an informal "carrot trick" where dismounting while holding a carrot causes heart particles to appear and the horse to follow you briefly. This behavior is inconsistent — sometimes the horse enters a bugged state where it won't flee, but also can't be remounted. Hitting the horse once can sometimes fix the mounting bug, but rejoining the world resets the horse to its default wild state. With the latest taming update, feeding horses should produce more reliable results.
Building a Functional Animal Farm
Confined animals in Hytale don't need food or water to survive. They won't starve or die from being penned up, which simplifies farm management considerably. The main concern is fence height relative to the animal's size.
Small animals like chickens, rabbits, and pigs only need a one-block-high fence to stay contained. Larger animals like horses require at least two blocks of height. Gates work as well, but make sure they match the fence height — a gap of even one block at the top can let a horse escape.
Once you've built your enclosure, use Capture Crates to transport baby animals from the wild into the pen. Release them inside, seal the gate, and you have a functioning farm. Animals placed in a pen will stay put as long as you don't give them an opening to leave.
Breeding — Still Limited
Animal breeding is not yet fully implemented in Hytale's early access. You cannot feed animals specialized food to make them reproduce, and captured baby animals do not currently grow into adults. The developers have indicated that breeding is planned for a future update, but no specific timeline has been confirmed. For now, if you want more animals on your farm, you'll need to capture additional ones from the wild.
This also means that renewable animal products like milk and eggs are harder to come by reliably. Eggs can sometimes be obtained from chickens using chicken coops, but the system is limited. Milk requires finding wild cows and using a bucket, which is inconvenient without a way to keep cows permanently at your base through breeding.
Hytale's animal systems are evolving rapidly as the game moves through early access. The addition of food-based taming in the most recent update is a major step forward, and breeding is expected to follow. In the meantime, Feed Bags and Capture Crates remain your best tools for building a working farm, and a well-built two-block fence is still the most reliable way to keep a horse from disappearing into the wilderness.