Base Stats (Wild Lv150)
| Stat | Base Value | Per Level (Wild) | Per Level (Tamed) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Health | 900 | +180 | +5.4% |
| Stamina | 250 | +25 | +10% |
| Weight | 400 | +8 | +4% |
| Melee Damage | 100% (29 base) | +5% | +1.7% |
Taming Guide
| Food | Amount (Lv150, 1x) | Time | Effectiveness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Superior Kibble | 13 | ~6min | +100% |
| Raw Mutton | 138 | ~39min | +97.2% |
| Raw Prime Meat | 172 | ~49min | +95.7% |
Special Abilities
ok so the Daeodon has this healing ability that makes it the most important support creature in the entire game. I cannot stress enough how essential this thing is for any serious boss fight or raid. the way it works: the Daeodon has a toggleable healing aura that pulses every few seconds and heals every friendly creature within a pretty generous radius. the amount healed scales with the Daeodon's food stat, which is why people pump food on these things.
and the healing drains food from the Daeodon's inventory at an absolutely insane rate. like, we're talking a full inventory of cooked meat gone in minutes. insane. you have to keep it constantly stocked with food or it'll starve and stop healing, and then your whole boss army wipes. then you're sitting there in the respawn screen wondering what went wrong, and the answer is always the same — your pig ran out of food. it's the only thing between you and a full party wipe. never ever ever let your Daeodon run out of food. I've lost boss fights to this exact thing and it's the most preventable tragedy in the game.
the Daeodon also passively gathers rare mushrooms from bushes and produces an enormous amount of feces while healing. sounds gross but is actually useful for making fertilizer. the pig itself can fight too — it's not helpless, solid base health at 900 and decent melee, and I've seen people use Daeodons as combat mounts in a pinch. but you're not taming a Daeodon for its combat stats. you're taming it because it's the only creature in the game that can heal your entire army at once. nothing else comes close to that utility.
Taming Strategy
taming a Daeodon is stressful because these things are aggressive and they hit hard, and they almost always travel in packs. if you aggro one you aggro the whole group, and then you have 3 or 4 angry hell pigs charging at you. they don't slow down and they don't give up and they will chase you across the entire map if they have to. I've been chased by Daeodons for literally 10 minutes before while trying to find a rock to stand on.
because they can't climb. and that's the key to taming them — get to high ground. a rock, a cliff, anything they can't walk up, and then tranq them from safety. if you're on the ground you're dead, simple as that. I'm not being dramatic here. a pack of wild Daeodons will melt you faster than a Rex if you don't have an escape route planned. learned that lesson the hard way multiple times.
once you've thinned the pack or isolated your target Daeodon the actual knockout is pretty straightforward. they have a big head hitbox and their torpor isn't insane — about 7952 torpor for a level 150, manageable with a good crossbow or longneck. the nice thing is they tame fast with Superior Kibble. like 6 minutes fast with only 13 kibble. blazing compared to most creatures of this tier, and you get 100% effectiveness at 1x rates. perfect.
the fast tame time is a blessing because the Daeodon's torpor drops fast too — 6.2 per second fast. you need to stay on top of it with narcotics. if you let the torpor hit zero mid-tame you're gonna have a very angry pig on your hands, and it's gonna wake up at full health and start attacking you immediately. that's a nightmare scenario you do not want to experience. trust me on that one.
one more thing — the Daeodon has a ton of food drain even when it's unconscious, so it'll wake up faster than most creatures if you're using low-quality food. another reason to use kibble. it minimizes the time the pig is unconscious and reduces the risk of it waking up and mauling you. I've had Daeodons wake up on me before because I was cheap and used raw meat instead of kibble. regretted every second of that decision as I ran for my life. just make the kibble, it's worth the effort and your sanity will thank you.
Best Uses
the Daeodon is primarily a boss fight support creature and this is where it absolutely shines and if you're doing any boss fight at all you should have at least one Daeodon in your lineup preferably two so you can rotate them because the healing aura drains food so fast that a single Daeodon can't keep it up for the entire fight and when your first pig runs out of food you swap to the second one and keep the healing going and this rotation is the difference between beating the boss with most of your tames alive and wiping at 20% health because your Rexes all died to attrition damage and I've been on both sides of that line and the Daeodon makes all the difference every single time
for PvP raiding the Daeodon is equally essential because you can park it behind your front line and let it passively heal your soakers and fighters while they push into the enemy base and the healing radius is big enough that you don't even need to put the pig in danger you just keep it behind a wall or on a ledge and let the aura do its thing and the enemy team will burn through way more resources trying to kill your front line than they would without a healer and the Daeodon more than pays for itself in saved tames and saved resources and I've seen raids where a single Daeodon kept six Rexes alive through multiple turret towers and the raiders walked away with everything while the defenders ran out of bullets and resources trying to kill the unkillable
an underrated use for the Daeodon is as a rare mushroom farmer because it can harvest mushrooms from bushes and trees way more efficiently than you can by hand and rare mushrooms are used in a bunch of recipes including superior kibble which the Daeodon itself eats so you can kind of feed it with what it harvests which is a nice synergy and also the Daeodon produces a ton of feces while its healing aura is active and you can use that for fertilizer or to make a compost bin setup and it sounds gross but it's actually one of the fastest ways to generate fertilizer in the game and if you have a greenhouse you know how valuable that is
Daeodon vs Snow Owl - Which Healer Is Better?
this is a comparison that comes up a lot and the answer depends on what you're doing. the Snow Owl has a freeze heal ability that's targeted and heals a single creature very quickly. plus it can freeze enemies and fly, which is obviously a huge mobility advantage. the Daeodon has an AoE heal that covers everything in its radius passively, but it can't fly and it burns through food like crazy.
for general purpose stuff the Snow Owl is more versatile — it flies, can heal itself, and escape danger easily. for boss fights and large-scale PvP where you need to heal 20 Rexes at once, the Daeodon is irreplaceable. the Snow Owl can only heal one thing at a time. you'd need like 5 owls to match one pig's throughput.
you should have both because they serve different roles. the Snow Owl is great for healing individual tames during regular gameplay. the Daeodon is your boss fight insurance policy. you don't want to bring a knife to a gunfight, which is basically what a Snow Owl is compared to a Daeodon in a boss arena.
Breeding Tips
breeding Daeodons is worth it for boss fights. an imprinted Daeodon with a good saddle is way tankier than a wild tame and can survive stray boss attacks that would one-shot a freshly tamed pig. gestation period is about 8 hours, pretty standard for mammals. baby phase about 5 hours, juvenile at 19 and a half hours, adolescent at just over a day. total maturation of about 2 days.
for mutations you want food and health. those are the only two stats that matter on a Daeodon. food determines how long the healing aura can stay active. health determines whether your pig lives long enough to use all that food. I cannot stress enough how important food mutations are — a pig with 20 levels in food can heal for way longer than one with base food. in a boss fight every second of healing counts. the difference between a mutated food line Daeodon and a basic one is night and day. the mutated one can keep the aura up for almost twice as long.
Pro Tips
first thing — always keep at least two stacks of cooked meat or raw meat in your Daeodon's inventory at all times. even when you're not actively using the healing aura, because you never know when you'll need it. if you forget to stock it and then a raid happens or a wild giga wanders into your base, you're going to be scrambling to feed your pig while everything around you is dying.
the healing aura consumes about 100 food per second at base. so a stack of 30 cooked meat lasts about 15 seconds. that's nothing. you need hundreds of meat to keep the aura up for a full boss fight. consider bringing a dedicated meat-hauling dino just to feed your Daeodon during long fights. the food consumption is that intense. I'm not exaggerating when I say I've brought a Therizino loaded with 50 stacks of cooked meat just to keep my Daeodon running through a single boss fight. yeah, it's that bad.
second toggle the healing aura don't leave it on passively during regular gameplay because it'll drain all your food in minutes and then you have nothing when you actually need it and I've done this more times than I can count where I forgot to turn off the aura after a fight and came back to my Daeodon starving and near death with no food left and the guilt is real because you basically starved your own pig through negligence and it's fully preventable so just make it a habit to check the aura is off whenever you dismount and save yourself the food and the heartbreak
third — the Daeodon can heal itself with its own aura. so if you need to retreat and heal during a fight, just ride the pig to a safe spot and toggle the healing on. it'll heal itself and any nearby allies at the same time. this makes the Daeodon surprisingly self-sufficient as a solo mount too. I've used a single Daeodon to clear caves before by toggling the aura between fights and healing to full before engaging the next group. works way better than you'd think for a support creature. the Daeodon is tankier than most people give it credit for.
and one more thing if you're bringing a Daeodon to a boss fight bring a second one as backup because if your first pig dies you have no healing and the fight is basically over and I've brought two Daeodons to every boss fight since losing one mid-fight and watching my entire Rex army get wiped in about 30 seconds without healing and that's a mistake you only make once because the pain of losing 18 high-level Rexes to a preventable healer death is something that stays with you forever and you will never go into a boss fight without a backup healer again I promise you that