Boars, wolves, lox and (in Ashlands) Asksvin can all be tamed with the right food and a pen — bears and deer can't, no matter what you feed them.
Boars, wolves, lox, and — since Ashlands — Asksvin can all be tamed: trap one in a pen, feed it the food it actually eats, and stay close enough for the taming clock to run. Bears and deer can't be tamed in the base game; no food or pen changes that.
Every tameable creature runs the same clock: taming takes about 30 minutes, and it only ticks forward while you're within roughly 64 meters of the pen, the animal isn't hungry, and it isn't alerted (no red exclamation mark over its head). Walk far enough away and the clock pauses; spook the animal — by standing where it can see and chase you — and it resets to alert instead of eating.
That's why the standard routine is: lure the animal into an enclosure, seal the last gap, then feed it and back off out of its sightline rather than standing over it. Yellow hearts mean it's eating and the clock is running; a green health bar (or a tamed name-tag) means it's done.
| Animal | Food | Where to find it | Tameable? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boar | Raspberries, blueberries, red mushrooms, carrots, turnips | Meadows | Yes |
| Wolf | Raw meat, raw fish, neck tails, lox meat | Mountain | Yes |
| Lox | Barley, flax, cloudberries | Plains | Yes |
| Asksvin | Smokepuffs, fiddleheads, vineberry clusters | Ashlands | Yes |
| Deer | — | Meadows, Black Forest | No — flees on sight, can't be penned |
| Bear | — | Mountain | No — eats dropped berries but never tames |
Boars are the animal most guides point new players toward first, and for good reason: a cheap wood-stake fence holds them, the food is whatever you're already carrying from foraging, and a tamed boar pen is the reliable source of leather scraps and boar meat rather than hunting wild ones down one at a time.
The fence has to match the animal, or you're feeding something that then walks straight through the wall:
Once an animal is tamed, breeding needs two tamed adults of the same species, both fed and both calm, within range of each other and of you — the clock that drives breeding, like the taming clock, only advances while a player is nearby. Boars and wolves both breed this way once you keep a well-stocked pen with more than one adult in it. Lox are the exception: as of the current version, tamed lox don't breed at all, so a lox pen stays at whatever number you trapped and tamed yourself.
Almost every failed tame comes down to one of these:
Get those right and the routine is the same for every species: pen it, feed it, walk away, and check back later for yellow hearts turning into a tame.