No Man's Sky Tame and Ride Animals | How to make bait and capture animals

One of the biggest additions to come with the release of No Man’s Sky Beyond is the ability to tame and ride animals using bait. By using the new Nutrient Processor, you can craft many different kinds of bait, but you have to pick the right one for each animal if you want to tame them. Once they’re tame, you can ride them to your heart’s content.

Taming your first animal in No Man’s Sky isn’t the most straightforward process. The tells you how to do it if you look in the menu, but it leaves out some crucial steps that will leave you scratching your head. In particular, finding the Nutrient Processor blueprint in No Man’s Sky is left entirely up to you. You don’t automatically acquire this blueprint, but you’re expected to have it if you want to make the bait you need to tame animals.

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We’re going to walk you through the process of taming and riding animals in No Man’s Sky step-by-step, so there’s absolutely no confusion. Once you know how to find the Nutrient Processor blueprint, make bait, and figure out how to tell which bait each animal wants you won’t have any issue taming them all across the galaxy.

How to tame animals in No Man’s Sky

In a nutshell, to tame a creature in No Man’s Sky, you need to give it the right kind of bait. However, there are some steps you need to accomplish to get to that point:

Find the Nutrient Processor blueprint.
Build the Nutrient Processor on a planet.
Find an animal you want to tame.
Analyze it using your visor to find out its preferred bait.
Find the recipe to make the right bait.
Craft the bait.
Get close to the creature and throw the bait.

Once a creature has eaten its favorite bait, then it will be tame. This means you can milk it or ride it, and it will follow you around for a short period of time.

How to find the Nutrient Processor blueprint in No Man’s Sky

The hardest part of taming an animal in No Man’s Sky for me was actually the very first step. When you load up the game after installing the Beyond patch, you’ll get some tooltips alluding to taming and riding animals. They’ll mention a Nutrient Processor, but you won’t get a waypoint or anything to help you find the blueprint.

You can check out your base research terminal, but you won’t find the Nutrient Processor in that tech tree. Instead, you need to go to The Nexus on the Space Anomaly. In The Nexus is a room where you can purchase tech upgrades near where Polo and Nada are located. In this room is a Construction Research Terminal on the left side. It’s easy to overlook this because an NPC is not operating it and it doesn’t look like a trade terminal or any others you may be familiar with.

The Construction Research Terminal in The Nexus has an expanded tech tree, and you can find the blueprint for the Nutrient Processor under the Technology Modules section. The blueprint costs 10 Salvage Data, which you can find in Buried Technology Modules which are underneath the surface of planets.

Once you have the blueprint for the Nutrient Processor you can build it on any planet by spending:

2 Metal Plating
1 Hermetic Seal
25 Sodium

Once you’ve constructed the processor, you can begin making bait.

How to tell which bait an animal wants in No Man’s Sky

Telling which bait an animal wants is pretty straightforward. You just need to analyze it with your visor. When you do this, you’ll notice a new stat displayed on the left side of the screen. In the example above, the Bait stat shows that this animal likes Scented Herbs.

Once you scan an animal, the recipe for the bait it favors is added to your catalog.

How to make bait in No Man’s Sky

By checking the Scented Herbs entry in the catalog, we can see that it is crafted from Faecium and harvestable plants.

In this case, we can find harvestable plants by looking for them with our visor. Faecium is a new element and can be obtained by feeding animals the generic Creature Bait. Fortunately, Creature Bait is easy to make, and after you update to the Beyond patch, you automatically have the recipe for it ready to go.

Now, all we have to do to make Scented Herbs is throw the harvestable plant we found (Aloe Flesh in this case) and Faecium together in the Nutrient Processor, and boom. Now we can go tame a creature.

How to ride an animal in No Man’s Sky

Once you have a creature’s preferred bait, you can go tame it. Just open up the Utility menu and select Creature Bait. This will open a submenu, and you can select to either throw the bait, or you can walk up to the creature and feed it by hand.

Once you do this, a happy face icon will appear above the animal’s head, and you’ll see an option to ride it. Not all animals are ridable. Some are too small to carry your weight. For the most part, though, you should be able to ride any animal large enough to hold you.

More No Man’s Sky

No Man’s Sky is an epic science fiction adventure set across an infinite universe, in which every star is the light of a distant sun, orbited by planets filled with life – each yours to visit. Explore never before seen worlds and trade, fight and survive on a galactic scale.

EXPLORE THE UNKNOWN

Explore uncharted solar systems and catalogue unique new forms of life. Every planet’s landscape is different from the next and populated by species never before encountered.

SURVIVE ON A DANGEROUS FRONTIER

Every solar system, planet, ocean and cave is filled with danger, and you are vulnerable. Battle attack ships, fend off dangerous predators, and survive in hazardous environments. Every encounter will test your skills to the limit.

PREPARE FOR AN EPIC JOURNEY

How you play No Man’s Sky is up to you, but you shouldn’t take your voyage lightly. Collect precious resources on the surfaces of planets, trade them with alien races and build the equipment that will take you to your destiny in the stars.