Delverium Animal Husbandry Guide: How to Catch Animals and Fill an Animal Pen

How to Catch Animals

There are three documented routes to getting an animal, and only the first one is something you do in the field:

1. Catch one from the wild with the Small Net. This is the method the developers described, and the rest of this page is about it.
2. Buy one from the Agronomist, the farming NPC. Sagestone Games confirmed the Agronomist sells nets; the community wiki also lists animals and eggs for sale there.
3. Raise one. Animals in a valid pen produce offspring, so one animal of each kind is enough to start.

For the first route, the animals named in the developer's own explanation are chickens and sheep. Those are the two we describe on this page. The community wiki's page for the net is broader — it says the tool catches "all kinds of animals from butterflies through to cows" — but we have not verified a species list against the Early Access build, so we are not printing one.

How to Use the Small Net

This is the method as the developer described it. The steps are short, and the ordering matters:

1. Have a Small Net — craft one, or buy one from the Agronomist.
2. Equip it and select it in your quickbar.
3. Walk up to a chicken or a sheep.
4. Swing the net at it.
5. A successfully caught animal goes into your inventory.

The detail people miss is the last one: the animal becomes an item. You are not leading it, luring it or herding it. If your inventory is full, deal with that before you go looking for animals, because the net has already caught the animal by the time you find out.

We are not printing the Small Net's recipe. A recipe does exist — the community wiki records one, crafted from wood and twine at a workbench — but that entry was last edited before the Early Access release, and printing ingredient counts we cannot stand behind is exactly the kind of detail that wastes a reader's time. Buying one from the Agronomist avoids the question entirely.

Bringing an Animal Home

A captured animal sits in your inventory as an item. Getting it home is not a separate mechanic — it travels with you the same way ore or a crafted wall does, and there is nothing to keep alive or feed on the journey.

The practical consequence is that the trip out and the trip back are the same trip. Catch the animal on your way home from gathering rather than making it the reason for the trip.

It also means the animal is only worth catching if you have a pen to put it in. A pen is the bottleneck, not the animal. If you are starting from nothing, build the pen first — see what a valid pen needs.

Putting Animals in the Pen

Place the animal from your inventory onto a tile inside the pen. That is the whole action: it is placed like a building item, not released like a creature.

The placement must land inside the pen's valid area. If the pen does not register as valid, the animal will not have anywhere to go — which is why the next section matters more than it looks.

There is a second documented way to tame an animal: build a valid pen around a wild one. The community wiki records this as an alternative to the net, and it means an animal already wandering your base is not wasted — fencing it in achieves the same thing.

What Is a Valid Animal Pen?

Here is the important caveat before the requirements: this is the most likely thing on this page to be out of date.

The following comes from the community wiki, whose pages were last edited in March and April 2026 — before the Early Access release. The developers have not published pen requirements. Treat this as a starting point rather than a spec:

• Fencing around the area
• A water trough inside it
• Minimum internal size of 2x3 tiles
• Maximum internal size of 24x24 tiles

The water trough is the one people forget, and the wiki is explicit that it is not decoration: it describes the trough as required for a pen to allow animals to spawn produce and young. A pen that looks right but has no trough is a pen that does nothing. The wiki also records the trough as craftable from wood at a workbench — same caveat as the net, we have not confirmed the counts.

Note that "internal size" means the enclosed space, not the footprint of the fence. The 2x3 minimum is a low bar; if you are aiming at the five-animal achievement, build something you can comfortably walk around in rather than the smallest legal box.

Can Animals Reproduce?

Yes, by the same wiki documentation. Mature tamed animals inside a valid pen spawn produce and baby animals on a timer, and the baby animals mature into more adults.

The documented species are:

Two things we are deliberately not putting numbers on: how long the timer is, and how many animals a pen supports. Both are balance values, both would be guesses, and both are exactly the kind of thing that changes in an Early Access patch. What the wiki does say is that offspring only appear while the pen is not already at its supported animal count — so a full pen stops growing.

That last point is worth planning around if you are chasing the achievement: five animals in one pen is the target, so make sure the pen you build is big enough to hold them.

Animal Husbandry Achievement

Fill an Animal Pen with 5 animals. This one is confirmed, not wiki data — it is the requirement Steam publishes for the Animal Husbandry achievement, read from the live list on September 23, 2026.

Two things follow from how it is worded. The animals have to be in the pen, and there have to be five of them at once. Given that a pen stops producing offspring when it is full, the five you need may have to come from catching and buying rather than from waiting.

At 19.1% of players, this sits in the same band as the other settlement-building achievements — Urban Planning at 20.7% and Green Thumb at 17.9%. It is a base-building achievement, not a combat one. The achievements guide has the full list of all fifteen.

Common Mistakes

• Building the pen without a water trough. It is the requirement that is not visible from the fence, and the wiki is explicit that the trough is what makes a pen produce anything.
• Going animal-hunting with a full inventory. The animal becomes an item the moment the net connects. There is no second chance to make room.
• Leaving a wild animal outside the fence. If a valid pen is built around it, it tames itself. Fencing off an animal you already have is faster than catching another one.
• Expecting the pen to fill up on its own. A pen at its supported animal count stops producing offspring, so if you are stuck below five, the pen is not going to close the gap by itself.
• Building the smallest legal pen. The 2x3 minimum is a floor, not a target. Aim for a pen you can fit five animals into comfortably.

If you are new to the game more broadly, the beginner guide covers where farming sits in the early game, and its farming section is the right place to start before pens.