Taming Flute in 99 Nights in the Forest — the Three Tiers, the XP Nobody Totals, and Six Names for One Bench

The Taming Flute is the reason a run can or cannot own a Mammoth. It is not a weapon and it is never spent, but it has three tiers, an experience bar, a campfire requirement and a building that at least six published sources call by at least three different names. Every step-by-step tame page on this site names a flute tier in its first paragraph and then sends you elsewhere for the details, which is why the flute itself has never had a page.

This one does the part nobody does: what each tier actually unlocks, what the upgrade really costs in tames and in Diamonds, why the "required flute" column in every published table is softer than it looks, and where the sources disagree about the bench you have to walk to.

Last verified: 2026-10-03.

Quick Answer

What the Flute Does, and What It Does Not

Hold it and approach an eligible animal. A mini-game runs, the animal's angry face turns neutral, and a food requirement appears. That is the part the Taming Guide already walks through, so it is not repeated here.

What the flute pages leave out is the small list of things the item does on its own:

• It is not consumed. Taming uses the flute repeatedly and keeps it. The upgrade replaces one tier with the next rather than charging you materials for it.
• Holding any flute is a status check. The flute shows the hearts over every nearby tamed animal while it is in your hands, which is the cheapest way to check a pet's loyalty before a fight with no other reason to open your inventory.
• It grants nothing to an animal that is already damaged. A flute in the bag does not make a wounded Mammoth tamable, and it does nothing at all to the creatures that cannot be tamed by any flute — the collared guard wolves, The Deer, The Owl, The Ram, anything but the Green Frog, the Meteor Crab, and the Furniture Trader's horse.

The Three Tiers, and What Each One Actually Unlocks

No published roster totals more than thirteen animals, and the total moves only because of the creatures at the edges. One source adds a Bee at two cycles for a Honeycomb, another adds a Mushroom Wolf at three cycles for Steak and Morsel, and the wiki's chart carries an Easter Chick at one cycle for a Carrot. Those are the three rows that appear in one table and not in the others; the eleven animal rows that every source shares are identical in count and almost identical in food.

The arithmetic worth doing is the one nobody prints: the second upgrade is the worst value in the chain. Going from Old to Good buys you two animals, and both of them are the tier's cheap mid-game pets. Going from Good to Strong buys you four animals that each run five cycles against a shrinking bar. If flute XP were scored on what it unlocked, the Good Flute would be the most expensive tier in the game by a wide margin — and it is the tier you have to climb through to reach the one that matters.

The reason to want Strong anyway is not the count. It is that four of the game's eleven tames are locked behind five cycles plus, in the Mammoth's and Hellephant's case, 10 Pumpkin and 5 Cake per animal.

The Tier Column Is a Face-Count Gate

Every published table sorts its animals the same way, and the sort key is the number of cycles the animal runs. The Old Flute rows are all 1, 1, 2, 2 and 3 cycles. The Good Flute rows are 3 and 4. The Strong Flute rows are all 5.

That is a strict containment: the flute named in a row is always a flute whose tier covers that animal's cycle count. Nothing in the sources we can cite states the rule in those words, but the pattern holds in every chart we found, and it explains the one place the tables break:

• The Arctic Fox runs three cycles, which makes it boundary case. Three sources and this site put it on the Good Flute; one content guide lists it among the animals the Old Flute can already tame. Both readings describe the same animal at the same cycle count.
• The Scorpion runs two or three cycles by source, which is why it appears in the Old tier everywhere and why our own Scorpion page carries a 2–3 range.
• The Bear is listed under Strong in every source, yet this site's Bear page reports that the exact tier varies by run — the same boundary behaviour showing up at the top of the chain.

So the "required flute" is best read as a flute that covers the faces, not as a hard gate written into the item. That does not mean the Strong Flute is optional anywhere: three independent sources say a lower flute will not produce a Mammoth, and the Hellephant page makes the same point from the other direction, since a Mammoth you have already shot at can no longer be tamed by anything.

Earning Flute XP

Two actions fill the bar, which sits above the minimap:

1. Taming. Successful tames pay out, and the harder the animal, the more the bar moves — five-cycle apex animals are worth more than a Bunny per tame.
2. Feeding a hurt pet. An already-tamed animal that takes damage and is then fed the food it was tamed with also fills the bar. One guide's figure for the low end is blunt about the pace: a few meals should fill the Old Flute's bar. This is the route that does not spend more animals.

Two classes touch the same loop. The Zookeeper levels the flute faster as a Level 1 perk, which shortens the grind to Good and Strong without changing the flute you start with. The Beastmaster starts the run one tier up on a Good Flute, which removes the first upgrade entirely rather than speeding it.

Where You Upgrade It, and the Campfire Gate

Fill the bar, walk to the bench, interact. There is no materials list — one source says so explicitly, and the practical version of that fact is that you cannot shortcut the flute by crafting it at any station, including the Crafting Bench and the Tool Workshop.

What the sources do disagree about is the building, and the disagreement is not cosmetic:

The wiki's own text hedges by describing both: a Tool Trader NPC on the map, and the Skills Building as another place to do the same job. One guide adds that the same bench also upgrades fishing rods, which is the reason the naming drifted apart in the first place — two upgrade chains in one building, described by people who saw only one of them.

On the campfire, the report is split in a way that matters at the moment you are hunting for the building:

• Level 4 — one source ties flute availability to the campfire reaching level 4, and the wiki places the building "around Campfire level 4".
• Level 3, usually found at 4 — two sources say the structure unlocks at Level 3 and that in practice they found it around Level 4.

The honest reading is that Level 3 is the earliest the building can appear and Level 4 is where it does appear, and nothing we can find shows a Level 3 campfire upgrading a flute reliably. Burn wood rather than hunting the building twice.

What the Upgrade Costs: Three Routes to a Third Pet Slot

The Taming Guide lists the pet caps. What it does not price is what each route to the third slot costs, which is the question a player on the fence actually has:

Three things come out of that table and none of them is in any source we found:

• No Diamonds route reaches the Strong Flute. All three purchases buy slots and save time. None of them buys you out of the grind, and a guide that sells the Beastmaster as "skipping the grind" is selling the first upgrade, not the last one.
• The flute's +1 slot is the cheapest slot in the game and the slowest. It costs nothing but the same two XP bars that were already going to take you to Strong.
• For a Zookeeper, the Strong Flute's extra slot is worth zero. The class already holds three pets without any flute, so the flute rule that gives everyone else their third slot gives this class nothing. Every pet-cap table we found lists the caps without saying which cap is redundant in which build.

If the goal is the apex animals rather than the slot count, the arithmetic runs the other way: the Mammoth and the Hellephant are unlocked by the same flute, cost the same 10 Pumpkin and 5 Cake each, and both need farm plots and a cooking setup that most runs have not built by the day they first see one.

The Pet Slot, Stated Cleanly

Two pets by default. Holding a Strong Flute raises that to three — stated by Eurogamer, by one guide's taming page and by the wiki's flute page. The Zookeeper holds three without any flute, the Beastmaster holds five, and the wiki's flute page adds a third name to that list: the Necromancer is unaffected by the flute cap as well.

Small contradiction worth recording: the wiki frames the Zookeeper, Beastmaster and Necromancer as exempt from the flute cap, while the other sources describe them as alternative ways to reach the same three slots. Same number, different reason, and the difference is what makes the flute feel redundant or essential depending on which sentence you read first.

Where Sources Disagree

1. What the building is called. Six names across the sources, listed above, with the wiki hedging between a Tool Trader NPC and the Skills Building after the Flames Update introduced the NPC.

2. The campfire gate. Level 4 in two sources, Level 3 unlock with Level 4 appearance in two others, with no source settling which one gates the upgrade itself.

3. The Arctic Fox's tier and its cycles. Published under both the Old and the Good Flute, and at either two or three cycles depending on which table you open. Every other animal's cycle count is agreed on everywhere.

4. Where the first flute comes from. The animal shelter is universal. Two guides and the wiki also name the Pelt Trader against a Wolf Pelt — and this site's Pelt Trader page records that the Wolf Pelt rung once rewarded an Old Taming Flute but no longer does, pointing at a Tool Trader purchase instead. Two class starts are named by the wiki as flute sources, and it lists the Beastmaster there without distinguishing that the Beastmaster starts on a Good Flute and not an Old one. This site's Taming Guide adds rare chests.

5. Whether the classes' third slot comes from the flute or around it. Exempt versus alternative route, in the same number.

6. The Kiwi's location. One cycle and one Berry on the Old Flute everywhere, but "extremely rare and found randomly across biomes" in some sources and a Kiwi Burrow behind Campfire Level 6 in ours.

FAQ

Can I craft a better flute? No. No source we found has a recipe for any tier, and the upgrade happens at the bench once the XP bar is full. Guides that describe flute crafting are describing the campfire or the workshop, not a recipe.

Do I lose the flute when I upgrade? No. It upgrades in place, from Old to Good to Strong.

How many pets can I hold without any class? Two, or three while a Strong Flute is in your hands.

Is the Good Flute worth the grind before Strong? Only if you want an Alpha Wolf. It unlocks two animals, and the Strong tier after it unlocks four — the second upgrade is the poor value in the chain, which is the opposite of the order most guides describe.

Can I skip ahead to Strong? No. The chain runs Old to Good to Strong, and the Beastmaster's starting Good Flute skips only the first step.

Sources

Checked 2026-10-03. The flute tier tables, the XP sources and the pet-slot figures are corroborated across the fandom wiki's Taming Flute page, Eurogamer's taming explainer, bo3.gg's flute guide, PC Gamer's flute upgrade guide, and two independent content guides covering the upgrade loop and pet limits. Where they diverge, the divergence is recorded above rather than resolved. Single-source claims are marked as such, and nothing on this page is a guess: where the game has not said, this page says it has not said.

Related Pages

• Taming Guide — the mini-game, every animal's food, and the full pet caps
• How to Tame a Wolf — the first animal most runs eat an Old Flute on
• How to Tame a Fox — the Good Flute tier in practice
• How to Tame a Bear — the firstStrong-tier animal
• How to Tame a Mammoth — 10 Pumpkin and 5 Cake behind the Strong Flute
• How to Tame a Hellephant — the same bill in the Volcanic Biome
• Best Pet — which of the unlocked animals is worth the food
• Pet Food — the ingredients every tier's bills run on
• Zookeeper Class — three pets and faster flute XP on an Old Flute
• Beastmaster Class — five pets, and a Good Flute on spawn
• Necromancer Class — the third class the flute cap does not touch
• The Alpha Wolf — the animal the Good Flute unlocks
• The Arctic Fox — the animal published under two different tiers
• The Scorpion — the Old-tier animal with a 2–3 cycle range
• The Frog — the one frog a Green-tier animal can be tamed into
• Pelt Trader — the Wolf Pelt trade that yields a flute