How to Tame a Hellephant in 99 Nights in the Forest

The Hellephant is the volcanic twin of the Mammoth — the same animal, the same food bill, one crucial difference: the Mammoth is neutral and the Hellephant attacks you on sight. That single change is what turns an identical recipe into a much harder tame.

This page covers what it wants, where it lives, and the tactics that make a hostile apex tame possible.

Last verified: 2026-09-30.

Quick Answer

The One Difference That Matters

Everything about the tame is the same as the Mammoth's. What changes is the approach.

The Mammoth stands still and lets you play a flute at it. The Hellephant does not. It is a hostile entity: it wanders until it notices you, then charges, and its hit puts you in ragdoll — on the floor, briefly helpless, in the middle of the Volcanic Biome.

That collides with the one rule that governs every tame: an animal must be undamaged to be tamed. So you cannot soften it up with a Rifle and then walk in. You have to survive it while you do the mini-game.

It gets worse before it gets better: the Hellephant spawns near cultists, particularly around the Ritual Circle. Expect to be taming while something else is shooting at you.

The Campfire Trick

Here is the mechanic that makes this possible, and it is the most useful thing on this page.

The Hellephant stops pursuing if you get too close to a lit campfire. It breaks off and returns to wandering — and reportedly teleports back to its original spawn if it ends up too far away with no target. So a lit campfire is a reset button. You can pull it, break the aggro, heal, eat, and come back to try again instead of fighting to the death.

The second exploitable weakness: it gets stuck on large structures — trees, buildings — and can lose interest in you while still standing in your detection radius. That is your window: put a solid object between you and it, and approach from the side it cannot path around.

Between those two, the practical loop is:

1. Put a campfire down near the Ritual Circle. This is the set-up step nobody mentions and the one that turns a coin-flip into a farmable attempt.
2. Pull the cultists first and clear them, so you are not doing the mini-game under crossbow fire.
3. Break the Hellephant's aggro at the campfire whenever your health drops, then re-engage. Repeat rather than trading hits.
4. Start the mini-game as soon as you get a clean window. One guide reports that the mini-game temporarily freezes the target while you balance the bar — which would be exactly what makes a hostile apex tame viable. That claim is single-source, so verify it in your own run rather than counting on it.
5. Feed 2 Pumpkin + 1 Cake per successful cycle, five times.

What It Wants

Identical to the Mammoth, and — as with the Mammoth — the sources agree:

Cake is the bottleneck, not Pumpkin, for exactly the same reason as the Mammoth: plots scale Pumpkin throughput, and Cake does not keep up. Our Pet Food page has the ingredient sources.

You also need a Strong Taming Flute before any of this works, which means the same flute-levelling route as the Mammoth: tame Bunnies and Wolves for XP, upgrade at the Upgrade Station, then take on apex animals. The full route is on the Taming Guide.

And here is the payoff for the Cake farm: the Mammoth, the Hellephant and the Jungle's Mossy Mammoth all want the same 10 Pumpkin + 5 Cake. One farm, three biomes' worth of apex pets.

What It Drops

The Hellephant pays out better than most things in the biome, and the detail that makes it unusual is that the food is already cooked:

One source notes it is the only entity that drops cooked food with no cooking required — which means killing one in the middle of a Volcanic run refills your hunger bar immediately. If you were going to fight it anyway, that alone makes the trip worthwhile; the tame is the bonus, not the other way round.

HP: A Number Worth Flagging

Sources disagree, so treat this as the honest version rather than a clean stat:

500 is the two-source figure, so that is what we use. The 800 listing looks like the Mammoth's own HP carried across — and it would make the Hellephant the joint-highest-HP entity in the game, which nothing else claims. Its damage (30) and walkspeed (20) are unanimous across all three.

For comparison: the Mammoth is 800 HP but neutral. The hostile volcanic version has less health than the peaceful snow one — which is the trade the designers made.

Naming, and Why You See Two

You will find this animal written as Hellephant and as Lava Mammoth, sometimes in the same game.

The short version: players called it Lava Mammoth first, and a tester later reported the in-game name as Hellephant. It is a red reskin of the Mammoth — red glowing eyes, no head fluff — and the name is a pun on "hell" and "elephant". One source also notes it was never mentioned in the official update log, so the creature's official status rested on community reporting for a while.

Either name gets you to the same animal. Our Taming Guide lists it as the Hellephant, which is the name the game itself uses.

FAQ

Is the Hellephant the same as the Lava Mammoth? Yes — same animal, two names. Players said Lava Mammoth first.

What food does it need? 10 Pumpkin and 5 Cake across five cycles — 2 Pumpkin + 1 Cake per cycle. Identical to the Mammoth.

Which flute? Strong Taming Flute (Tier 3). Nothing lower engages it.

Where do I find one? The Volcanic Biome, at the Hellephant Ritual Circle, usually with cultists nearby.

Do I have to fight it first? No — but you will have to survive it. It attacks on sight, and you cannot damage it before taming, because a damaged animal cannot be tamed.

How do I survive the charge? Get near a lit campfire — it breaks off pursuit. Structures also break its pathing, and it gets stuck on them.

How much HP does it have? Two sources say 500, one says 800. We use 500.

Does it drop good food? Very — 8–9 cooked Steaks, plus Cooked Ribs and a chance of a Mammoth Tusk. The only entity that drops cooked food with no fire needed.

Sources

Checked 2026-09-30. The tame requirement — Strong Flute, 5 cycles, 10 Pumpkin + 5 Cake — is corroborated by Bloxodes, rblxguide and Pocket Tactics, and matches the Mammoth's identical requirement on our Mammoth page. Hostile behaviour (charges on sight, stops at activity radius, loses interest near a lit campfire, gets stuck on structures, teleports back to spawn when too far away) is described by 99-nights-in-the-forest.com and Pocket Tactics. The ragdoll on its charge comes from 99-nights-in-the-forest.com and rblxguide. The Hellephant Ritual Circle spawn point is from Pocket Tactics and Bloxodes; cultist guards are from rblxguide and 99-nights-in-the-forest.com. HP is genuinely split — 500 (two sources) versus 800 (one) — and we present both rather than picking silently. The cooked-drop table (8–9 Cooked Steak, 0–2 Cooked Ribs, 0–1 Mammoth Tusk) is from rblxguide and 99-nights-in-the-forest.com, which also supplies the "only entity that drops cooked loot" note and the naming history (tester-reported name, pun, absent from the official update log). The mini-game freezing the target is from All Things How, is single-source, and is flagged as such because it materially affects whether this tame is practical. The Volcanic Biome update (Part 2) as the introduction is stated by rblxguide and 99-nights-in-the-forest.com; note that our Update Log & Patch Notes timeline covers 2026 only and does not date it.

Related Pages

• How to Tame a Mammoth — the neutral twin, and the easier half of this pairing
• Taming Guide — flute tiers, cycles and food for every animal
• Pet Food — where the 10 Pumpkins and 5 Cakes actually come from
• The Cultist King — the other thing you summon in the Volcanic Biome
• How to Get the Infernal Sword — the biome's other headline reward
• Best Pet — whether an apex tame is worth a slot