Yakumo Saddle
Essential · Essential_PalGear2★Gear for riding Yakumo safely.
It feeds no other recipe, which makes it a terminal item: craft what you will actually carry and stop there.
Details
It stacks up to 999,999.
Yakumo Saddle Crafting Recipe
Leather×30
Fiber×50
Refined Ingot
Paldium Fragment
Coal×40
Ore×40
Wood×25Crafting it takes 140 materials across 4 types.
Where to Find Yakumo Saddle
Yakumo Saddle is not something you find lying around — you craft it, and the recipe is below.
Using Yakumo Saddle Well
The saddle is the on-switch for Birds of a Feather, and that skill does something no stat buff does: while Yakumo is out with you, the wild Pals you run into are more likely to be generated already carrying a passive your Yakumo itself has. It starts at 15% and climbs to 18, 21, 24 and 30% across the five condense ranks. Look at the shape of that ladder before you feed it souls — three points per step for the first three, then six for the last, so a Yakumo stopped halfway is the worst place on the chain and the fifth rank holds most of the value. Two conditions come from the game's own flags rather than the tooltip. The effect fires only while Yakumo is the Pal you have deployed at your side, which is rare: of the ranked partner-skill entries in the files, 623 ask only that the Pal sit in the party and 16 demand it actually out with you, and those 16 belong to just five species. It is also flagged as non-stacking within a species, so a second Yakumo on the team adds nothing. The game's own wording warns that certain passives are excluded from the roll, and no file names them, so treat a trait you cannot reproduce this way as carved out rather than unlucky.
Build the Yakumo before you build the route. The roll keys on the passives Yakumo is carrying, which makes this the rare mechanic you can aim: put the trait you are hunting on your Yakumo and every encounter afterwards is weighted toward it. You do not have to breed the trait in, either — 68 disposable implants exist, Legend and Lucky among them, so one implant spent on Yakumo pays out across everything you meet from then on. That matters most at the top of the list: 312 passives are in the game and only 60 sit in the two highest tiers, so anything that narrows the roll is worth more than 30% sounds. What it costs you is your active partner slot, and that is the cheapest slot to give up on a catching run — you are throwing spheres, not asking a Pal to win a fight.
Do not build it for the ride. Yakumo's 1,080 sprint is 48th among the 140 Pals you can actually mount, and the faster ground options were open long before you reach this one: Univolt does 1,100 from Technology level 14, Dazemu 1,200 from 28, Pyrin 1,300 from 29 and Ragnahawk 1,300 from 33. At level 41 the two Technology points buy a mount you have already outgrown. What they actually buy is the only passive-shaping capture effect in the game. Three other Pals touch catching at all — Wispaw, Muffly and Souffline, each worth up to five levels of capture power when the target has been sneak-attacked, frozen or bound in vines — and all three change whether the Pal goes into the sphere, not what it brings with it.
Yakumo Saddle — Yakumo's Gear
Yakumo Saddle is Yakumo's own gear — no other Pal can equip it, and Yakumo cannot be ridden or put to work in its geared role until you have this in your inventory.
Equipping it turns on Yakumo's partner skill, Birds of a Feather.
Yakumo is Neutral, which is what decides where it is worth taking — the gear does not change its typing, only what you can do with it.
Alternatives and Upgrades
Other Pal gear items at a similar tier, for when you want to weigh this against the rest of its class:
