My Little Kavat

The first two Warframe pets I talked about were both dogs. One of them was built like a cross between a wolf and a tree. The other is a pink Charger, made by putting infected puss on a ‘dog’ egg, which now has been updated to have its unique form, rather than being a recoloured enemy. But now I have a Kavat, a kitty. An actual kitty, not a Warframe kitty who runs around slicing everyone to death while being immortal.

Small problem though. My Kavat is ugly as fuck.

Uglier, somehow, than my pink Charger.

Unlike Kubrows and their infested cousins, Kavat are far harder to get. You need to get genetic codes off of Kavat, and the only way to do that is to scan them with either your Codex Scanner or the Synthesis Scanner from Simaris. Other options include using the Helios sentinel, which automatically scans things, or using the Heliocore, a hammer seemingly made of glass, which scans enemies should you kill them with it. But unlike Kubrows, which you can steal eggs from on the low level areas of Earth, Kavat only appear in the Orokin Derelict. The Orokin Derelict can only be accessed with keys you craft in advance, and you need to craft a key every time you go there.

Oh and Kavats only have a small chance to give you a piece of genetic code. And you can only scan each Kavat once per mission. And only about 5-10 will spawn if you’re lucky. And they’re invisible up until they attack.

Basically, Kavat genetic code is a pain in the ass to get, to the point that I ended up getting my genetic code in batches of 5 from rare time-limited alerts. You need 10 to breed a cat though.

But on top of that, you also need 10 genetic codes to create an upgrade for your breeding center in order to even create a Kavat in the first place. Luckily, the upgrade isn’t hard to find – you can buy it from your clan’s dojo, and the flamethrowing old hag known as the Grineer Hyekka Master also has a chance of dropping the upgrade blueprint when killed.

So once you have your 10 genetic kitty codes, you throw them all into your incubator and wait. After 1-2 days (depending on whether you have the Nutrio Incubator upgrade or not), a little baby Kavat will appear.

Lovely, right?

The kitten will just run around, same as a little Kubrow, although they have slightly different animations – Kubrows have dog animations, cats will spend most of their time staring at you, sleeping in awkward spots or stretching themselves out. Apart from colourings, Kavat kittens all look exactly the same.

If you want to take your cat on missions though, you need to let it mature. Maturing any pet lets you take it on missions, give it mods and customize it, but it also means your pet will start genetically degrading – after all, we basically cloned these monsters and took them out of their natural habitats, so we stick needles into them to stop them from dying. When it does, it will grow into either an Adarza or a Smeeta Kavat. An Adarza Kavat has the chance to increase critical chance and reflect damage, while the much more valuable Smeeta Kavat can turn invisible and create decoys, and gives a random buff every 28 seconds – ranging from refunding energy from abilities, maxing out your critical chance to 200%, giving you an instant reload, giving you 150 extra shields or DOUBLING your drops and affinity for the next 2 minutes.

Of course, the cat I bred happened to be an Adarza Kavat, and I’m someone who doesn’t really use high crit weapons. I don’t mind, I always use my Carrier, but I kinda wanted a nice cat.

Instead, I got this hideous thing.

It’s like it ran into a wall.

You see, cats have randomized faces, ears, tails, fur patterns and colours. I basically won the genetic lottery for really ugly cats.

And the sad thing is, the poor kitten isn’t even very useful on missions. Because of their desire to attack everything and how flimsy they are, my poor little Kavat spends half its missions waiting for me to revive it. It’s only good on low level missions, and even then it still struggles. And because pets can’t use Vacuum, I have to pick up everything manually by running over them.

Really, the lack of Vacuum for pets is the reason why no one uses them. That’s why everyone used to use Carrier, because originally it was the only companion that could pick things up for you. Until pets get a variant of Vacuum, few people will use them.

That being said, I will breed another Kavat. But I won’t let it mature. I just want a cute cat to live in my ship with me.