How the new Paws & Claws pet system, Beast Master character, and balance tweaks give Brotato a smart late-life update on PC and a clearer roadmap for Switch and Switch 2.
Brotato has been quietly sitting in that “installed forever” folder for a lot of players: beaten a dozen times, revisited every few patches, but mostly solved. Paws & Claws is the kind of late-life refresh that does not rip up the design, but instead slots a new layer on top of everything you already know.
The headline is simple: pets are a new item class that ride on existing systems instead of replacing them. Underneath that, the patch quietly reinforces Brotato’s long-term balance philosophy and sketches a future for the console versions.
How the new pet item class actually works
On PC, Paws & Claws introduces nine pet-themed items that behave like a pseudo-weapon class. You do not manage them like guns, but they add an extra axis of scaling and battlefield control across every build.
Pets are bought as items, benefit from the same economy and rarity rules, and tie into visibility and readability changes in the patch. You can now highlight Pets and Turrets, adjust pet transparency, and read a proper timeline of events in the pause menu. All of that is there to keep your screen legible once a half-dozen little helpers are swarming alongside your turrets, mines, and projectiles.
Unlike something like turrets or summons, the pets are clearly aimed at different archetypes rather than just raw DPS boosts. Across the nine of them, you see support for economy-first runs, defensive tanks, lifesteal bruisers, range-focused gun builds, crit-heavy melee, and more niche synergy setups. Instead of introducing a new meta all by themselves, pets lean into what your character already wants to do and reward commitment to a lane.
The nine pets and the playstyles they reinforce
The patch notes frame pets as a full spread of options rather than a single optimal line. While specific numbers can still shift with hotfixes, the intent behind each pet is readable from the way they are grouped and highlighted.
Several pets are clearly tuned around economy and snowballing the mid game. These are the ones that help you convert survival into more materials, smooth out shop RNG, or make it safer to stay aggressive on higher danger levels. Expect early-wave pets that trigger on kills or wave completion to pair naturally with characters like Lucky or Entrepreneur, multiplying the value of every extra material they generate.
Other pets are more obviously defensive tools. The Paws & Claws notes highlight new options that sit closer to turrets and landmines in function, giving you autonomous support that controls space or soaks pressure. Tanky characters such as Knight, Wildling, or builds leaning into armor and HP regeneration will feel these most sharply, since a pet that can body-block or draw aggro scales indirectly with every point of durability you stack.
Still others read as enablers for “glass cannon” playstyles. These pets shore up survivability without asking you to spend item slots on raw defense, or they multiply your damage once you have met certain thresholds in crit, elemental damage, or attack speed. Characters like Ranger, Hunter, or Crazy can now push their offense even harder while letting a pet cover some of the gaps a normal defensive item would have to fill.
Finally, there are a few niche or hybrid pets that exist primarily to support oddball builds and late-game achievements. These tend to combine conditional bonuses or interact with specific tags you would not prioritize on a standard run. They are less about pure efficiency and more about expanding how many viable weird builds Brotato supports.
Nine might not sound like a lot on paper, but pets intersect with such a wide range of characters, weapons, and items that the new decision tree is significantly richer. Instead of asking which weapon you want, runs now occasionally ask which “companion package” best matches the way you are already scaling.
Beast Master: a character built around pet momentum
Paws & Claws also adds a new character, Beast Master, who is explicitly constructed to show off how deep the pet system can go.
Rather than simply starting with a single pet, Beast Master gets a ruleset that rewards you for leaning into pet synergies over the entire run. The character’s power curve is less about early brute force and more about building a stable of helpers and then letting them carry the late waves.
Beast Master’s kit points in several directions at once. You want a healthy economy to buy pets and the items that make them effective. You want enough personal power that you can safely reach the point where your zoo is online. And you want to avoid crowding your build with too many unrelated stat sticks, because pets take on more and more of the work as the waves advance.
In pure design terms, Beast Master is a proof of concept for pets as a pillar of Brotato, not a gimmick. The nine new pet-related challenges further reinforce that point. Unlocks and achievements now ask you to master the nuances of pet scaling, positioning, and synergy combinations, pushing experienced players to find the limits of this new system.
What this says about Brotato’s balance philosophy on PC
Looking at the rest of the patch notes, Paws & Claws is less about raw content volume and more about maturing the game’s health on PC.
Bull takes another round of restrictions, with items like Tardigrade and Community Support being added to its restricted pool and a dedicated Lifesteal restriction group to prevent degenerate sustain loops. That is a direct attempt to keep one of the swingiest characters from trivializing danger levels through a few high-variance rolls.
LinkedStat fixes and the cleanup around “not moving” interactions reveal the team’s willingness to close off unintended exploits, even those that enabled fun but unbalanced combinations such as Chameleon plus Retromation’s Hoodie. Similarly, adjustments so that Soldier’s bonuses are no longer tied to movement, changes to boss drops, and enemy behavior fixes all point toward a lens of readability and fairness.
Pets slide into that philosophy cleanly. The system is strong, expressive, and visible, but it lives within the same boundaries as everything else. There is no separate pet economy, no sideboard of off-run progression, and no gacha layer. If a pet turns out too strong, it can be tuned like any other item. If a certain character plus pet combo breaks the game, it can be reined in without dismantling the feature.
On the engine side, PC also gets the benefit of Brotato’s console optimizations and a Godot update to 3.7 dev-1. The devs are clearly planning for the game to remain stable as its systems grow, which matters when you are adding a feature that can throw more autonomous entities onto the screen every wave.
Roadmap implications for Nintendo Switch and a likely Switch 2
Paws & Claws is live on PC first, but the announcement explicitly calls out Nintendo Switch and “Switch 2” as future platforms for the update.
That detail is important. Brotato already runs on the current Switch, and the mention of Switch 2 suggests Blobfish expects Brotato to have a life that straddles generations on Nintendo’s side. Bringing the pet system over is both a content promise and a technical one. The team is confident they can keep horde density, pets, turrets, and all of the new UI readability features running comfortably on handheld hardware.
Given that PC just received console-side optimizations back-ported into the main build, it is reasonable to expect that work will serve as the baseline for the Switch and eventual Switch 2 versions of Paws & Claws. The addition of options like pet transparency and better UI focus handling are also quality-of-life features that particularly help on portable screens.
In practical terms, the roadmap looks like this. The PC patch ships, gets a round of hotfix tuning as players discover the strongest and weakest pets, and then the stabilized version makes its way to Switch. By the time a Switch successor is in players’ hands, Brotato should bring its full pet ecosystem with it, benefiting from all the balance passes done on PC.
Quick build examples that should love pets
Because pets are general-purpose and scale off existing systems, they are poised to supercharge certain archetypes without invalidating others. Here are a few build ideas that stand to benefit the most from the new pet items.
A luck-stacking economy run built around Lucky or Entrepreneur now has a new tier of payoff. Early pets that create or multiply materials let you double down on rerolls, effectively turning luck into even more shop control. Pair high luck with harvesting, wave-clear focused weapons like SMGs or Shredders, and any pet that rewards kill counts or wave survival, and your mid-game buying power spikes dramatically.
Crit-heavy or ranged glass cannon builds such as Ranger, Hunter, or Crazy can selectively pick up pets that offset their main weaknesses. One pet that provides on-hit sustain or a small, scaling defensive buffer can let you keep your weapon slots entirely devoted to damage. Another that adds conditional damage bonuses based on range or crit chance turns your already extreme stat lines into something absurd without demanding many item slots.
Tank and regen-focused characters, including Knight, Wildling, or Doctor, can treat pets as active defenses. Combine high armor and regeneration with pets that occupy enemies, patrol specific zones, or add reactive damage when you are hit. Suddenly the classic “walk into the horde and facetank” playstyle gets an extra ring of protection that also scales your damage output.
Finally, summon or structure-oriented runs, like Engineer with heavy turret investments, can make pets part of a blended automation plan. You set up firing lines of turrets and mines, then let mobile pets patrol the gaps and chase leak-through enemies. Items that amplify structure stats while also boosting pet effectiveness become the new crown jewels of these builds, giving you high-coverage maps where very little can slip through.
Across all of these examples, the theme is consistency. Pets do not simply hand you free wins. They give you a way to convert focused builds into more reliable clears, and they encourage you to think about your potato as the center of a small squad rather than a lone weapon platform.
Paws & Claws is not a sequel-level rework for Brotato, but it is a smart, sharp late-life update. By threading pets through the game’s existing systems and using Beast Master and new challenges to showcase them, Blobfish is giving veterans a reason to reinstall on PC and laying the groundwork for a healthier, more expressive version of Brotato on both Switch and whatever comes next from Nintendo.