Aion 2 Global Pets and Genus Insight Guide: What to Farm First and When to Spend Soul Crystals

The plan, in three lines:

1. Collect new pets before you level the ones you have, from the biggest camps in your home region. Collecting pays 100 Genus EXP a soul; a pet's last level pays 3.3. Finish a level only when a pet is a few souls short.
2. Spend Soul Crystals on the Special board first, and lock nothing while a board levels. Farming can't level it, while pets carry the other four boards to Insight 7, and its slot 4 can roll Double Chance as soon as it opens. Each genus's own crystals still go on its board.
3. Open every Hidden Cube with a key: 1,000 Soul Crystals each.

The tables below list your faction's pets, and each name opens its spawns on the interactive map.

How pets, Pet Insight and Genus Insight work

Three things level separately:

• Your collection. Kill a pet's monsters for its souls. 5 souls collect the pet, and every pet is also a mount. The Pets window opens with the level-10 story quest All Geared Up / Gathering Essentials.
• Pet Insight, a pet's own level, 1 to 3. 25 more souls take it to level 2 and 75 more to level 3: 105 souls in all. Each level raises the stats that pet gives you just for owning it; level 2 lets it glide as a mount, and level 3 lets you turn into it with Empathy Candy.
• Genus Insight, a board for each genus (Cogni, Fera, Natura, Varian and Special), level 1 to 10. Levels 1 to 9 each open one more slot, nine in all, and each slot holds one rolled stat line; level 10 raises the grade odds.

Any pet's Source tab names the monsters that drop its soul and where they are, and the chests and shops that have it.

What each pet gives at each level. Every pet of a genus gives the same; Special pets give nothing:

What each step pays your Genus board:

100 Genus EXP is also what one rolled slot pays, for 4 Soul Crystals and 1,000 Kina. So collecting a pet is worth 20 Soul Crystals and 5,000 Kina to its board; the 75 souls for level 3 are worth 10 Soul Crystals. Take a pet to level 3 for its stats, or when it is a few souls short.

Pets and Genus Insight are shared by your characters on a server.

Insight 1: open the four monster boards

Collect one pet of each genus: 5 souls each. Any pet in the tables under the next heading does it. The Special board opens once you own a Special pet; Pagati, sold for Kina, is the free route. Special pets have no souls and come from shops and packs, and its levels come only from Soul Crystals. It has its own section.

How to reach Insight 4: ten pets per board

Insight 4 takes 5,000 Genus EXP: ten collected pets of one genus, 50 souls. It opens slot 4, the one slot that rolls damage lines. On the four monster boards those lines are Unique and Heroic only, so they start rolling at Insight 7; until then slot 4 rolls small Common, Rare and Epic stats.

These are the ten pets of each genus with the biggest camps in your home region. Camp is the most of a pet's spawns within 50 m of one spot, so you farm without travelling. Each name opens all of that pet's spawns on the map.

How to reach Insight 7: every pet you can get

Insight 7 takes 40,000 Genus EXP and brings the first Unique lines, at 1% of rolls: the grade where slot 4's damage lines begin. It is also as far as pets can take a board: every pet of a genus at level 3 gives between 41,000 (Cogni) and 65,000 (Fera), and Insight 8 takes 80,000.

Your home region alone gives this much:

1. Collect the rest of your home region

2. Check the Black Cloud Merchants every hour

The Black Cloud Merchants sell pets for Kina from a random stock that changes every hour. Open the Shop and pick the Black Cloud Merchants sign at its top left, above the shop's own tabs; it is easy to miss. A pet costs 100,000 Kina, often 10% to 30% off, on the Pets tab and sometimes among the Special offers. The Pets tab draws from all 200 monster pets, so a pet you would otherwise cross a rift for can turn up there. Paid refreshes cost 500, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, 6,000, 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 and 15,000 Kina.

In our data these pets have no monster drop at all; the merchants, chests and rewards are where they come from:

3. Cross a Spacetime Rift for the other region's pets

39 / 44 pets have monster spawns only in Altgard / Verteron. A rift opens every 3 hours (server time; hover the clock on your map) and you have an hour inside. Guards around the angel icons on your minimap kill you at once. Pick the pets you need before you go:

4. The Abyss and expeditions

These pets drop from no monster on the two regional maps. In Krao Cave, Fire Temple and Draupnir the boss that carries a pet's soul gives one to every party member on every kill, so five runs collect it:

5. Then level what you own

With every pet you can reach collected, go back for levels 2 and 3: each pays 250 Genus EXP and the stats above. Start with the pets closest to their next level.

Collecting also pays Soul Crystals: 100 at 5 pets and at every 10 after that, except that every 50th pays 10 Empathy Candy instead. Up to 200 pets that is 1,700 Soul Crystals. Special pets don't count.

How to reach Insight 9: Soul Crystals

A board levels on Soul Crystals from Insight 1, and past Insight 7 that is the only way up. Press Analyze on a board and every open slot that isn't locked rolls a new line: its grade first, then a stat from that slot's own list. Each slot rolled costs 4 Soul Crystals and 1,000 Kina and pays 100 Genus EXP, whatever it rolls.

A board takes its own genus's Soul Crystals or plain Soul Crystals, which every board accepts.

Slot 2 opens at Insight 2, slot 3 at Insight 3, and so on to slot 9. The Genus EXP each level takes, and the share of its rolls above Rare; the rest are Common or Rare:

What each step costs in Soul Crystals alone, with no slot locked; each Soul Crystal is 25 Genus EXP. Pets can pay up to Insight 7; past it, only crystals do. Insight 8 is worth its own stop: it raises Unique lines from 1% to 5% of rolls:

What finishing each board costs, with every pet of its genus at level 3:

Where Soul Crystals come from:

Open every Hidden Cube with a key. One keyed cube is 250 slot rolls: 25,000 Genus EXP, a tenth of a board. Every placed cube needs a key, and keys stay on the character that earns them: your region's Monolith pays 12, achievements about 30 ("Who Brought the Chest?" pays one at 3, 10, 30, 50, 100, 150 and 200 cubes opened), the 14-day login board 4, and the shop sells more for 50 Quna, 3 a day.

Lock nothing while a board is levelling. A locked slot keeps its line, but Analyze still charges 4 Soul Crystals and 1,000 Kina for each slot it rolls, and the locks add this on top. With four slots open, one lock makes a press 20 Soul Crystals and 5,000 Kina, two make it 24 and 6,000, three 40 and 10,000:

Heroic lines don't exist below Insight 9, so a line locked earlier is one you will replace. The exception is a strong slot-4 line you would keep anyway.

At Insight 10: roll for your lines

At Insight 10 a Heroic line is 5% of rolls. Every board has 3 presets and switching is free: keep a working set of lines on one and chase better ones on another.

What each slot rolls, at the top of the Heroic range. Every slot can also roll HP 100 or MP 50:

Slot 4, board by board. On the four monster boards these lines roll only at Unique and Heroic; on Special they roll at every grade, from 0.1% at Common. Heroic lines roll 1.5% to 3% unless a range is given. Unique lines roll 1% to 2%, except PvE Damage Boost at 1.5% to 3% and the genus's own Damage Boost at 2% to 4%:

Double Chance rolls only on the Special board's slot 4. Guides written for Korea or Taiwan that stack it on slots 3 and 9 don't apply to Global: those slots have no Double Chance here.

A slot rolls its grade, then one line from that grade's list. At Unique and Heroic, slot 4 has 14 lines on the four monster boards and 12 on Special, so at Insight 10 one named Heroic line, at any value, is 0.36% of slot-4 rolls on a monster board and 0.42% on Special; at Unique or better, 1.43% and 1.67%.

Auto Analysis repeats Analyze until a line of the grade you set appears. Untick Use Soul Crystal and it spends only that board's own crystals, which keeps your plain ones for the Special board.

Which lines to keep: Kanon's picks

Kanon ranks the lines like this in his handbook's Global chapter. His reasons come from Korean endgame measurements, which he expects to hold on Global only roughly:

Short of those, he keeps Damage Boost or PvE Damage Boost on slot 4, though they join a pool already near 180%, so a point of them adds only about 0.35%. His order is slot 4, then 1 and 5, then 6 and 9, then 7. He levels every board to Insight 9 without locks, the Special board first, then lets Auto Analysis roll for a Unique slot-4 line. He gives no reason for the Special board; ours is that it is the only board farming can't level, and its slot 4 rolls Double Chance at every grade, where the other boards' damage lines wait for Insight 7. For owned stats he takes Cogni and Natura pets to level 3 first, for their Might and Precision.

The Special board

The seven Special pets (Black Dragon, Swift Lugi, Wandering Merchant Lugi, Pagati, White Bunny, Chonky Hamster and Two) give no stats and have no souls, so nothing you farm levels this board. All 250,000 Genus EXP comes from Analyze: 10,000 Soul Crystals and 2,500,000 Kina. Level it first, with plain Soul Crystals and its own: Insight 4 opens slot 4 for 200 Soul Crystals and 50,000 Kina, and Double Chance can roll there at any grade.

Unbound by Genus

All five boards at Insight 10 earn the title Unbound by Genus and 20,000 Kina: PvE Damage Boost 4.5%, Attack Bonus 34 and Critical Hit 68 equipped, and PvE Damage Boost 1% just for owning it.

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Sources: Global client data (launcher version 26, read 7 October 2026, and unchanged in version 27) for pet counts, souls and Genus EXP per level, pet stats, Insight levels and grade odds, slot lists and their weights, Analyze and lock costs, collection milestones, the Black Cloud Merchants' pet pool and refresh costs, shop prices, Hidden Cube, achievement, attendance and Wanted quest rewards, and the title; the Wind Breeze Merchants' price is from the version 25 shop table; the finishing costs are summed from the client's per-level Insight table at 100 EXP, 4 Soul Crystals and 1,000 Kina per slot rolled, and a Wanted quest's average from its reward slots' chances. The screenshots are ours. Pet spawns are from our launcher version 25 export, the same data as the interactive map. Checked in game on our own characters: Analyze charges and pays per slot rolled (a Fera board at Insight 4: four slots cost 16 Soul Crystals and 4,000 Kina and paid 400 Genus EXP), lock costs come on top of the slots still rolled (one, two and three locks on four slots: 20, 24 and 40 Soul Crystals), a pet's level 2 pays its board 250 Genus EXP, a Black Cloud pet costs 100,000 Kina before its discount, and three presets, free to switch. Not yet checked: how many Soul Crystals an extra soul becomes. Other guides: this guide's coverage follows aion2maps' Pets and mounts and Pet Genus, which also give the hourly Black Cloud rotation and server-wide sharing; the three-part explanation follows Corpus; wikily.gg on lock costs by slots locked. Global trackers: wikily.gg, aion2maps and Corpus on cubes needing a key and where keys come from, and Corpus and wikily.gg on the Special board's unlock and what pet levels 2 and 3 unlock. Creator advice: Kanon's handbook for which lines to keep and why; Anders' Pet & Mount Guide on keyed Hidden Cubes paying 1,000 Soul Crystals on Global; not locking before Insight 10 is aLuckyRO's rule and the slot-4 exception kanonxo's, both as reported by aion2maps. Our calls, judged on the EXP-per-soul and cost tables: new pets before levels, home region first, a key for every Hidden Cube, no locks while levelling, and the Special board first, with plain Soul Crystals.