Pet abilities

Pet abilities are a recent addition to SWG (publish 21). They give pets additional abilities not found in most wild creatures; you, the Creature Handler, can learn an ability from a pet that was born with the ability and then teach it to your other pets. A very complete guide to pet abilities can be found in A Guide to the New Pet System (Included Abilites, XP Listings, & How To's).

Pet Growth
A pet has a Combat Level also known as a Difficulty Level. A baby pet has the same CL as it's parents and has the same HAM and combat statistics it will have when fully grown.

Pets develop and grow as they gain training XP by killing things. A pet has an XP requirement for leveling based on its Difficulty Level; each time it earns enough experience, it gains a maturity level. Each new level brings: You can see the number of available slots and training points by examining the pet control device in your datapad.
 * an increase in size until fully grown
 * training points, which can be spent to learn an ability
 * possibly a new slot for a trainable ability

There is a maximum number of training slots available to your pet, depending on it's CL. Any inate pet ability does not use a slot, which makes sense since you didn't have to train it. When you have filled the last slot, the pet is fully matured and can no longer be improved.

Learning Abilities
Some babies in the wild are born with an inate pet ability; each type of creature may have one of three possible abilities. Once you tame such a pet, you can learn the ability by using the pet in combat (the pet must not have been used by anyone else in combat). After some random number of kills (the chance of learning the skill after a kill seems to be based on the maturity level of the pet, the level of the ability, the phase of the moon--but I don't know which moon, etc.) you will get a message saying you have learned the ability.

One of the games within the game for Creature Handlers is collecting all the abilities. This is a challenge that can carry on well after you attain Master Creature Handler status.

Teaching Abilities
Ok, so now you know a number of abilities and you have a pet mature enough to learn them. You can now use the Train Pet ability to train the targetted pet. A window pops up allowing you to select the ability to train and telling you how many training points will be used by the pet to learn it.

Please note that abilities come in three levels (L1, L2, and L3) and you can't teach a pet the ability at L2 until it has learned it at L1 (and not at L3 until L2 is learned). Also each new level uses a training slot.

Using Abilities
Once your pet has learned an ability, it is ready for use. Many abilities provide permanent changes in your pet (e.g., better stats, automatic stance changes on low health); some however, are triggered. You can train your pet to recoginize these commands using the same mechanism as for the basic pet commands.