Bestiary league

"In this land, where knowledge is strength and ignorance is death... A hunter must know his prey. In Bestiary, hunter-scavenger Einhar Frey will teach you to hunt, capture and sacrifice beasts in order to craft and modify powerful items using the Blood Altar. With Einhar's help, you can capture any of the beasts of Wraeclast. As you master the art of hunting, you can capture Legendary Beasts, which are rare and formidable foes, or beastcraft a portal to the Spirit Lands to hunt one of the four Spirit Beasts."

- Description on the official Path of Exile website

The Bestiary league and Hardcore Bestiary league were past challenge leagues. The leagues started on March 2, 2018.

This league introduced Einhar Frey, who taught the player how to capture beasts with nets. Captured beasts were marked in the Bestiary and placed in the Menagerie for display, but more importantly, used for beastcrafting to create or modify items of various kinds or to challenge the First Ones in battle.

All characters and stashes were moved to Standard league and Hardcore league respectively when the leagues ended. Characters that died in the Hardcore Bestiary league were immediately moved to the permanent Standard league.

After the leagues ended, the beast hunting mechanics were not immediately added to the core game. They were added to the core game with the 3.5 Betrayal patch. Through beastcrafting, four end-game encounters can be accessed: The Spirit Beasts.

Challenges and rewards
The Bestiary leagues include 40 optional challenges. Completing them awards the following microtransactions:

Minimap
These new icons are introduced to the minimap:

Modifiers
All areas have:

Mechanics
''This section is for archival purposes only. The current core mechanics differ drastically from the league mechanics. See Beasts for the current mechanics.''

In this league, players are given access to nets. They can be dropped normally or can be bought from Einhar Frey. You can throw the net at any catchable living monster (default hotkey "V"). Catchable monsters are marked with an icon on their life bars. Nets are not used until they are actually thrown at a monster. They have a cooldown and a cast time, so being stunned while throwing a net will interrupt it.

Once the net is thrown, the target monster cannot be killed and will be stunned, for up to 3 seconds. If a capture succeeds, Einhar will transport the beast away to the Menagerie. The lower the monster's life is, the higher the chance of success. If a capture fails, the monster will recover a percentage of its life and become enraged. You cannot throw a net at it again until it has stopped enraging.

Rare beasts can spawn with a Bestiary mod. These monsters will show up on the minimap with a yellow icon and have a whitish-red color. They are stronger than normal Rare monsters and are used for specific Beastcrafting recipes. There are also Legendary beasts that have two Bestiary mods and have much more life. They are marked with a red icon on the minimap and are used for rarer and more valuable recipes.

Items
These items are exclusive to the Bestiary leagues:

Unique items
The following items are exclusive drops of the bosses that introduced in Bestiary league

Version history

 * Introduced to the game.
 * }