Bestiaries have their root in real-life history; in medieval times, a bestiary was a Christianity-influenced book with illustrations of all kinds of animals, with certain values, traits, and morals assigned to each of them.
It later inspired other authors to create their own bestiaries, some of which contained creatures from fables and legends.
In video games, bestiaries usually serve a similar purpose. They can contain some additional information about each monster you’ve encountered, perhaps some backstory and the creature’s role in the world. Sometimes bestiaries provide a detailed guide on how to deal with the monster, allowing you to be better prepared the next time you cross paths with it.
A bestiary may contain all the monster’s weaknesses and strengths, such as vulnerabilities and resistances to certain effects or damage types. Perhaps they can’t be stunned or frozen – you’ll learn all about it from a bestiary, allowing you to adjust your strategy accordingly.
Bestiaries can work differently from game to game. In some games, one fight is all you need for the bestiary to create a comprehensive entry about the enemy, which may seem a bit unrealistic. Other times, bestiaries may track how many enemies of a specific kind you’ve defeated and may unlock extra details once you killed enough of them.
Bestiaries can also be an invaluable tool for collectors and those who want to 100% everything; unlocking every possible entry in a bestiary can be considered a very fulfilling accomplishment.
Here’s what is bestiary in some video games.
Bestiary in The Witcher
In The Witcher 3, bestiary contains all the details about the enemies you’ve learned about. This includes the monster’s weaknesses and a piece of lore related to it. Usually, to learn about the monster, you have to find it and kill it but there’s another way that doesn’t require meeting that creature in person.
It’s a small but realistic detail and that’s reading a book; if you find a book that talks about a certain monster, monster index will get updated based on that knowledge. In fact, some entries will get added only after you’ve read certain books.
Bestiary in Diablo
Most Diablo games don’t have an in-game bestiary but you can find one in Diablo Immortal, where it contains only a piece of lore about the monster and an illustration. Unlocking an entry requires killing specific monsters until you collect 10 Monstrous Essences from them.
It’s worth trying to unlock the full bestiary as there are rewards for each unlock. On a side note, even though there are no bestiaries to be found directly in the games, you can get them in the form of cool physical books with real artworks.
Bestiary in Pathfinder: WoTR
Pathfinder started without any kind of bestiary but something that serves a similar purpose was added in a later update. Patch 1.1 brought a change that met with positive feedback; from now on players were allowed to inspect enemy creatures, which shows not only a cool piece of lore about the creature but also very detailed stats of the monster, allowing the players to adjust strategy accordingly.
To unlock information about the creature, the controlled party must pass a skill check roll; the better the roll, the more information you’ll learn.