Dame Elswyth’s Summons

Lost Your Pet?

Follow these three steps:

1. 1. Search nearby pets with /summons loaded
   2. Search far away pets with /summons list
   3. Once your pet is found, bring them back with /summons tp <pet name>

Gory Details

• • • [ ] = optional
    • < > = replace with your own value

Finding Pets

If a tamed, semi-tamed, or dead pet is lost, stuck, or no longer responding, start by checking pets in currently loaded chunks with the fast command:

/summons loaded [filter] [owner:<ownername>]

If you don't see your pet in the loaded chunks, you can try searching for your pet in explored unloaded chunks.  This scans the entire world database, chunk by chunk, looking at each entity for your pet, so it may take a while on heavily explored worlds.

/summons list [filter] [owner:<ownername>]

If a pet is found, their name, entityID, loaded/saved status, and last known position are reported.  If neither command finds your pet, Dame Elswyth concludes that its soul has passed beyond even her reach.

Optional Filters

The optional [filter] can be a pet name (e.g. Eastman), an entityID (e.g. 321566), or an entity code (e.g. cats:cat-female-house).  It is case insensitive (e.g. Eastman and eastman are the same) and partial matches should work as long as they're unambiguous (e.g. cats should work for cats:cat-female-house).

By default, these commands only work with your own pets.  If you're an Administrator, or if you've been given permission through config variables, you can also use the optional [owner:<ownername>] filter which locates/teleports other peoples' pets.  As with [filter], this filter is also case-insensitive and allows partial matching as long as its unambiguous, so owner:coolGuyNYC is the same as owner:coolguynyc.

Retrieving Lost Pets

These commands teleport your pet to you, teleport you to your pet, and sets a waypoint at your pet's current location, respectively:

/summons tp <entityId|name> [owner:<player>]

/summons tpto <entityId|name> [owner:<player>]

/summons waypoint <entityId|name> [owner:<player>]

Where name is your pet's name (case insensitive and partial matches should work if they're unambiguous).  Spaces in names are OK, so you can teleport "Sir Fluff".  If the pet is in an unloaded saved chunk, the mod queues that chunk column to load, then retries until the entity appears in loaded entities, so these commands might take a few seconds to complete for heavily explored worlds.  These commands work independently of Vintage Story's tp privilege.  By default, players may only use them on their own pets unless server permissions allow otherwise.

Note to self: Check names with spaces with the owner filter, e.g. /summons tp Sir Fluff owner:hannahBearNYC

For Administrators

You can control what players can do with the following config variables which can be accessed either through Mod Config or Config Lib.

Config Variables

• • non-root-owners-can-find-other-pets (default value is false)
  • non-root-owners-can-teleport-pets (default value is true)
  • non-root-owners-can-teleport-to-pets (default value is false)

If you're like me, your pet always seems to walk right into fire.  There's a few reasons for this.

1. PetAI only scans for fire damage every 2 seconds.  A pet can sit in fire for 2 seconds before it wakes up and realizes "I better move!"
2. As soon as the pet is out of danger, it "forgets" about the fire/heat source and may decide to go right back into danger.
3. If a pet is following you, and there's heat/fire between you and the pet (e.g. a pit kiln) the pet will go right through it to get to you.
4. Some forms of fire damage were not scanned / detected.
5. In tight spaces (e.g. underground) PetAI had trouble figuring out how to get the pet to safety when it starts taking fire damage.

This mod addresses all these issues.

1. You can control how often PetAI scans for fire damage.  The mods add a config variable ms-interval-between-fire-dmg-checks which is clamped between 50 and 5000 milliseconds (default is 250 ms) between fire damage checks.
2. Pets now remember the exact source of fire damage for 30 seconds.
3. Pets now go around fire hazards when following you.
4. I'm pretty sure I've covered all forms of fire damage in the fire avoidance code.
5. We now try a number of different paths in tight / complicated space and use the first path that actually gets the pet out of danger.

Exective Summary

Your pet will sit and lay a whole lot longer!

Detail

PetAI's sit and lay implementation was never meant to be a command -- they're supposed to be simple pet parlor tricks.  You give the command, the pet does it (given the proper obedience) and then wanders away (8ish seconds for sit and 20ish seconds for lay, depending on puppy or adult).  But some pets are "working pets" and we demand more from them: they guard, they corral, they ward, they sentry, they assist.  For these pets, a command is important: they understand what they're supposed to do, and given any limitation of their obedience, they perform their mission to the best of their ability.  These are working animals: sheep dogs, guard dogs, seeing-eye dogs, etc.  I've reimplemented Sit and Lay so that they're no longer parlor tricks, but commands.

Sit and lay have been reimplemented with the working animal in mind: The higher the obedience, the longer they'll do the task.  In theory, a pet with 100% obedience will sit or lay forever, but in practice, since obedience drops with time, eventually they'll wander off, but they'll do their duty for quite a while!

Practically speaking, for the WolfTaming mod, if your dog starts with 100% obedience and you leave PetAI disobedience default values where they are, and you don't change the value of my sit-duration-scale, lay-duration-scale, and actionScale, your dog should sit for about 15 minutes and lay for about 30 minutes of wall-clock time.

Nerdy Detail

This is roughly how I've set it up:

eligible = clamp((obedience - minObedience) / (1.0 - minObedience), 0, 1)
floorMs = vanillaMaxDurationMs * actionScale
if eligible >= 1:
    duration = forever
else:
    durationMs = floorMs / (1 - eligible)^curvePower

The vanillaMaxDurationMs is the max duration of lay and sit as defined by PetAI.  Then, I apply actionScale (either sit-duration-scale or lay-duration-scale, which you can set in ModConfig or Config LIb but which both default to 1).

Just be aware: PetAI checks obedience every 60 seconds, so I check every 60 seconds to see if the pet's obedience has gone done, and if it has, a new (shorter) sit / lay duration is computed and applied.  This means if you turn PetAI disobedience completely off, your pet will sit / lay forever.