How to configure Pets/Mercenaries

With the new pet system, you can configure pets/minions or mercenaries. They can gain levels and with each level, they can use different mob templates, so they can look differently, have various behaviors, use different abilities, as well as equip items in additional slots. In this documentation, we will let you understand how this new system works. In Atavism, you can have combat and non-combat pets, but we will focus on the combat ones.

In order to configure a combat pet you need to use the Effect Module with the effect of type: spawn and subtype: Spawn Effect, and Spawn Type: Combat Pet and set a few parameters like:

Duration, which defines how long the effect will last, so how long the pet will last from the effect usage

and Pet Profile, which has the most important parameters for pets.

You need to define pet level and the required experience that needs to be gained to level up, mob template for specific which is a typical mob template that contains mob behavior, abilities that it can use, basic statistics, etc. but with one additional element, that defines something like category to which the pet belongs to and because it’s a statistic, you can alter it (increase/decrease using Effect of type Stat), and you can set it in the Player Template Module, like all other statistics.

This statistic is of type Pet_Count.

And you can have as many as you want.

For example, if the Pet_Count_3 statistic is set for your mob template, and the same statistics is set to 3 for your Player Template, this means that, without any modifications, you can summon 3 pets that have this statistic set within their templates. There is also the additional statistic of type Pet Global Count Type, which defines how many pets you can summon in total, for example, if you have 2 categories of pets: Warriors and Mages with the statistic set to 3 for both of them, then in total you can summon 6 pets, but if the mentioned Pet Global Count statistic is set to 7, then you can summon up to 7 pets no matter what category, so it can be 7 Warriors or 7 Mages, or mixed from both.

The last element that you can set within the Combat Pet Profile is the Slot Profile. There you can define slots that the pet will have, so you can equip items into them. You can add more slots when your pet levels up.

When you assign this effect to an ability, then you can set it as a part of a skill or item to summon such pets.

Within the Pets Panel, you can see information about Pets levels (Number of Pets/Maximum Number of Pets within a specific category) as well and you can invoke commands on all of your combat pets. By clicking the icon of the pet group, you can open their equipment.

And you can equip items by dragging them into the specific slots.

That can be reflected visually in the panel as well as in the game, so you can use the same equipment as for your own character. In order to do this, you can check equipment documentation/tutorials on the wiki.