SSE Pet follower isn't sneaky enough.

[cumbrianlad]

Hi. This explains the problem with pet followers never being stealthy. Read if you like. I'm adding a new post about a possible solution.

 

I have a dwarven spider as a custom follower. Its race works fine for health regen, So do its destruction spells and things like extra damage. It has very high sneak (starting 60) and is very quickly at sneak 100. I added a variation of the perk 'MuffledMovement', without the conditions. It's supposed to be 80%.

 

However, in-game, with or without this perk, it is getting detected far too easily. I'm guessing that this is because the pet follower does not go into stealth like an NPC, so it is never actually classed as sneaking. Does that sound right?

 

Either way, the problem remains.

 

I even tried adding the perk 'Silence' for walking and running does not affect detection... no joy. The perk to avoid operating pressure plates does work for it. It had better stealth perks than my test character and the enemies were getting alerted, walking right past my character and attacking the spider!

 

Does anybody know how to make pet followers properly stealthy?

 

Edit: Alright, I have new info that could be useful to other people, too...

The muffle and silence spells work. I gave it an enchantment on its skin with muffle magnitude 1 (completely silent) and we could sneak along right behind any enemy.... so they can't hear it. As soon as the enemy had line of sight on the spider they spotted it and went into combat. So it is purely the vision part of detection that is making it useless in sneak.

My spider already has a script that makes it cast invisibility every time it uses its destruction spell, but it was originally set to 15 s duration. I increased that to 30 min and tested in an epic cave with spread out enemies. The first one spotted it and it killed them, turning itself invisible for 1/2 an hour in the process. After that we could walk right past any enemy. I got bored after 20 minutes of this but there was not a single extra detection. They never even went into alert.

I came across some inconsistencies that the USSEP team don't have in their changelog, concerning the muffle spells and enchantments. The spell has magnitude 1.00, the Nightingale boots have it set at 0.25, 0.50 and 35.00, respectively for the 3 levelled items. The Pet_Framework version of the spell for vanilla pets has the magnitude 100. pretty certain 0.00 is no effect and 1.00 is full effect. What bigger values do to the calculatrion I couldn't begin to speculate.

No pet follower can ever be stealthy because of this. What i need is a script to get it to cast a longer invisibility spell, preferrably whenever the player crouches to start sneaking. I'll start a new thread about that now that I know precisely what I need.