Trying to make a 'Summon Greater Familiar' Spell...

[baronaatista]

I am a complete noob to actually making mods, been using them for years and getting more and more comfortable with xEdit as I patch my modded load orders.

 

For kicks, I'm trying to make a 'Greater' version of the find familiar spell. I want it to be larger, do more damage and have more health than the original.

 

So I have the spell working in game, but I did it very simply and quickly with SSEEdit, copying the vanilla find familiar spell into a new plugin, along with the associated magic effect, and also made a new npc, and then pointing the new spell to the new magic effect, and the effect to the new npc. I also created a copy of the spellbook and pointed it to my new spell.

 

The NPC record lets me tweak height data, and adjust his health and stamina. Right there everything was gravy. But I wanted it to do more damage, and noticed that... as far as I can tell? It's base damage comes from the WolfRace record which I don't want to alter. So I copy the WolfRace record as a new record into my mod and call it GreaterWolfRace, tweak it's unarmed damage, and point my NPC to use my new race. Go back in-game and the spell still works, but it summons an invisible wolf.

 

I'm kind of stuck. There's the 'familiar visuals' actor effect, which may specifically call on / use the WolfRace record? None of the associated records with that effect do, but the abfamiliarvisuals magic effect uses a script of some kind which might? At a loss here, any help would be appreciated.