Can creatures, such as dogs and wolves, use spells, Shouts, or powers? I've looked and tried alot of diffrent things, checked the Wiki a dozen times, but to no avail. Does the creature in question need a special script or animation? Any help would be appreciated.



First time modding anything, sorry if this seems obvious

Afaik, yes, they can, you need to grant them those spells and probably edit their combat behavior, and possibly scripts if there is any.

I've added several diffrent type of spells to the common dog's Spelllist, as well as give them some Magicka, but nothing seems to work. I don't think they need scripts, as the common Frostbite spider just has its ranged poison attack in it's Spellist.

I'll try messing around with the combat behavior some, those are the ones labeled with the prefix cs right?

Yes, cs for Combat Style.

You can attach spell casts to certain attack animations under the Actor's Attack Data tab (hit Override Data to edit it). This will cause the actor to auto-cast whatever spell you assign every time it executes that attack, but this doesn't drain Magicka or anything. For my Guardian bosses (which are mostly creatures that don't normally cast) I use some fairly elaborate scripting to get them to cast spells. I never had any luck changing a non-casting monster's combatstyle and getting it to cast as a result, so I'll be curious to see what results you get.

After several hours of messing around, no luck with the combat styles. Although I did manage to set some shout effects on some basic attacks as Verterion said. Dogs Shouting Disarm and Fear are pretty funny to watch!


Looks like scripting is the only way to make it work. I'm gonna go follow the Wiki's tutorial on it, any tips?

I use counters and a timer to determine when a spell is ready to be cast and Debug.SendAnimationEvent to get the actor to do some kind of appropriate animation for the cast. It's not perfect, but the effect can be impressive.

I wish I COULD get a magic-user's combatstyle to work for, say, the Giant model, but it just doesn't seem to happen I suspect the models I'm using just lack Cast animations and that's all there is to it.