I am unfamiliar with the capabilities of the creation kit, but I want to
create a dog follower that uses the model of a wolf, and give it the
special "ability" of the afflicted, but instead of green junk being spewed
from it I want fire to come out. Can something like this be done, or would
I be wasting my time trying?

Should be pretty easy, Make a dog companion or copy one already in game, switch its race to wolf but keep its voice as dog ( wolfs don't have dialog like dogs) or if you want it to have a human voice you could do that as well. I would make a copy of the wolf race (be sure under copy data on the race you make to set the morph race and armor race to wolf race) to use for your companion so you can set it to allow pc dialog and un-check cant open doors, that way it will follow you through doors and can talk, be sure to set its faction to current follower faction and set this to -1 and then add potential follower faction and leave it as is, this will give them follow dialog and commands ( as long as they have a voice that allows dialog, not all do). For the fire breath you could just add the dragon fire ability to it if you didn't want to edit the afflicted ability. pretty simple stuff really for a basic follower, i have made dragons ( still buggy) spriggans trolls lol its fun .





edit - i could actually whip a basic one up really fast to see how well it works and there are a few way i or you could go about it .


1 the fully custom way i described above, but for the wolf to have full follower dialog it will need a human voice or you would have to add your own dialog's. but if your lazy like me you could for example give it female even toned voice and follower faction and it will talk and have all follower commands.

2 create a " stray wolf " creature that uses the stray dog script, it will pretty much follow you everywhere once you interact with it, but these have no commands. (i think)

3 you could just straight edit one already in game, like Meeko or even the trained dogs sold in markath. With this method your would would live in meeko's shack and you can talk to him and have him follow you when ever you want and send him home if you and it would be a wolf with bog voice.


but like i said if you want it to have full NPC follower dialog like hold items go here, wait , follow etc it will need a voice that can use dialog's and add current follower faction to -1 and potential follower faction .

Thanks for the reply. The one problem I am now facing is having the animal use the dragon breath.
I added dragonfirebreathshout to it's spell list and in AI data made it's combat style "csdragon" but
it will not use the dragon breath. It will only bark at ranged enemies and bite close enemies.

Same issue im having, if i find out how to make them use ability's i will let you know .



edit - side note, if you made a new race for your wolf and havent done this yet, set its skin to FireWolf and you will have an elemental fire wolf, he is actually very cool now to just get him to shoot fireballs or cast flames or use dragon fire or something heh.

You would probably have to create a new animation or figure out how to use papyrus... The dogs dont have hands or anything like "human" NPCs, so they have nothing to cast with. If you made a new animation, you may possibly allow the spell to come out of its mouth.

Yea i found that out, was hoping it could still cast/shout just not have animations for it but guess not.

I ended up just making a normal wolf companion and making it a flaming wolf and gave it the flame atronach's flaming walk and it looks/works great. Pretty much a flaming normal wolf companion with fire attacks and full speaking female follower dialog. I made a "stray dog" version with no dialog just follow packages, but i much prefer the full follower version and i just RP that a woman was somehow traqed in this flaming wolf body heh


Side Question - Should i release it ? I have made a few companions like this , Spriggans, Falmer etc etc, and they work great, for the spriggan i plan to make a small cave for it to live in till you find it, but atm i just drop my followers into the worldspace somewhere around riverwood. Question is should i release them as they are, just put into the world , and update it later when i give the ma home, or hold off untill im done.

The reason i ask is cause they are pretty much fully working and i would like to get them out there for people to play with, but 1 they have no quest yet and no dialog other than follower stuff, and 2 i havent made them a home yet.

For most people this isnt a big deal and just puting them in the world somewhere is fine, but this is a big issue for RP types ( like my self) so im not sure.