I have been playing around in the kit and decided to try to start on the first mod I wanted which is ridable beasts similar to the horses you can rent at any stable/shadowmere.

I duplicated Shadowmere and renamed the copy ID,Name, and Shortname to SpiderHorse, unchecked Respawn, Checked Unique. Turned on the preview Checkbox.

I changed the Race,Skin, Death Item, and Voice Type to FrostBiteSpiderGiant and saved the plugin.

(I also tried adding the LvlHorseSaddled Script with Auto-Fill All clicked.)

In Skyrim I do a player.placeatme with the id number and I get a SpiderHorse. Going to mount it places him atop but not in alignment. If you "ride" him around, he leaves the "player rider" floating in the mounted postion.

I saw this as a bug in the original game and the fix was to load an old save. But doing a save and then reloading doesnt fix it with my mod.

Looking at the regular Shadowmere I see there are GetupL.hkx , GetupR.hkx, and Saddle_offset.hkx I assume I need to get copies of these into the Spiderhorse animation but I cannot right click etc to add/edit/remove any of them in the listing..

Am I correct in thinking that is what is missing from my SpiderHorse? If so, how does one go about editing/adding these types of changes. If not, anyone have any ideas what I might be missing?????

It sounds to me like you need to make animations specifically for riding the beasts. This mod idea isn't impossible, it just requires a lot of extra work outside the CK.

NIF scripts aren't supporting skyrim yet, as far as I know, so you won't be able to get animations in without a lot of knowledge/testing with files...