So I've been working on creating a summon dragon spell that allows you to summon a miniature dragon like you would a familiar. I've got it working all except for one small detail. Using the summon familiar spell seems to override all default behavior for a creature, and thus I cannot, for the life of me, figure out how in the world to make the dragon fly in an orbit overhead instead of following me in a crawl on the ground. It does this naturally in combat, but not when I'm out of combat.

Optionally, hovering near the player would work as well.

I'd be grateful for any help that can be offered for this issue. Thank you in advance.

Well, you could use a PlaceActorAtMe instead of a traditional summon spell. Then have the spell wait until the duration is over, and then disable the dragon.

Hmm, seems it's back to the drawing board then. I'm fresh into creation kit. I understand javascript, php, and jquery/ajax. I see a lot of familiar things, but it's been slow going trying to fully grasp how script writing works here. It's simply not clicking.

edit: I tried manually using player.placeatme with the dragon in game to test the AI and all seems good.

Just need to figure out how to script the spell now to summon.

Coincidentally I've discovered that a dragon's flight speed is directly related to their scale. So a dragon that is scaled to 0.25 will fly at 25% of their normal speed.

Yeah, I found that out when I made a really tiny dragon as a companion.

I bet their damage is full though...so a mosquito sized dragon would be very slow....but could still toast you if you have insufficient fire resist...

Indeed, it's even better with Deadly Dragons mod. Still haven't figured out the script, but I at least got the AI Packages working mostly how I want them. I wish I could have the best of both worlds, summoned companion AI with hovering/flying animations.