Mounts & Rider Fit

A mount is authored in Pets & Mounts → Mounts. Each one carries its own speed, travel modes, summon time and animated sprite — and its own Rider Fit, which is how you line the character up with the saddle.

A pet can be a mount too, with nothing extra to author: tick Rideable as Mount on the species and your players ride the pet itself. Mounts and rideable pets are one system in play — the same key, the same summon bar, the same wait ring.

Riding in play#

What your players can ride#

When more than one applies, the pet comes first, then the Mount slot.

How it plays#

1. Press the mount key (A by default — Mount in the player's control settings) or the mount button. A summon bar fills; when it lands the player is in the saddle. A rideable pet that is worn but not out is summoned by the same cast.
2. Press it again to get off. The mount stays where the rider got off and a ring appears around it — that is how far the rider may go while it waits.
3. Inside the ring it waits. It does not follow, wander or teleport.
4. To get back on:
   • Right-click it — the player walks over and is seated. No summon bar.
   • Press the mount key right next to it (within 2 tiles) — seated at once.
   • Press the mount key further away — the summon bar runs again, and the mount comes to the rider when it lands.
5. Walk out of the ring and it stops waiting: a pet runs back to its owner and follows like any other pet; a mount disappears (summon it again with the key).

The pet's own menu (right-click a following pet → Mount up / Dismount) does exactly what the key does.

Set up a rideable pet#

1. Pets & Mounts → Pet Species → _your species_ → Mount.
2. Tick Rideable as Mount.
3. Set its Speed Multiplier and Despawn Distance (the wait ring).
4. Leave the Mount dropdown on — No mount — to ride the pet itself. Pick a mount there only if you want it to turn into that mount while ridden.
5. Open Visuals and set its Rider Fit (below) so the rider sits on its back. Getting on and off, under it, picks how the rider mounts and dismounts.
6. Make sure the species has a pet item players can own — see Taming.

Set up a mount#

1. Pets & Mounts → Mounts → + New Mount. Fill in Stats and Travel.
2. Give it a sprite and a Rider Fit under Visuals, and pick how the rider gets on and off under Getting on and off (below).
3. Create an item of type Mount (Database → Items), open Advanced → Mount Configuration and set Mount Definition to this mount. Players ride it by wearing that item in the Mount slot.

Fields#

Gotchas#

• "You don't own a mount yet." means there is truly nothing to ride: no rideable pet summoned or in the Pet slot, no mount item in the Mount slot. A pet whose species is not Rideable as Mount counts as nothing.
• The ring is only drawn for the rider, and only while the mount waits. It is exactly the Despawn Distance — step over the line and the mount stops waiting. Recolor it, fade it or switch it off in UI editor → Indicators → Mount wait ring; switching it off hides the ring only, the mount waits exactly as before.
• A parked pet stays parked, even past the 10 tiles at which a following pet would jump back to its owner. That is the point of the ring.
• Let go, a pet comes back on foot. It takes a real route round buildings and runs fast enough to catch an owner who keeps walking. It only jumps to its owner's side when it cannot get there: walled in, more than 40 tiles away, or still not back after 15 seconds.
• A rideable pet that fights (Companion Attack on) fights while it follows. It does not attack while it is ridden or parked, and creatures do not pick a parked pet as prey on sight. It fights again as soon as it is following.
• Leaving the map (a door, a portal) counts as leaving the ring.
• Dismissing the pet, or dying, ends the ride. Death sends the pet back to the roster as usual; summon it (or press the mount key) to bring it out again.
• Pressing the key while the summon bar is filling cancels the summon. Holding the key down does nothing extra — one press, one action.
• Switching pets while one is parked ends that ride; the newly summoned pet is the one the key rides next.
• Needs the Mounts feature flag for the mount key, and Pets for rideable pets and the pet menu. Changes to a species or mount reach a hosted game on the next Publish.

Getting on and off#

By default a rider simply appears on the mount and appears back on the ground. You can give that moment some life, and you choose the way on and the way off separately, so they can be mixed — hop on, vanish off.

The game draws these itself, so they work with any character art, including RPG Maker packs — no extra frames to draw.

Where to author it#

Setting one up#

1. Open Pets & Mounts → Mounts and expand World default: getting on and off a mount.
2. Pick a style under Getting on and one under Getting off, then press Save world default. Every mount and rideable pet now uses them.
3. To make one mount different, open it, go to Visuals → Getting on and off and pick its own styles. Anything you leave on World default keeps following the world setting.
4. Save. On a hosted game, Publish.

Fields#

Gotchas#

• It is only a visual. The rider counts as mounted (speed, mount abilities, the summon bar) at exactly the same moment as before. A long Length does not slow anyone down.
• Every player sees it, not only the rider.
• A pet linked to a mount uses the mount's setting; a field the mount leaves on World default falls to the pet species' setting, then to the world default.
• A rider who dies does not play it, and getting on and straight off again cuts to the second one — nobody is left hanging in the air.
• A player who walks into view already riding does not hop on in front of you; you only see it when it happens.
• Existing worlds are unchanged until you pick a style: nothing set means Appear.

Why Rider Fit exists#

In game the mount and its rider are two separate sprites drawn on the same tile. Nothing in the artwork tells the engine where the saddle is, so it seats every rider at the same fixed height. That is fine for a horse drawn at typical proportions and wrong for almost everything else — on a low wolf the rider floats above the back, on a tall dragon they sink into it, and on a wide sheet they sit off to one side.

Rider Fit is the correction: a few pixel offsets, saved on the mount, that put the rider where the art actually seats them. It is the same kind of control as Direction Mapping in the sprite editor — a small authored fix that points the engine at what the artwork does.

Where to author it#

Setting one up#

1. Open the mount (or rideable pet species) and go to the Visuals tab.
2. Pick the Animated Sprite first — Rider Fit previews the real frames, so there is nothing to aim at until the sprite is set.
3. Scroll to Rider Fit. The preview shows the mount with a rider standing on the same spot. The stand-in is the character your Dry Run wears (Characters → Dry Run character), or, if you have not picked one, the first character that has a sprite.
4. Drag the rider onto the saddle. Drag the mount instead to nudge the mount itself. The numeric fields update as you drag, and you can type exact values into them.
5. Step through the eight Preview facing buttons and check each one. If the saddle only looks wrong on some facings, tick Edit this facing only and correct those individually.
6. Save. Riders already in the world pick up the new seat the next time they mount.

Fields#

Gotchas#

• The preview needs artwork on both sides. Without an animated sprite on the mount you get an empty stage; if no character in your project has a sprite yet, the rider is drawn as a plain box. The offsets still work in both cases — you just cannot aim by eye.
• A mount's size is its sprite's In-World Scale (Visuals → Animated Sprite), not Render Width / Height. At 1, one frame of the sheet is one tile wide; a sheet you have just imported is drawn at the default, 2. Raise it for a mount big enough to sit on, then seat the rider — the Rider Fit offsets are in the same pixels, so set the size first. Render Width / Height only size the plain box that stands in while the sprite loads, or for a mount with no sprite at all. A mount with no sprite of its own that is linked to a pet species wears the pet's sprite and is drawn at the pet's Render Size, so the pet is the same size under you as beside you.
• Which animations a mount plays. Give the mount's sprite Idle, Walk and Run and it stands, walks and runs with them. While you ride it, it takes its pace from you: it runs when you run and walks when you walk. With no Run on the sprite it walks at every pace. If the sprite also has Mounted Idle, Mounted Walk or Mounted Run, those are used instead while someone is riding it; a missing one falls back to the plain animation, and a missing Mounted Run to Mounted Walk. A mount with no idle of either kind holds the first frame of its first animation when it stops. A mount with nobody on it stands in its idle — it does not copy its owner's attacks. A rideable pet you ride directly follows the same rules.
• A mount keeps its own copy of its sprite. Load saved sprite… → Load on the mount's Visuals tab copies that sprite's sheet, size and animations into the mount. An animation you add to the sprite afterwards on the Sprites page — an Idle, say — does not reach the mount, which then holds the first frame of its first animation when it stops. Check the animation list inside the mount: if the row is missing, load the sprite again there, Save, publish and summon the mount again. Pet species work the same way.
• Offsets are pixels, not tiles. They are measured at 1× zoom in the same space as the sprite, so they hold at every camera zoom. Values are clamped to ±256 px and rounded to whole pixels.
• Per-facing overrides are per-field. Nudging Rider X on the north facing leaves that facing's Rider Y on the base value — one correction never resets the rest of the seat.
• Rider scale changes need a re-mount to take effect on a rider who is already mounted; the offsets apply immediately.
• An untouched mount stores nothing. Leaving Rider Fit alone (or resetting it) saves no value at all and the engine's original seat applies, so existing mounts look exactly as they did before.
• Publish and roll like any other definition. On a hosted project, mounts reach the live server through a normal publish; a self-hosted server picks the change up on its next start. A mount that is already out takes a republished sprite, animations and size as soon as the publish lands.
• Evolving a ridden pet swaps the seat to the evolved species' own Rider Fit, since the artwork changed.

Mount abilities#

A mount can carry its own abilities — a charge, a trample, a war cry. While a player rides it, those abilities replace the ability bar and are the only ones that can be cast from the saddle. Casting one does not dismount.

Where to author it#

Database → Pets & Mounts → Mounts → _your mount_ → Abilities.

Setting one up#

1. Build the abilities first in Abilities (for example Trample and Gallop).
2. Open the mount and go to the Abilities tab.
3. Press Add Ability for each one, in the order you want them on the bar. Save.
4. Summon and ride the mount: the bar shows the mount's abilities, starting at the first weapon-ability key.

Fields#

Gotchas#

• An empty list keeps the old rules: riding shows the normal bar and every ability is refused while mounted.
• Everything else is off while riding. Weapon and armour abilities come back the moment you dismount — or if the mount is dismissed or despawns.
• A Transform (shapeshift) wins over the mount: a transformed rider sees the form's bar. See Status Effects → Transform.
• Pets ridden directly (a rideable pet species with no mount linked to it) don't use mount abilities. Link the species to a mount (Pet Species → Mount → Mount) to give it some.
• Saving refuses an ability that doesn't exist, and more than 6.
• Needs the Mount Abilities feature flag (on by default).