Author a mount and seat the rider correctly on its artwork.
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.
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
| What you're riding | Where the seat lives |
|---|---|
| A mount (summoned with the mount key) | Pets & Mounts → Mounts → _your mount_ → Visuals → Rider Fit |
| A rideable pet ridden directly | Pets & Mounts → Pet Species → _your species_ → Visuals → Rider Fit (shown once Rideable is on) |
| A pet that is linked to a mount definition | The mount's Rider Fit. A pet-linked mount with no seat of its own falls back to the pet species' seat. |
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, using your project's default character avatar (Characters → Defaults) as the stand-in. 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
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Rider X / Rider Y | Moves the rider's sprite, in pixels from the shared tile point. Negative Y lifts the rider up, positive X moves them right. This is the main control — most mounts need nothing else. |
| Mount X / Mount Y | Moves the mount's sprite the same way. Use it when the artwork itself is drawn off-centre in its frame, rather than moving the rider to compensate. |
| Rider scale | Multiplies the character's own avatar scale while riding this mount. A rider at full size looks oversized on a small mount and lost on a huge one. Applies to all facings. |
| Draw rider behind the mount | Puts the mount's sprite in front of the rider. Needed for a howdah, a high-backed saddle, or a mount whose body is drawn over the seat at some facings. |
| Preview facing | Which of the eight facings the preview shows. A dot on a facing button means that facing carries its own override. |
| Edit this facing only | Off (default), your changes apply to all eight facings. On, they apply only to the facing being previewed — for sheets where the saddle shifts as the mount turns. |
| Reset to default | Clears the whole fit back to the engine's default seat. |
Gotchas
- The preview needs artwork on both sides. Without an animated sprite on the mount you get an empty stage; without a default character avatar set under Characters → Defaults the rider is drawn as a plain box. The offsets still work in both cases — you just cannot aim by eye.
- 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. In Studio Web, mounts reach the live server through a normal publish; a self-hosted server picks the change up on its next start.
- Evolving a ridden pet swaps the seat to the evolved species' own Rider Fit, since the artwork changed.