Companion orders and movement

Stance and movement are separate

Open the Companion Panel, select an active pet and use Orders. Aggressive, Defensive and Passive choose how it acquires ordinary combat targets. Follow and Stay choose its movement. You can also give these orders from the pet’s adjacent right-click menu. The orders themselves do not spend a normal player turn. The pet acts on its AI turns.

Aggressive and Defensive

Aggressive chooses an eligible foe within 6 tiles of the pet and 10 of its owner. Defensive adds a further requirement: the foe must be adjacent to either the pet or the owner. Diagonal neighbours count. The ordinary target search skips settlement people, guards, livestock, vendors, escorts, companions, passive creatures and creatures with no damage. For a large foe, distances are measured to its nearest occupied tile.

Passive does not make a pet safe

Passive prevents the ordinary target search. Enemies can still choose that pet as a target. It does not turn off every separate ability: a Flame Salamander can still burn nearby eligible foes with its fire aura. Use Stay Back to turn that aura off and remove the pet from the ordinary enemy target list. Fire and dangerous ground can still hurt a non-combat pet.

Stay Back and young pets

Stay Back takes priority over the stored stance. A following non-combat pet backs away when an eligible threat is within 3 tiles and refuses a follow step into that reach. It can still be boxed in. Stay overrides this backing-away movement. Support species remain non-combat regardless of the toggle, and their stance controls are hidden. Frail pets start with Stay Back on. Hatchlings use Passive even if another stance is stored.

Follow and Come here

Follow normally closes to within 2 tiles of the owner. A wall at the leash edge or a doorway can make it close further. Come here tightens the ordinary follow distance to 1 tile for 12 world turns. It applies to your active following pets and does not cancel Stay. A pet farther than 15 tiles can catch up beside you. Three failed follow paths can also trigger a catch-up, if a suitable adjacent tile exists.

What Stay actually holds

Stay stops ordinary following, chasing and the long-distance catch-up. A pet can still strike a foe already inside its attack reach when its stance permits. It is not an absolute position lock. A pet already retreating can move towards its owner, and a living pet can step aside for a walker. Stay turns off the usual owner benefits that require a following pet. Nearby abilities with their own checked range can still work, so a parked pet’s effect is not always disabled.

Stay across scene changes

A pet told to Stay in the overworld remains there when you enter another scene. A pet left in a dungeon or another instanced realm comes with the party when that scene changes, keeping Stay at the new position. This prevents it being stranded in a map that no longer exists. Stay does not put the pet in the stable or make it immune to harm.

Owners in co-op

A following pet uses its owner’s position, falling back to the acting player if its owner is absent. The Companion Panel and shared command route validate ownership. In the current build, the host’s adjacent right-click stance and movement rows can also change another party member’s pet. Come here uses the caller’s own active companions. These are control-route differences, not a transfer of pet ownership.