It's been a while since I've written down anything about this mod, so I thought I would share my current progress and future plans for the final attack dogs update. A dev diary if you will.

• The "Conjure Unstable Familiar - Canid" spell has been reworked from scratch and greatly improved. All the weird quirks attached to the spell are gone. The amount of conditions on it have been reduced from a couple hundred down to 12, there was a lot of bloat attached to it due to my inexperience as a modder at the time. The spell now uses scripts and a custom summoning system for all the summons and works seamlessly with the vanilla summoning system, you won't even notice that there's a difference. For the last part, I changed the spell so that you could swap out which summon showed up based on the school of the spells your character has equipped. For example, summoning spell in your left hand + fire spell in your right hand will summon a flaming wolf. Previously your summon was based purely on the spells that your character knew and your conjuration skill. You still need to level up your conjuration skill and also finish the college of Winterhold quests to unlock everything, but now you also have the option to swap summons on the fly.
  

• Pet summoning spells can now be used at a distance, the dog will poof into existence where your mouse is aiming. Previously you were stuck summoning them right next to your character.
  

• The friendly fire perk was fixed.
  

• Most animals have gotten new models or textures, the furriest critters even have shell texturing. UVs were redone and textures were also combined to cut down on wasted vram and draw calls. A lot of the work in progress screenshots that I put up are from 2023. Since then, my plans for the graphics update have changed a bit. The old textures in the screenshots were 2k and didn't use much photo sourcing, the new ones that I'm working on are 4k and look a hell of a lot better than before. Once I've made more progress on them I'll put up some current screenshots.
  

• The feature that copies magic effects from the player and gives them to your dog has been improved and the bugs have been fixed. It's also much more compatible with custom spells as long as they have the right keywords.
  

• I've removed most of the edits from the mod that didn't absolutely need to touch the vanilla parts of the game and have replaced them with more compatible alternatives. Keep in mind that this mod is also on console, so there are limits to what can be achieved indirectly.
  

• This mod is now 100% compatible with Rougeshot's skeleton mods. All you have to do is install any of his mods and then leave the esp turned off, no more patches needed.
  

• I've tweaked the sounds of several animals to be less loud by default and also changed out a few as well.
  

• Currently I'm trying my hand at creating a custom dialogue and follower system for the dogs. It works about half the time and then decides to stop working, it's not going well. I'll figure it out eventually though.
  

• Lastly, an MCM is going to be added. You'll be able to change the difficulty of animals affected by this mod, turn off the glow effect on certain animals, and toggle friendly fire on and off.