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Friend Helpful Remake

2025/8/15 Update
Bonded smart animals can always be drafted and have no range restrictions to their master.
Added a new implant to make animals able to be drafted with no range restrictions to their master.

2025/8/8 Update
Added two events: Smart animal passes and smart animal joins to increase the chance of getting a smart animal. You can disable these events in mod settings.

This is a rewritten version based on 1.6, removing some of the complex designs of the old version. The old 1.5 version is here:
Friend Helpful

Added 6 new training sentience catalysts. After using them on animals, they can train corresponding skills and do corresponding work. In fact, the original 12 skills are merged into 6 to reduce complexity. These 6 catalysts and corresponding skills are:
Battle sentience catalyst: Shooting and Melee
Nature sentience catalyst: Plants and Animals
Dexterity sentience catalyst: Crafting and Cooking
Wisdom sentience catalyst: Medical and Intellectual
Strength sentience catalyst: Construction and Mining
Charm sentience catalyst: Social and Artistic

Take the Nature sentience catalyst as an example. After using it (see in picture), two new trainings will appear for animals: Nature and Advanced Nature. Training Nature can make the animal be regarded as having level 4 Animals and Plants skills, and can do related work. Training Advanced Nature will not bring about qualitative changes, but each level of training can improve the animal's skill level by 2 levels. The higher the level of the advanced training, the more difficult it will be to train.
The Battle sentience catalyst has the effect of improving skills, but there is no corresponding work. It can only improve the combat ability of animals.
When an animal is working, there will be a button next to it that allows you to cancel the work. Apart from this, the work of the animal is still uncontrollable and the animal may slack off. Feeding animals with lavish or fine food will increase the probability of them working, while feeding them with nutritional paste or baby food will increase the probability of them slacking off.
These training sentience catalysts only require two sentience catalysts to make, and the technology requirements are very low. So install them on your animals! It is recommended to use them with my following two mods:
Friend Well-behaved : Manage the animal's food restriction, hostility responses, etc. Also you can select the animal's owner with a button near the animal.
Friend Clever ：Allow sentience catalysts’ effect to stack. Animals with sentience catalysts will not be penned and not be killed by the auto slaughter system.

Let's first define what a smart animal is: an animal that has learned to haul or any of the above 6 new trainings. Unless otherwise specified, the animals mentioned below are all smart animals.
Animals that have learned to haul can do various chores that do not require much skill level, such as cleaning, feeding patients, etc.
Animals that have learned new trainings can do work with corresponding skills, and there will be an additional work tab next to the training tab, allowing you to disable the work of the corresponding skill for this animal. In addition, the mod settings allow you to enable the smart animal column tab, which can directly view the disabled work of all the smart animals in the entire colony. (See picture) Finally, you can also directly disable a specific work in the mod settings, which will take effect on all animals.
In particular, animals that have learned rescue can put out fires, even if they are not smart animals.
For the bills on the workbench, an "Any Animal" option has been added, and this bill can only be used by animals.
Animals can ignore some special requirements when working, such as the restrictions of the gauranlen tree and the mechanitor. In addition, if an animal produces a mech, it will try to set its master as the overseer of the mech.
In particular, tending work has a very high priority, and animals will get up from their sleep to tend others.

Smart animals can be drafted and can equip weapons. Similar to the relationship between the mechanitor and mechs, animals cannot be drafted without a master or when their master are downed, and cannot leave their master too far away (mainly to prevent them from being too op).
Most of the commands in vanilla game (referring to the options generated when right-clicking things) have been screened, and animals can accept most of them by right-clicking. Some commands require certain skills, otherwise they will not be displayed. For example, animals without training charm (corresponding to social) will not respond when right-clicking the comms console.
If an animal is drafted, the command cannot leave the control range of the master. Animals that have not been drafted do not have this restriction.
In addition, 5 implants have been added to improve the combat capabilities of animals (including entering space), after all, they have no apparel. If you also want to improve their medical properties, it is recommended to use my Friend Forever

Added a new Scenario: Feral Child. Play as a baby with working animals. No gamestart research projects. Any other human joined the colony will be cursed. As long as you survive for 15 days, the baby will grow into a child.

This mod only supports the vanilla work, has dubs bad hygiene and basic vanilla expanded support. If you have a mod you want to support, you can check the file named ModSubTrees.xml and there is detailed example in it. It should be very simple.
This mod can be added or removed in the middle of the save. Before removing, please make sure that animals are not equipped with weapons, otherwise the UI will report an error after removal (this is a vanilla bug)

Finally, let's talk about the performance issue that many people are concerned about. The following is the logic used by this mod to find available work:
1. Try the last successfully found work, and if it is available, use it immediately. On the one hand, it saves a lot of calculations, and on the other hand, it prevents the animal from running away after digging one grid of minerals. This attempt may be deliberately failed to give the animal a chance to try new work.
2. Check the total working time of the animal. The longer the time, the more likely the animal will start to slack off and not make any work attempts.
3. On average, the idle animals search for available work once every 12 minutes in the game. First, animals that have not completed their training will not try to search for corresponding work to their skills. Second, the jobs in the game are divided into groups of about 12, and the animals will only try a few of them randomly. If no job can be found, then wait for the next 12 minutes to try again. If you manually cancel the animal's job, or feed them bad food (see above), the animal will reduce its enthusiasm for work and the time interval between checks will be longer than 12 minutes.