Animals and their uses on my ship

[Besto Telesto]

I've started capturing some animals and I've discovered that they can be useful. However, I want my animals to do different things. For instance, I want my chicken to hide on my boat until I have enough TP for it to lay eggs, while I want my dog attacking.

The issue seems to be that the animals group is blanketed for all my animals, so I can't make my dog go into combat without my chicken.

Also, when I click mount, I 've noticed that animals(all of them) will jump on the heads of the nearest pirate instead of just the captain or whichever group I have selected. Sometimes I get my dog stuck on top of a cleaner,fisher, or cook instead of my boarding party.

Since it seems like I can't make animals dismount currently, I just have to leave the pet until a different fight.

And on an additional note it seems much harder to keep animals like dogs at a stat where they can be compitent in combat.

[Patricia Hapon]

Box your chicken. They'll not be able to mount and they'll not be able to fight.
Normally there is (for now) no chicken rights, so law isn't against you ... Be careful, I don't mean that chicken will never fight back ...

[Besto Telesto]

I've been trying out a boxed chicken. Had to increase my hull and deck, I noitced when it was just one block thick, once my chicken got killed by an enemy boarder through the one block, and one time when I pressed mount (for the dog, it tries to mount the chicken too) the chicken "teleported" from the cage to a pirates head who was grappling. If I had a 2 block buffer, these issues(both happened once, could just be random glitches) haven't happened since.

However, I did notice that if you "box" chickens in there crap has nowhere to go, so the chicken just lives in a sty.

[geckomuerto]

Spiders are good for boat defense, as they can paralyze a few enemies pretty effectively.

[Patricia Hapon]

Yeah, the game mecanic is like that, ranged weapon and such can go through one block, it also work for you.
I tried it with my pirates for a legendary encounter, no roof and a protective wall ... It end up in a ranged battle and some glitch.

Also, level cats, when mounted, stop the morale decrease of their hosts, it can be quite useful.