Minion Stick

[Masked Koopa]

I've seen a lot of complaints about X or Y minion such as the shadow duelists, wurt's merms, or webber's spiders, and a lot of them seem to go in character-specific directions when it comes to solutions. I think it's time that minions as a whole got a tool for command, so that we might actually consider hiring some of the less used ones.

You could likely just integrate this functionality into the walking cane, but for the sake of this post I'll just call it the minion stick.

You would be able to perform the following commands with the stick in hand:

• Right click a location to tell your minions to move to that location. This will be prioritized over and cancel other tasks, letting you move them out of harm's way.
• Right click something to have your minions interact with it, if they can. If they cannot, they will ignore this command. This means clicking a rock will make shadow miners and merms break it, a tree will make pigs merms and shadow loggers chop it, etc. Right clicking an enemy will have your minions focus that enemy.
• Left click something to have your minions interact with all of a given resource. If it's a hostile creature, they will attack everything hostile to them or you in the area. In the case of trees, if it's a fully grown tree, they will only chop fully grown ones of the type you clicked. If it's a partially grown one, they'll chop all trees they can get their hands on.
• Right click your minion to dismiss them. Does not work on non-hired minions (like small/smallish birds), making them lose loyalty to you and return home.
• Left click on your minion to tell them to "stay". This will make them continue chopping/mining/fighting/whatever so long as they are loaded, instead of trying to follow you. Left click again to change them to "follow" again. If a minion is unloaded or runs out of things to interact with, it will teleport back to the user.
• Right click yourself to return all minions back to you.
• Left click on yourself to dismiss all minions.

I feel like this would make minions less of a liability, and would give a lot of characters a boost in usefulness without actually directly buffing the stats of a given minion. Willow's bernie, Wendy's Abigail, Maxwell's Shadows, Webber's Spiders, Wurt's Merms, Everyone's Pigs, Bunnymen, Birds, Rock Lobsters, Gnarwails, and probably some I'm forgetting. Pretty much every character would benefit from this in some form, and I feel it would make people come back to the minion mechanic in a similar way to how they came back to beefalo after YOTB.

[Mysterious box]

8 hours ago, Masked Koopa said:

I've seen a lot of complaints about X or Y minion such as the shadow duelists, wurt's merms, or webber's spiders, and a lot of them seem to go in character-specific directions when it comes to solutions. I think it's time that minions as a whole got a tool for command, so that we might actually consider hiring some of the less used ones.

You could likely just integrate this functionality into the walking cane, but for the sake of this post I'll just call it the minion stick.

You would be able to perform the following commands with the stick in hand:

• Right click a location to tell your minions to move to that location. This will be prioritized over and cancel other tasks, letting you move them out of harm's way.
• Right click something to have your minions interact with it, if they can. If they cannot, they will ignore this command. This means clicking a rock will make shadow miners and merms break it, a tree will make pigs merms and shadow loggers chop it, etc. Right clicking an enemy will have your minions focus that enemy.
• Left click something to have your minions interact with all of a given resource. If it's a hostile creature, they will attack everything hostile to them or you in the area. In the case of trees, if it's a fully grown tree, they will only chop fully grown ones of the type you clicked. If it's a partially grown one, they'll chop all trees they can get their hands on.
• Right click your minion to dismiss them. Does not work on non-hired minions (like small/smallish birds), making them lose loyalty to you and return home.
• Left click on your minion to tell them to "stay". This will make them continue chopping/mining/fighting/whatever so long as they are loaded, instead of trying to follow you. Left click again to change them to "follow" again. If a minion is unloaded or runs out of things to interact with, it will teleport back to the user.
• Right click yourself to return all minions back to you.
• Left click on yourself to dismiss all minions.

I feel like this would make minions less of a liability, and would give a lot of characters a boost in usefulness without actually directly buffing the stats of a given minion. Willow's bernie, Wendy's Abigail, Maxwell's Shadows, Webber's Spiders, Wurt's Merms, Everyone's Pigs, Bunnymen, Birds, Rock Lobsters, Gnarwails, and probably some I'm forgetting. Pretty much every character would benefit from this in some form, and I feel it would make people come back to the minion mechanic in a similar way to how they came back to beefalo after YOTB.

This does fix some issues with minions but not all of them such not being able to tell when loyalty is expiring which is a huge problem for wurt and webber because it can lead to unintentionally killing their teammates and the other thing being followers not being able to get back to their homes which technically could be fixed by having the game spawn another mob at their home if they don't return in x amount of days. Otherwise tho this is a good idea.

That being said in it's current state the follower mechanic is also kinda dead because zero maintenance followers and ai exploited able mobs exist in the the forms of shadow puppets, abigial, bunnymen, and bearager.