[Mod Help] Starting With a Critter?

[pikachewy99]

Hiya! I just got into modding and was wondering if anyone knew a way to make it so upon spawning your character could start with a Critter? I would like this character I'm creating to start with a Vargling pet (just because I think it would be a cute touch to add to his personality), but since I'm a beginner at Lua and modding in general, I wasn't sure how I would go about that (and I've spent a good while looking at the code and trying to comprehend things, rip). I'm guessing that I somehow need to call the functions and various assets that create the critters(?), but I know those are local and I'm not sure how I'd access those from mod files? I'm thinking I need to use GLOBAL somehow, though I;m not sure if that would be in modmain.lua or the character.lua...

At this point I'd be fine without having this pet, but I'm curious to know if it's something that's already been figured out! I apologize if it is- sadly google hasn't been pointing me to any immediate answers. Thank you in advance!

(I'll edit this if I end up finding an answer on my own time- I'm gonna continue looking around and seeing if I can solve this myself, but I figured I'd be better off trying to reach out than let myself suffer in silence.)