[Critical Bug Report] Knockback Attacks While Riding a Beefalo Can Trigger Double Damage Calculation, Instantly Killing the Mount

Adding onto this, with a link to a comment I made on the original thread made for this report.

 

There are a few ways to go about this to address it, but the simplest one would be to do something like what I said here:

On 1/18/2026 at 9:45 PM, hoxi said:

• When hit while riding the Beefalo, the Beefalo also gets added to the list of hit targets along with the player, preventing the double hit on the Beefalo with potentially different damage values (if the enemy normally deals reduced damage against the player).

This would be the simplest one to implement, and keeps the current expected behavior (it'd also be the same as with single-target attacks that can cause knockback, where only the Beefalo is hit and the player is knocked off).

 

Which potentially look like changing something like this:

-- example from SGdeerclops.lua, DoIceSpikeAOE
inst.components.combat:DoAttack(v)
if shouldknockback then
	v:PushEvent("knockback", { knocker = inst, radius = TUNING.DEERCLOPS_ATTACK_RANGE })
end
data.targets[v] = true

To:

-- check for mount before attack as well, knockback could be caused by Combat:DoAttack through "onhitother" event or similar
local mount = inst.components.rider ~= nil and inst.components.rider:IsRiding() and inst.components.rider:GetMount() or nil

-- simply add mount to targets hit so it won't get hit by the next search if unlimbo'd
if mount ~= nil then
	data.targets[mount] = true
end

inst.components.combat:DoAttack(v)
if shouldknockback then
	v:PushEvent("knockback", { knocker = inst, radius = TUNING.DEERCLOPS_ATTACK_RANGE })
end
data.targets[v] = true

Or a bit more intricate, only add the mount to the target list if no longer riding it after the attack/knockback call:

-- check for mount before attack as well, knockback could be caused by DoAttack through an "onhitother" event or similar
local mount = inst.components.rider ~= nil and inst.components.rider:IsRiding() and inst.components.rider:GetMount() or nil

inst.components.combat:DoAttack(v)

if shouldknockback then
	v:PushEvent("knockback", { knocker = inst, radius = TUNING.DEERCLOPS_ATTACK_RANGE })
end
data.targets[v] = true

if mount ~= nil and inst.components.rider ~= nil and not inst.components.rider:IsRiding() then
	data.targets[mount] = true
end

 

Obviously, there's probably a more cleaner approach by refactoring some code, like by adding a redirected target through an event fired through the combat component or something (would need to be pushed immediately if done through the SG), or maybe making a global function to check for this stuff (passing the targets table to let the function add the mount entity to it), which would turn this into a single line to add for a bunch of these cases with the first suggestion.

Edited January 21 by hoxi
Small corrections