Hireling — recruit a townsperson as a follower¶

Hireling is a mod for Outward that lets you recruit a living NPC — a guard, soldier, quest character, or merchant body — as a human follower who walks with you and fights at your side. It is for players who want a humanoid companion, and it is the human-follower counterpart to Beastwhispering, which tames beasts.

At a glance - Type: gameplay mod - Requires: BepInEx 5 (Mono branch), ForgeKit, CompanionKit (which itself pulls in AggroKit, DonorKit and NetKit) - Config: BepInEx/config/cobalt.hireling.cfg - Commands: BepInEx/config/hl_cmd.txt - Data: an embedded follower-stats table, overridable at BepInEx/config/FolkStats.txt - Save: your follower, per character, at BepInEx/config/hl_folk_<character uid>.txt

For players¶

Walk up to a recruitable NPC and press F4 (or run the recruit command). The mod makes a copy of that NPC as your follower — the original stays where it was. Your follower then trails you across zones and doors, draws its weapon when a fight starts, and helps you kill what you are fighting.

Who you can recruit

Real, living humanoid NPCs: town guards, soldiers, quest characters, and merchant bodies all qualify — even ones with no combat AI of their own.
Ambient villagers do not qualify. The wandering townsfolk that populate a city are a lightweight kind of character with no body to puppet, so they cannot be recruited. If the nearest thing to you is one of them, the mod says so plainly rather than silently doing nothing.
Beasts do not qualify — those belong to Beastwhispering.

An NPC must be within 15 m (configurable) to recruit. You can target a specific one by name with recruit <name>.

Giving orders

engage — send the follower onto the enemy you have locked, or, if you have no lock, to help with whatever you are fighting.
disengage — stand down: the follower drops the fight and returns to you until you engage again.
dismiss — let the follower go. This tears it down completely.

Your recruit survives a relaunch. The follower is remembered per character in BepInEx/config/hl_folk_<your character uid>.txt (written at recruit, on each zone arrival, and when you quit to the menu; dismiss deletes it). On your next launch, the follower re-forms when you are in a scene that holds a live NPC with the same name — typically the town you recruited them in — and steps back in at the spot they were last saved. Their stats re-read from the live NPC, exactly like a fresh recruit.

Known issues and limitations¶

Re-forming needs a live same-named NPC in the current scene. Reload out in the wilds and the follower waits (quietly) until you next enter such a scene. Their gear and stats are re-captured from that NPC rather than frozen at recruit time, so an NPC that has changed since looks different when your follower comes back.
One follower at a time. Recruit again after you have dismissed the current one.
NPCs that other mods spawn and drive cannot be recruited, and never re-form a follower. Any body stamped as script-owned (ForgeKit.ScriptedBody) is skipped by both the recruit scan and the re-form search. In practice that is every StoryKit NPC — Maren, the trainers, and every DangerousRoads road event (the wandering merchant, the town-guard patrol). They are spawned, driven and despawned on their owner's schedule, so a follower cloned from one outlives that bookkeeping and answers to nobody. recruit next to such an NPC says so in the log and on screen; a saved follower whose name happens to match one waits for an ordinary NPC instead. This is deliberate and wider than the road merchant it was found on — if you recruited a StoryKit NPC on an older build, that follower will no longer re-form.
In co-op, only the host recruits and dismisses. A guest who presses the key is told the host handles followers; a guest's own reload never re-forms one.

Features / How it works¶

A follower's combat readiness comes from two sources, blended together:

What was captured off the real NPC — a genuine guard keeps its own health, speed, and (if it was armed) its own weapon damage.
The FolkStats table — a bandit-like baseline so that even an unarmed townsperson fights like a capable brawler instead of a helpless civilian.

By default the live capture's health and speed win over the table (a real guard stays as tough as it looked), while the table fills in fighting stats an unarmed villager would otherwise lack. You can change that blend in the settings, or turn the table off entirely to use only what was captured.

The follower's body is a clone of the source NPC, so it keeps that character's look, including its gear. The engine spine that makes it follow, hold position relative to you, and take part in combat is provided by CompanionKit; Hireling supplies the recruit rules and the stats layer on top.

Settings¶

BepInEx/config/cobalt.hireling.cfg:

Section	Key	Default	Effect
Keys	`RecruitKey`	`F4`	Recruit the nearest recruitable NPC.
Recruit	`RecruitRange`	`15`	How close (m) an NPC must be to recruit it.
Clone	`EquipmentStrip`	`Components`	How the clone sheds its equipped items. `Components` keeps the dressed look; `GameObjects` is a heavier strip used as a fallback if the lighter one leaves the body broken.
Combat	`AttackDamage`	`25`	Damage per hit when neither the capture nor the table supplies a value.
Combat	`AttackInterval`	`1.4`	Seconds between the follower's attacks.
Combat	`AggroRange`	`12`	How far (m) the follower will engage an enemy you are fighting.
Combat	`AttackRange`	`2.6`	The follower's melee reach (m).
Combat	`AssistOnOwnerHit`	`true`	The moment one of your attacks lands on an enemy, the follower charges that enemy instead of waiting for it to walk into `AggroRange` (which is measured follower-to-enemy, so a target you shot at range never qualified). The focus lasts 8 s, each further landed hit refreshes it, and it outranks the follower's own self-defence.
Combat	`OwnerFocusRange`	`60`	How far (m) the follower will charge to reach the enemy your attack just landed on. Keep it at or under the combat leash (60 m).
Stats	`UseFolkStats`	`true`	Blend the FolkStats table with the live capture. Off = capture only.
Stats	`PreferCapturedVitals`	`true`	When blending, the captured HP/speed win over the table row. Off = the row sets vitals too.

Example configuration¶

BepInEx/config/cobalt.hireling.cfg — created on first launch. Excerpt:

[Keys]
RecruitKey = F4

[Recruit]
RecruitRange = 15

[Clone]
EquipmentStrip = Components

[Combat]
AttackDamage = 25
AttackInterval = 1.4
AggroRange = 12
AttackRange = 2.6
AssistOnOwnerHit = true
OwnerFocusRange = 60

[Stats]
UseFolkStats = true
PreferCapturedVitals = true

FolkStats table. The follower-stats table ships embedded with a single bandit-like Default row. To customize it, create BepInEx/config/FolkStats.txt in the same format — one row per NPC name, plus a Default. Names are matched exactly first, then by longest partial match, then falling back to Default. Run reloadfolk to re-read your changes without restarting. Each row's payload is a compact stat string (health, speed, impact, resistances, protection, per-type damage); the file's own header comments spell out every field.

Commands¶

Write a verb into BepInEx/config/hl_cmd.txt and it runs on the next poll (results go to the log). Write help to list them all.

Command	What it does
`recruit [name]`	Recruit the nearest recruitable NPC, or the nearest one whose name matches.
`dismiss`	Dismiss the follower — full teardown.
`engage`	Order the follower onto your locked target, or to auto-assist.
`disengage`	Order the follower passive — drop the fight and return to you.
`folkstatus`	One-glance status: identity, body, anchor HP, stance, effective stats.
`folkdump`	Recruit-pipeline dump: nearby candidates with accept/reject reasons, plus a body audit on a live follower.
`folkanim`	Animator dump on the follower body (controller, parameters, playing clips).
`folkstats`	Stats pipeline: captured vs. table row vs. effective, plus the anchor's live readback.
`reloadfolk`	Re-read the `FolkStats.txt` override and re-apply now.
`selftest`	Run the mod's internal checks and log the results.

Hireling does not add ForgeKit's shared dev-verb pack to this channel — only the commands above, plus help and the scripting verbs (script, scriptstatus, scriptcancel) that every command channel provides.

For modders¶

Hireling is CompanionKit consumer #2 — the reference human-follower build, distinct from Beastwhispering's beast pets. The companion spine (the humanoid puppet body, the welded combat anchor, follow, and stance) all come from CompanionKit; this mod owns only the parts that make it Hireling: the recruit policy (which characters qualify and why an ambient villager is rejected), a human-stats layer (FolkStats) that merges a bandit-like table with the live NPC capture, and the v1 save schema (Hireling.Core.FollowerSave — name + last-saved scene/position). It builds the follower body through the kit's humanoid puppet factory, drives it through the kit's Companion aggregate, and rides the kit's persistence spine (CompanionPersistence<FollowerSave> + a nearby-rung-only BodyAcquisition ladder — see the kit page's Persistence section). Its command channel and the config-override table loader come from ForgeKit.