Recruitting Minions
By default all character have a lesser power called "Recruit Ally", if you cast this on an NPC or creature who considers you a friend, or is in the same faction as you they will join you as a companion. Additionally any summons or commanded creatures under your control will behave as minions and follow your attack and follow commands, though these minions cannot carry items for you.

Depending what character package you chose you will also be given a number of other character-based spells or powers for recruitting companions/minions, such as the power to command roaming undead or animals, all these powers can be found in your spellbook and work simply by casting them on the desired creature or NPC. One power even lets you join NPC factions such as goblins or bandits, allowing you to live amongst them and recruit them as allies.



Commands
You issue commands to minions by holding the command key and pressing left or right mouse button (LMB/RMB) over an object in the world. It's important to know that commands take two forms. Order and Task commands. Order commands immediatly send all minions who arn't busy to go help out with it, Task commands are built up into a task list, and the minions will work their way down the list, minions busy with a task will ignore orders until they are finished with what they are doing. This might initially sound problematic, but it in fact allows you to have the bulk of your minions following your orders closely, while splitting the spares to do menial tasks like picking flowers.

For a full list of commands check the read me. They include Loot Area, Harvest, Repair Items and more



The Loot Bag
When issuing commands such as Carry, Loot or Drop a moveable "loot bag" will be dropped in front of you, this is the container that the minions will drop their loot into so you can quickly review all of their goodies and pick out what you want to keep or discard. You can manually drop the loot bag for your minions by dropping it like any other carried item, similarly if you click the bag inside your inventory you can open it and access it's contents like it were a container.

You do not need to take the bag with you, a new one will be provided if you issue another loot or carry command later on but the previous bag will be destroyed along with all of it's contents. If you crouch and activate the bag you will pick it up, beware though the bag weighs as much as all of it's contents and may be quite heavy, it's usually more practical to order your minions to carry what they can by left-command-clicking the bag.

Another handy feature is the bag's value changes to reflect the value of it's contents, so you can see at a glance what your loot is worth and how much it weighs, additionally if you pick up the entire bag you can sell it directly to a merchant for the full value of it's contents and the empty bag will be returned to you.



Summoned Minions
All standard summons (Including modified versions such as those used by Supreme Magicka or Mighty Magicka) are automaticlly treatted as minions. Due to the way Oblivion handles summoned NPCs it is not possible to issue advanced commands such as Harvest, Carry Loot, Loot Container to these summoned NPCs or tell them to hold position. However, summons do respond to attack commands so you can designate targets or send them in ahead as a shield. Also armed summons can benefit from having their weapons repairred or improved by an expert armorer minion.

Non-standard summons that don't use the game's summon-spell template (Such as those added by Midas Magic) are not automaticlly treatted as minions, but can be turned into a minion by casting an appropriate minionising spell on them after they have been summoned. In most cases these summons will respond to advanced commands such harvest or loot, though do be careful, in most cases any items these minions are carrying will be lost when they die or unsummon.



Equipment and Repairs

When you access a minion's inventory they will review their gear and equip what they feel to be best from what they are carrying. In this way you can supply your allies with better equipment if you want. Minions can also use potions and scrolls, there is a toggle in the options panel that stops minions from handing in scrolls or potions when they hand in loot and will instead keep them for themselves.

Additionally the minion with the highest armourer rank will be designated as the team's armourer. This NPC will hold onto any repair hammers he finds instead of turning them in. Every so often he'll go through the parties equipment and automaticlly repair everybodies gear to the best of his ability (including yours) providing he doesn't run out of hammers. The armourer benefits from the standard armourer perks and so armourers above rank 75 can actually repair your equipment beyond 100% and improve it while they need at least 50 to repair magical items. You can disable automatic repairs or adjust the interval between repairs on the configuration page.



...and more!...

Now, to see if I can downgrade my custom CM Partner to regular NPC status and Minionize her instead.

The minions don't like to keep there clothes on after I access their inventory and they don't put anything in the lootbag but I will check the readme to make sure I'm using the right commands.

I hate to be the guy to ask this since your mod tries to do away with dialogue menus but could you maybe make an optional esp to replace the recruit, faction join and dismiss spells to dialogue choices pretty please, the reason I ask is because Deadly Reflex makes NPCs duck and turn hostile when you try to cast a spell at them, I would understand if you didn't want to do that though so no worries if it's not something you want to do.

The fixes look great. I too had this happen: I opened the inventory of my minion, took nothign, closed it, and all her armor dissapeared. I checked both her and my inventory again and I hadn't taken anything- her armor was still there in her inventory. Is this a bug?

Some questions, both for the current and future versions:
Can you un-minionize an NPC? If so, do they just revert to their normal AI? I'm thinking of two scenarios: taking a regular NPC adventuring, say one of the mage guild members, who turns out to be important for a quest later; also, there's times when the game gives you followers (ie, the battle in Kvatch near the start of the MQ), and it would be nice to be able to fully minionize those followers and then let them go when the battle's over.

Will a minion be able to try to pick a locked door?

Will lockpicking potentially require a gazillion lockpicks? They can be hard to come by for a non-thief type.
Will you be able to try lockpicking until successful or will the minion simply have a "skill vs lock difficulty" type of success chance, where it's possible to never succeed?

Will the follow distance be tweakable via the ini file?

I noticed that if a minion runs off to attack an enemy and they are a bit of a distance away (but still in sight) when you use the follow command they teleport to your side, could you make it so that they run over to you rather than teleport?
Another (minor) thing is when you tell a minion to wait and then go really far away like across the world and then use the follow command they instantly appear next to you when you change cells maybe you could tweak it so the follow command only applies to minions that are in the same cell as you when it is used.

So I'm going to make a custom animal companion for my ranger. I'm going to make a new creature record so that the follower can level with the PC, be essential, have low-level processing - good stuff like that.

Should I give the critter any AI packages? I basically plan create a ref in the gameworld someplace, load the mod, placeatme him to the player, and minionize him. So in theory he doesn't need any AI if he's never acting independently, right? How about agression etc?

And the same applies for a custom NPC: give em AI or not?