Heel

Your tames catch up on their own.

If something tamed is following you and it falls a long way behind — or gets stuck somewhere it will never climb out of — it waits 25 seconds and then turns up behind you. Through portals. Out of pits. Off the wrong side of a river.

They arrive in an arc behind your back, one at a time, so a dozen wolves never land on top of you and wall you into a portal.

What it will and will not touch

It only ever moves a creature that is tamed, alive, and following you specifically.

That is three separate safety rules and each one is doing a job:

Tamed — a wild wolf is never brought to a player by this mod, under any setting. That would make it a way to drop a two-star troll on somebody.
Following you — your friend's boars are their client's business. Two clients both moving the same animal would fight over it, and it would flicker between two places until one gave up.
Following — a penned or parked animal is tamed and near you and going nowhere, which is every trigger this mod has. If "following" were not required, walking past your own barn would empty it into the field behind you. Told to stay means stays.

Where it will not put them

A spot has to earn it, and when nothing earns it nothing happens — the follower stays where it is and it tries again shortly. Doing nothing is always safe and always available.

Never in water, never on ground that has not loaded, never in mid-air.
Never inside a ward you are not admitted to. A convenience mod that can push livestock into a stranger's base is a griefing tool wearing a convenience mod's coat.
Never on top of another arrival.

Two ways to fall behind

Adrift — you are more than 40 metres away. The clock runs no matter what they are doing, because a wolf three hundred metres back is running towards you at full speed and will still be running in an hour. This is the portal case.

Stalled — you are near enough that they ought to be with you, and the gap is not closing. Pit, fence, roof, a rock they cannot path around. This is the one a distance check cannot see: a wolf eight metres below you at the bottom of a hole is not far away by any measure worth having, and it is never getting out.

If they are simply behind and gaining, they are left alone to arrive under their own steam — which is what happens almost every time you jog across a field. The delay is the point.

Console

heel

Says who it thinks is yours, what the clock is doing, and why anything is still sitting in a pit.

Multiplayer

Client-side only. It moves your followers on your machine, asks nothing of the server and nothing of anyone else's client — so it works on a vanilla server, and two people running different settings cannot desync anything. Everyone who wants it installs it; everyone who does not, does not.

Settings

Everything is in BepInEx/config/dafini.heel.cfg. The ones worth knowing:

Setting	Default	What it does
`CatchUpDelay`	25s	How long they get to sort themselves out first
`AdriftDistance`	40m	Past this, the clock runs regardless
`WithYouDistance`	12m	Inside this, they count as having arrived
`ArrivalSpacing`	0.5s	Gap between one arrival and the next
`MinRadius`	5m	How far behind you the first ring lands
`HoldWhileFighting`	off	Leave tames to finish their fights instead of rescuing them

HoldWhileFighting is off on purpose: the wolf you most want rescued is usually the one stuck in a pit with something.