Hi all! In short, I want to clone the dragon from Dragon Valley and make it look like a falcon, possibly importing the bird mesh from Pets or will that break the game entirely?? I'm confused by the object tutorials here????

Omg, I was just talking about this on my simblr, but in reverse, cuz I want to make the Pets birds look like dragons.
I've tried it before, with absolutely zero success, cuz I suck at even basic modding.
I had deep cloned the birds & baby dragon in S3OC, and opened the package files in S3PE to extract the meshes and textures. I Replaced the MLOD and textures, but when I loaded the game, the bird's appearance was still the same. So I have no idea how it could be done.

I just want to take the Dragon and make it an accessory so that a sim can walk around with the dragon on their shoulder without it going back into inventory whenever the sim engages in an interaction. It sounds like you got farther than I did, but now I can't remember what I was hung up on . I'll have to take a look at that.

Don't the dragons already use a lot of the animations from pet birds?

I know that to create a default replacement, you have to be careful with the instance IDs to be sure they match the object you're replacing.