The creature
The creature lives in your settlement and acts on its own. It decides what to do from what it wants, what it has learned, and what it has decided about you. You can direct it, and it can decline.
What it decides on its own
The creature tracks the settlement, the animals and the people around it, and picks its next action from that. Hunting, resting, greeting a villager, performing, defending threatened villagers, helping at a building site and gathering happen this way. Between actions it pauses briefly.
It grows hungry over time. When hungry it can hunt nearby wild animals or take livestock from a pen. Distance and learned behaviour influence which animal it chooses.
Roles
You can assign a role: gatherer, builder, entertainer or soldier, or leave it with no assigned role. The role guides its work, and its colour shows on the role bar and on the rope between you. With no role assigned it can choose one itself and says which it has chosen.
An assigned role holds its attention. Other wants are held back while it works and return gradually over time. Strong enough wants can interrupt role work before that focus wears off. An assigned soldier with a planted flag can stomp rival maniples within its work area.
The flag
Plant the flag and the ground around it becomes the creature's work area. Its searches centre on the flag and it walks back when it goes outside that area. Take the flag up and the work area restriction is removed. With a role assigned and a flag planted, its work centres on the nearest player settlement if it is close enough to the flag.
What it learns
Stroking and slapping change how much it trusts and fears you, and can strengthen or weaken the behaviour you respond to. Striking it after it takes from a pen can weaken that habit. Hunting in response to a settlement food request brings meat to its food reserve. It keeps a record of what it has done and of how you responded.
It learns miracles by watching repeated casts near it. Once it has learned enough, it can cast a bound power from your reliquary. Casting also needs energy, which it spends on the cast and refills over time and by eating. Helpful powers answer settlement needs; harmful casts depend on learned behaviour and available targets.
Refusing
A creature with low trust and low fear of you may decline a move order to bare ground, and says so in its own words. Trust or fear can make it accept that move order. It can also refuse an object you hold out to it. When it accepts one, it chooses between eating it, throwing it, playing with it, carrying it somewhere, setting it down carefully or examining it.
What is not in it
It does not grow over the course of a game yet, and its miracle casts have no animation yet. The roadmap lists both as unfinished.