Serious trouble with having multiple animal followers, help needed

[Halihaisku]

My problem is following: I found Meeko first time in 603 hours I have been playing Skyrim, and fell for him instantly. I took him with me. After that I visited first time the Hassildor player home, and discovered that with this house came very adorable husky called Aldon. I wanted him too! And that's when the problems started.

 

So, I'm posting this here because I don't know where else I would post it, as Hassildors comments and forum topic are locked, and Meeko is a vanilla follower with no author to contact.

 

At first I was using EFF, and tried to get both Meeko and Aldon to follow me. It didin't work, Meeko followed me, but Aldon was unresponsive. I happen to have Vilja as my companion too, so I tried to ask Meeko to follow her, and have Aldon with me. It seemed to work, so I traveled to Whiterun to take care some business. But now I'm stuck inside Breezehome because neither of the dogs follows anyone.

 

The thing is, if I talk to Meeko and ask him to follow Vilja, it works, and I can talk to him again with topics like "Wait Vilja right here". But if I ask Meeko to follow either her or me, and then talk to Aldon, Meeko reverts back to his recruiting dialogue and sits forever wherever this happens to happen. And same thing with Aldon. At this point, I changed into AFT, because according to Dr. Google, AFT supports also animals, and EFF doesn't. But this hamster wheel of hell is still rolling.

 

I have tried to dismiss / re-recruit and use AFTs "Tweak - Make follower" spell on both of them. With both of them I got error messages about missing actor values and variables, if my memory serves me right. In any case, the spell failed and that was the point.

 

So, what should I do now? Is it really impossible to have two dogs? Should I just force myself to pick one of them and send them home? Or is there something I have not done yet and could try? Any help would be appreciated.

[panurgy]

I just tried several games with EFF, IAFT, and SMF. All of the mods have nice features and their own special twists, but EFF is the only one that really worked for multiple followers. With IAFT I had 3 different followers across 2 different characters get trapped in Lakeview Manor and Breezehome. With SMF I had followers who were let go, but still continued to follow me around. Lydia was once let go in Breezehome, then went outside and just stood there. No idea if her behavior ever would have changed or reset. I had two other vanilla followers who disappeared in dungeons, and I later found them back at their respective starting locations. I think they got stuck at traps until the wait timer expired. Both SMF and IAFT seem to work great with a single follower, though.

 

Anyway, for human followers your only hope is EFF, so if that isn't working you might be out of luck. I haven't tried multiple creatures--though I have used EFF with Meeko plus both one and two human followers without trouble.

 

Also, IAFT is an updated, bug-fixed, more mod-compatible version of AFT. Even though it's buggy with multiple human followers, it may do better with two dogs than EFF. It might be worth a try if you're desperate. I wouldn't switch follower mods in the middle of a game, though.