(None of the other posts I've seen here actually break down the problem, so here's my attempt at clarifying the issue. And yes, it's been reported to Bethesda and acknowledged, but so far their response is basically along the lines of, "Dude, that sucks; we don't know what's causing it, and haven't seen it happen ourselves, but we'll keep looking into it.") The bug: Companions neither gain nor lose affinity, regardless of actions taken, and regardless of wait time between actions. Once the bug happens with one companion--and it can do so at any point in the game--it hits all of them, without exception. It can manifest as early as Codsworth, thus keeping you from ever gaining any affinity with any companion. Example: Normally, when you recruit a companion, they immediately gain 40 affinity. With this bug, affinity remains at its current level--in this case zero--and cannot be raised or lowered except through console commands. This also means no companion quests unless triggered by console for each stage, and no companion perks, unless given by console. Also none of the usual companion comments relating to actions. If you already have an affinity rating with one or more companions, that rating will be frozen at its current level. (And again, this affects ALL companions, and levels freeze for all of them at once--it's not a matter of the quest-locked affinity plateaus some companions have.) What we know it's NOT: We know it's not a mod issue, because it occurs seemingly at random on all platforms, and on both "clean" and modded games. It's also not the new cooldown times--this was happening long before the update that increased cooldown times, and besides, increased cooldown times don't prevent you from gaining affinity ever with any compion--they just make it take longer to raise affinity to max. Seeking a solution: Various people have reported that one or more of the following fixed the problem in their current game, but many have reported that even after attempting some or all of these, the only way they could fix it was to start a new game and cross their fingers. None of the below "fixes" work reliably, so it may be a case of mistaking correlation for causation. Solutions tried so far with varying degrees of success and failure: Reverting to an earlier saveTrashing all saves and starting overUninstalling and reinstalling the Unofficial PatchRe-verifying files through steamCompletely deleting the entire game, including preference files and mods, and starting over from scratch (but especially considering it doesn't work every time, that's a bit extreme) So that's that. Anyone have a solution, or able to steer me where I should look for one?