[LE] I've got a few custom follower questions

[snaaaaaaakee]

I've been making custom followers for myself and my friends for a few years now, but it's been on and off so every time I solve one of my own problems I end up forgetting the solution the next time I run into the problem again. The most irritating problems so far have been

 

1- Some of the followers have voice sets that aren't technically compatible and it makes them unable to be recruited; I used to have a solution for this that involved a weird mix of the "make anyone a follower or marriagable" mod on the Nexus and "Multiple Followers Lite" from the Steam workshop. But good lord i cannot remember what modding gymnastics i did to make that work. I think I did it on accident. those mods arent actually compatible.

They have all the voice lines for being a follower as far as I know, they're just not in the category of voices followers can use. The main npc I have that has this problem has the malecommoner voice, and I used to be able to have him as a follower using the made up solution I listed above, on my old computer. If there's any way to just set the voice to be able to be used by followers then that'd be ideal, but I actually know very little about the more extensive uses of the creation kit.

 

2- I'm not entirely sure how to actually change their skill values, their class doesn't seem to affect them at all. This one's not the most important, since I don't actually pay that much attention to my followers during combat anyway, as long as they're at least holding the right weapon I don't usually mind it. But it'd be nice to have it be the way I want it, I think.

 

3- the list of things that count as spells is so big and upsetting and while I would love to know if I can make my paladin use the dragon tail smash attack, I don't feel like going through and testing which spells they're actually capable of using. Does anyone know of a list or anything about that?

 

4- this isn't actually a recurring problem but I feel like it's concerning enough to mention; I took some of my followers into County Bruma to explore that new mod with me, which was tons of fun. We brought back lots of fun new colovian clothes and alcohol to sell back in skyrim, but we did not bring back one of the followers, because he just kind of stopped following me on a mountain path.

He was still my follower, and if I talked to him his dialogue options were all as if he was following me but I could not get the man to budge. Tried disable/enabling him, then just dismissed him and decided to see if that would work. He still didn't move, so I just left him there figuring I could try and fix it later or something.

Unsurprisingly, he did not go home at all, and he's probably still on that mountain, so I tried to just spawn in a copy of him to replace him. He spawned in wearing nothing except for his sword. I decided to just delete him as an npc and remake him from the top, but I'd like to know if anyone has any idea what might have caused him to do that? It was very concerning and I'd like to avoid having that happen again I think.

Edited March 1, 2018 by snaaaaaaakee

[Levionte]

1. You'll need a mod for that. The good follower overhaul mods have a "force recruit" that can make basically any npc a follower. If that's not good enough, you'll need a mod that adds the other vanilla voices to the formlist of available followers and/or makes a new follower system for them. I know a mod like that exists, but I don't remember what it is. Should be easy enough to google.

 

2. It's in the Actor entry. You can set their attributes, combat styles, class and the like. If I'm remembering correctly, attributes and class affect their statistics while combat style changes their tactics and tendencies.

 

3. I don't know of any list, but you can look at the conditions of the spell and see if your actor qualifies. I would guess humans can't dragon tail smash.

 

4. Console commands like "MoveTo" is probably your easiest solution. I give my followers "catch-up" packages and scripts to prevent that kind of thing, as most decent follower mods do. Easiest script to write is probably putting a MoveTo line in the alias script in the event the character gets Unloaded. If his AI is busted, that's a different problem. You'll have to find out which mod is telling him to be a goat and reset it.

Edited March 4, 2018 by Levionte

[varkonasnorse]

The first thing you need to do is get a spiral notebook and a sharp pencil. Write stuff down when you do it! Take the time. You will be a happier camper later on. :cool: