Immersive Follower Framework

• You will be quietly given the Follower Management Power after you have completed the Skyrim intro/Alt Start Choice and are outside. Once you activate it (shout menu), you will be able to select from the options presented.
• Options include: Allow Followers to Ride Horses, Set Home or Call Follower if they are stuck.

If you forget to dismiss a current follower on the vanilla system, you will get a notification on it that you forgot to dismiss your follower. You will need to roll back a save so that the system updates the quest. Remember: We cannot be held responsible for adding a scripted mod in the middle of a current game.

If you buy a horse, it only makes sense your followers can ride horses, too. Skulvar Sable-Hilt has three beautiful horses ready for your followers to ride. You can go on foot with your followers at any time and set your horses to any grazing area you decide and find them where you left them. These horses are hardy and will not perish.

Make sure you have configured your followers to ride horses before you talk to Skulvar Sable-Hilt.

Purchase 3 horses from Skulvar Sable-Hilt at Whiterun Stables at 500 Septims per horse. He will also teach you how to manage your horses for 100 Septims, which will present you with another shout power to use (it’s not an item).

When you use your Horse Horn power you’ll be presented with options. These options include setting a grazing area to unhitch your horses if you want to walk instead of ride. The side effect of having follower horses is this: if you buy the horses before having a follower to ride them, the horses will auto follow you until you set a grazing area. This is a nice way to keep track of them.

Sometimes you meet friends that you want to roommate with. Don’t worry, with Immersive Follower Framework any potential follower you come across can be invited to live in your home. Up to ten friends! Your home can be set to a camp outdoors, or a castle in the skies. Wherever your head rests, so will your friends.

You can also ask friends from around Skyrim to come join you at your party palace*. That’s right. If the person you talk to has the potential to be a follower, you can ask them to hang around and do stuff. Please note if you dismiss a current follower, you need to talk to them again and let them know it’s okay to keep hanging out where they were, otherwise they’ll head back to their home location. If you ask a potential follower who has quests or dialogues to finish up and you break that quest, you have only yourself to blame.

Don’t forget! If you lose a follower you can call them to where you are, anywhere in the world.

*Party Palace is your personal home, or alternatively,  you can download the one OMB created.

Followers will fight based on 2 things: their combat style and their class. These cannot be set in game. Script extenders do not fix this either because it’s hard programmed to the actor directly.

A class determines how points are distributed when leveling up. If a follower’s class is supposed to be mage, but they have more points in one handed, at some point they’re going to want to fight with a one handed weapons instead of magic. Combat has slider options for how often they will perform a spell, or fighting, and also sets for Dual Wielding. So even if you teach your follower every spell, they’re only going to use them if they want to.

Classes

Inside the CK are two values in their given Class that the PC doesn’t worry about. As you know, when you use a one handed weapon, after so many swings/connects you earn Actor Value (AV) Points in that specific tree. After enough points you earn a Perk which is a bonus to the fact you’ve been using that tree. During this time you also earn enough Experience Points (EXP) to level up and distribute those points. You control that on yourself. The game controls what NPCs have and do. These weights are governed by the Class (more below).

Classes given by Bethesda fall short of what is appropriate for NPCs, especially followers. Perks like Smithing, Alchemy and Pickpocket are wasted because NPCs don’t actively use anything from that tree. Since this mod edits for a better follower system, I have altered all the base game system to remove useless point distribution and allocated them to more useful slots. Since “light foot” is useless without actor value points into the sneak tree, so every class has the ability to allocate at least one point into sneak which should be helpful.

NPCs get 16 Skill Weight points. (The base game was 8 which leads to improper calculations later on). These weights will not affect the toughness of the game or interfere with combat mods. This is by far more of a patch to the vanilla framework to keep it in line with what the game actually does at run time.

Follower Trap Safety

For many years many authors applied “light foot” on custom followers to make sure they didn’t trigger traps, but the perk doesn’t activate unless the actor with Light Foot perk already has 40 points in sneak. With IFF, basic traps are now set to ignore the follower faction.

Please note this only works on traps that are labeled with “Bear trap” or “trigger trap base.” Whichever traps that you, the player, won’t trigger with the right perk, your followers should be good as well. So they can get hurt by the swinging traps or spike traps and set them off; be careful!

Part of the comprehensive overhaul is making sure your followers are self-sufficient and able to learn.

Potion Power

Followers use potions! That’s right! They use base game, vanilla potions. Not the ones you craft through the alchemy station. In this way your lower level potions, or potions you won’t use, won’t take up space and it will allow them to keep fighting through the pain. Simply make sure they have a standard vanilla healing potion and it will be used. Remember: we do not touch vanilla potions directly – if you use mods that edit potions, those affects are going to be on your follower as well.

Stewards

Your followers will not become Stewards by entering into your local Hold Homes. Instead the dialogue is pulled up when you are at the location of a Hearthfire home and you must pick them to be an actual steward. Hirelings are not available for this option- they are there to be paid for their work, not your house servant. Note: If you already have a Hireling as a Steward, the game will keep him or her in that alias.

Follower Spells

The idea of followers learning spells is a tad daunting. This can be a bloated feature or a streamlined feature. We decided on streamlined because bloat is never good for anyone (we prefer our mods salt-free). There are two ways to teach your follower a spell, via dialogue or handing them a specially crafted spell tome. OMB has a special set up for placing the book in the follower’s inventory: they will only learn the spell if they’ve proven to be an actual spellcaster by having actually cast a spell themselves (after all, a two handed warrior has little use for a firebolt!).

In order to do this, you must take a regular spell tome to a tanning rack and convert it into a Learning Tome. Then you either talk to the follower or hand them the tome. That’s it. Super easy. Please remember- a follower will not cast a spell if they have a two handed weapon in their hand. Spells are cast by their left hand, or sometimes right, so if you wish you can give them a one-handed weapon for their free hand.

The following spells are able to be learned:

Frost: Ice Spike, Ice Storm, Frostbite, Icy Spear
Fire: Firebolt, Flames, Fireball, Wall of Flames, Incinerate
Storm: Lightning Bolt, Sparks, Thunderbolt , Chain Lightning, Wall of Storms
Other: Conjure Familiar, Conjure Flame/Frost/Storm Atronach, Stone/Oak/Ironflesh, Lesser/Greater/Steadfast Ward

Follower Enchanted Items

Followers only benefit from very specific enchants, notably fortify health, magicka, stamina and their rates, carry weight (although this is buggy so use their backpacks instead, you rotten pack muler), fortify unarmed damage, resist to magic types and waterbreathing…well they can’t drown anyway but this causes them to not surface. If you insist on using mods that bloat how many enchants you can wear and your followers wear, YOU run the risk of destabilising your game.

Unstuck Me You Cad!

Debugging- Followers can sometimes get stuck, which sucks. Their packages won’t update and they do stupid things. Simply walk up to them and say “Let’s Chat!” You are then offered a choice to tell them a joke. They will laugh and the game evaluates their packages. This will help if they are still following you when they should be sandboxing. I decided to go this route so that your game isn’t constantly being asked to register update events. Much more elegant and besides, who doesn’t love it when someone laughs at your jokes.

Outfits

Outfits can be stubborn to manage because they are set first inside the CK and custom followers generally don’t want to change outfits. We’ve simplified the issue as much as we possibly can. If you ever wondered why some follower mods come naked it’s so that you can hand them new items to wear and they will actually wear them.

You can ‘Clear Outfit’ by which the follower you are talking to is equipped only with a silver ring. Any item you give them after, they will equip if it is best including, but not limited to, clothing. You have to trade an item with the follower for them to know what to wear. This is an engine limitation. Also, followers can be silly and forget to wear clothing. Anyway, the clear outfit is the simplest way to force followers to wear what you hand them and the one I prefer this way personally.

Once you are at the appropriate level for other gear, you will find more dialogue opens up. If you use an unleveling mod for loot and find a full set of Daedric at level 5 you want them to wear, then set their clear outfit and hand them their items. You start with a simple robe, fur armour and iron outfits. Do not use this feature on custom standalone followers in case you break their customization.

Trading

Followers have two ways to trade- Exchange, which puts items in their inventory and they’ll equip it if they think it’s best or just hang onto your junk , or Backpack, which puts items you don’t want them wearing into a cloud location which means a lot less item load when travelling.

You are limited to 120 Backpack capacity (they carry 40 pounds extra junk per follower). Please remember that by default, the game is limited to a certain amount of memory of data for inside cells. By going over this amount, you will cause instability and crashing which is why I provide for your spouses to be vendors as well. But seriously, stop picking up everything. It’s okay to let that bucket be a bucket (Embry might have use for it, after all).

Immersion or NPC AI on your Logical Load Order sheet.

Add mod to your favorites from the Bethesda.net website.

Download mod to your library from in-game.

Enable.

Have fun.

Vader and Tarshana for the initial Idea

Tarshana: initial follower framework set up, horses, outfits, let’s chat/update function, backpack and saddlebag options

OMB: scripting work and idea guru for potions and spell tomes, fixes to the DB and Serana follower framework, makes it so unique followers in other mods can’t sneak into IFF’s dialog, makes it so Delphine will still recruit blades, adjustments to the Stewards and hooking the mod into the USSEP fixes so that everything runs peachy keen

Testers: OMB, Tarsh, Kojo, Ender, Doc, DeusZERO and Chris