Immersive Follower Framework

A Follower AI Overhaul

Have you ever thought to yourself “I really need a sexy follower overhaul?” And not just any kind of sexy, but the sexy that will blow your mind, rock your socks, titillate your bait, tickle your pickle? Well now you can titillate your bait, rock your socks, float your boat…well you get it.

Introduction

Let's Say Hello!

Introducing the Sexy Follower Overhaul(PC)/Immersive Follower Framework(XB), the one stop shop to fill all your needs for managing followers. This is the most logical, comprehensive overhaul in an itty bitty sexy package. I'm going to go into some nitty gritty details so if you don't read what it does and break your follower AI, that's your fault. YOU CAN'T BE SEXY IF YOU DON'T READ! You deserve to be sexy, so keep reading.

*You can manage three active followers at any given time
*You can manage one animal follower at any given time
*Your followers will ride horses when you want them to (If using CH, you need to pick ONE follower horse management system, this one or CH's. Not both.)
*Your follower's horses can be set to graze, letting you continue on foot
*Your followers can have new outfits set
*Your followers will hang out and relax
*Your followers can use potions and learn new spells
*Followers are smarter ‘n the average bear, Yogi
*Followers are essential (with an option to allow them to die)
*THIS WILL NOT INTERFERE WITH INIGO OR FOLLOWERS ON THEIR OWN FRAMEWORK!
*Potential followers can be invited to hang out in your party palace**

The mod is set up out of the box without having to tinker every aspect of your followers for hours on end, leaving you with hundreds of extra sexy minutes to actually play the game. The game itself has limits however – how can you have a troupe of ten people fit inside Windcreek or Embershard at a time?!! You can't. So this limits you to a party of five (you, an animal, and three sexy followers). I find it unimmersive to allow more than a few people at a time to share my adventures. And you don't want be unimmersive do you?! That's what I thought!

Start

Let's Have Some Friends!

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. You love options right? How about sexy options?! This mod totally has sexy options.
Sexy 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. Note: We cannot be held responsible for adding a scripted mod in the middle of a current game.

Horses

Let's Ride!

If you have configured your followers to ride horses, you will be able to 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. SEXY 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.

Buy a Horse

Learn to Manage Horses

Use Horse Horn

Party Palace

Let's Get Down to Boogie!

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. #letsnotbestupidtogether

Set Your Home

Discuss Living Arrangements

Invite Your Friends Over

Marriage

Let Love Reign!

Marriage partners who are followers now have a special set of skills: they will sell the junk you picked up along the way. I mean, who doesn't want 50 scraps of paper and 20 blacksmith tongs hanging around?!! Please note that if you are running any other spouse mod, this might interfere with their duties. They're supposed to be your partners, not your employees.

Management

Let's Get Physical!

Potion Power
Followers use potions! That's right! They use VANILLA POTIONS, NOT CRAFTED. This is a nice way for you to not be burdened with potions, plus they won't slurp your more powerful ones. This is a win-win situation. Simply make sure they have a standard vanilla healing potion and it will be used. Note: 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. Yummy, potions.

Stewards
No longer will your follower auto-think “OH EM GEE! I MUST BE A STEWARD HERE!!11!!” 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 slave. Note: If you already have a Hireling as a Steward, the game will keep him or her in that alias.

Follower Spells
OldMansBeard is one sexy programmer! 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 dagger for their right 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

Combat

Let's Learn!

Followers will fight based on 2 things: their combat style and their class. These cannot be set via game. Even with SKSE, the functions don't settle unless we reset them each time. Therefore, it is up to the OMA's to properly set classes and combat styles for their own followers.

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. #followersarestubborn

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 Points in that specific tree. Afters so many 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 to level up and distribute those points. You control that on yourself. The game controls what NPCs 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. #omgdonelearning

Follower Trap Safety
For many years most of us OMA's slapped “light foot” on our custom followers to make sure they didn't trigger traps, but the perk doesn't activate unless the person with it has 40 points in sneak. Ugh. Makes it useless for us to slap on, so instead I've done something else which still leads to followers not setting off most traps, but for immersion purposes they can set off a few that don't have a default option of ignoring your current follower faction. If we were to program all the traps it would cause more issues than it's worth. It's a good idea to ask them to wait while you scope the area and disable traps yourself and then ask them to continue.

Please note this only works on traps that are labeled with “Bear trap” or “trigger trap base.” No, I don't have time to comb through EVERY trap in the world ever made by Skyrim, so whichever traps that you, the player, won't trigger with the right perk, your followers should be good as well. I'm not about to create bloated scripted events to handle this so be smart about the fact that even the smartest of people can bumble into traps. #Level9Immersion

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. #whoneedsCicero

Outfits

Let's Get Outfitted!

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.
2You 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 FOR THE ENGINE TO UPDATE AND KNOW THE NPC SHOULD WEAR SOMETHING. That's 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. If you are using a standalone follower that comes with their own set of gear and you clear their outfit, they will lose that gear so pay attention to the follower documentation! If you want to save that gear (because it's specially named) then take it from them first. Followers can only have 1 outfit at a time.

Trading

Let's Share Burdens!

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 (you cad! Lydia isn't a mule), 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). Remember: only YOU can prevent stupidity.

Relaxing

Let's Hang Out!

Nothing like telling your followers to stick around and have them hang out. Your Follower Management power allows you to Set Home which places a special marker in the location for them to hang around, or call them to you or to home. You can set your Home anywhere, even at your camp outside! Please, please PLEASE... when you call for your follower AT your home, take a step to the left or right. Sometimes the offset given for the spell gets silly and you end up with a warping follower. The way I have it set up is very very very very small papyrus fragment and I refuse to bloat the mod #fightthewater

Compatibility

It goes without saying you can't use this with other mods that overhaul followers. So don't do it. For the general use mods, place IFF like this in your LLO:

Immersion Mods
Relationship Dialogue Overhaul (if using)
Cutting Room Floor (if using)
Immersive Follower Framework
IFF/RDO Patch (if using both)

It's really that easy!

Credits

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

• © Tarsh Gaming 2016-2021 All rights reserved.
• Design: Prologue