guide Customize Followers for Compatibility or Taste

[Altwen]

This guide will outline some of the things I like to do when installing new followers in order to make them compatible and make them my own. Whether you are completely new to modding or a seasoned vet, you should be able to learn something or at least garner some inspiration from this guide.

 

It's highly recommended you have and know how to use the following programs:
Mod Organizer (MO2)
SSEEdit (xEdit)

Skyrim Creation Kit (CK)
Bodyslide

 

(If you don't have at least mod organizer and everything installed through there, you're probably going to need to look up a few other guides before this one is relevant)

 

Installing and Finding Your Follower

First, you will need a follower mod, but there's certainly no shortage of those so pick one or start customizing one you've already installed.

Spoiler

 

I found this, it's a pair of vampire sisters- how exciting! It's a good thing because I've been looking for an excuse to try out this new diamond skin texture that's hot on the Nexus right now. Simply choose download with mod manager and install. If you got your follower from somewhere else or there is no option to download through mod manager, you can find a button at the top of MO2 which says "Install a new mod from an archive" and select the zipped mod probably in your downloads folder. Installing a mod through mod organizer is just a fancy way of saying extract the archive to a new folder in your mo2/modprofilename/mods folder. MO2 uses a virtual file system so all the contents of a mod's folder is basically treated as being in your steam/common/skyrimspecialedition/data folder by the game or any apps you launch through MO2. Mods lower on the list overwrite identical files higher in the list, assuming your list is sorted by priority. Unchecking a mod in the list stops it from being loaded into the virtual file system, equivalent to actually moving or deleting every one of the mod's  files out of your game's directory, and it can be done or undone with a simple click! This is why MO2 is so powerful.

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Now that I've got it all installed let's go into the game and see what they look like... Only one problem, I don't know where the heck to find them and the mod author didn't post their in-game location. No problem because we have SSEEdit! Fire it up and load your follower .esp then check under "cell" and there should really only be one edit which is where they placed the follower(s)

 

Pro Tip™ when you first open xEdit and it has every single one of your plugins checked, press ctrl-a to select all and uncheck them all at once, then just check the single .esp you actually want to load

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I've located them, they're at Windhelm Palace of the Kings. Once I get in game I'll just open the console with ~ and type coc windhelmpalaceofthekings to teleport directly there. I'm not planning on saving so it's not like I'm cheating or anything...  You can use this page to find the coc ID for whatever place you're trying to teleport to. Here they are, and since they are made for CBBE there's no issues with how they look.

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Now we do the first thing everyone should do when installing a new follower mod, open the console, click on them, and type unequipall so we can see what they look like naked! Welp, that didn't go as planned.. I accidentally told them to attack something while trying to line them up for photos and they ended up wiping out Ulfric's entire personal guard. These girls are seriously OP, something I will definitely be changing in order to make them fit in my balanced and fair setup. Time to take some notes on what I want to do with these girls, well, besides the obvious...

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So I am writing some things down which will determine what kind of changes I'm about to make to them. I like to preserve the original design features while further emphasizing them where I can and of course balance them for my game. First things first, whatever body mesh they have is not mine so; I want to replace that as well as add in those diamond textures so I can finally see what all the fuss is about. This would also be the step that should fix your problems if you got a follower that uses a different body type than your main body.

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Replacing Meshes/Textures

I right click on the mod in MO2 and open in explorer only to be pleasantly surprised that the mod author has done an incredible job organizing and setting aside different body meshes and textures for both girls!

 

Pro Tip™ If they did not give two unique bodies and you wanted to put a different body or texture on each girl, you'd have to go into xEdit copy the shared naked skin armor addon (AA) by right clicking>copy as new record into>the same .esp, point it to a different body.nif, (likely with the same name but placed in a new folder, probably named for that actor) and do the same copying of the naked body armor which should be made to point to your new AA... inhales.. and then point that NPC to the new naked body armor. Of course, if you're changing textures you'll need to make a copy of the head and hands too, I hope you're following me here.. Alternatively you could use the same naked body but with a different texture set though we're not doing that since I want to give them separate meshes anyways.

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Now I can simply copy and paste the diamond textures overwriting the ones that came with the mod. I know they will work since it's CBBE textures on a CBBE body. If it were not a CBBE body it wouldn't matter anyways because I'm going to be replacing the meshes with my own CBBE meshes anyways. I found my textures in the mod I just installed called diamond skin, navigated through until I found the correct ones (textures/actors/character/female) I'll want to replace every one I can although I left the mouth alone since the one that came with the followers seems to have built in vampire teeth. I don't want to get rid of that. (this is why it's important to go in game and see what they're supposed to look like first) As a cherry on top, I used the "femaleheadvampire" files for one of the girls and just renamed them "femalehead" to match the originals. I'm not exactly sure what the difference is, but I'm hoping it means more diversity in their looks.

 

If your follower came with its textures packed in a .bsa you will need to use BAE and extract the textures folder to the mod folder (i.e. mods/modname/textures) You can delete any of the extracted files that aren't being changed since they will be loaded from the .bsa instead. Alternatively you could just copy the file structure without extracting by creating new folders with the same names and copy your textures there. Loose files always overwrite .bsa compressed files but you'll want to try and load as few loose files as possible since they'll increase load times and ram usage.

 

Just like textures, you can find your body meshes by right clicking whichever mod is responsible for your body, in my case it's 3BBB, and in the meshes/actors/character/characterassets folder is femalebody_0 and _1 (meaning low and high weight) you'll likely want to copy body, head, and hands since they're all made to fit together; copy these into the corresponding meshes folder from your follower mod and viola, the follower has your main body and can accept any compatible skin textures!

 

Pro Tip™ if the mod author really hates you, himself, or is just foreign or noob at modding, they might not make things nice and neat with their bodies named something normal like "femalebody_1.nif" Depending on the mod, you might have to check out the actual AA through xEdit by finding the NPC and what naked body armor they're using, finding the naked body armor to see what AA it's using, and finding that AA so you can rename the .nifs properly. So long as the mesh the AA is pointing to has the same name and is in the same folder directory, you should be fine.

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Now for the fun part, I like to give some followers unique bodies and I do so by loading up my preset in bodyslide and making very minor adjustments to it. As you can see on the left of my desktop, I've backed up my original body files because bodyslide will overwrite them. Once I'm done and I "build" this body, I'll just move the newly generated body files into the followers directory and restore my originals. I've decided I'm going to give Mariana a stout build, I made her boobs larger but droopy, belly less defined and more round, upper hips wider, arm muscles bigger, and her butt flatter though more muscular. The other follower I've decided to keep at my default bodyslide for now, the important thing to me is that they're not identical and they have some variety. I only want to make very slight changes to the bodyslide because I have a ton of armors that are already fit to my default body. By making very small changes, or ones which result in the same general mass but with different shape, it means their body will immersively fit into and out of any of my existing armor, so basically.. it just works.

 

Pro Tip™ If you want to play with sliders while maintaining the same general size so that it fits properly with your armor, rotate the body to a sideways angle and move it until it's just touching the edge of the window, then you can play around with the sliders while using the edge of the window as a marker making sure you don't shrink or grow too far beyond the original preset.

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Editing Plugin Data

I have replaced the textures and meshes and now it's time to crack open xedit once again to add some personal touches. Weight is a scale between 0-100 and literally corresponds with the femalebody_0 and _1 files, it's a clever way that the game can use two files to generate 100 size variants. With my bodyslide, it's basically a scale of bony teeanager to voluptuous goddess; but within reason, I'm sorry but there's no quadruple F cups in my game. Your mileage may vary depending on what bodyslide you use. Height is literally actor scale, the same as if you go in game and use the console command setscale, it's pretty touchy so I'd only recommend altering it by small .01 increments. I set Mariana to 100 weight and .98 height, making her a lil shorter while mainting her waifu thicc status and set Laura to 1.04 Height and 70 weight, making her taller yet still above average in the juicy department.

 

Pro Tip™ While you're in game testing, you could use setscale console command to help determine what height you want for your follower by seeing it in game first. This way you can even factor things such as high heels.

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I also decided to change their voice types to sultry for Mariana and condescending for Laura. I think it's a good fit for their looks and gives them further contrast, plus it's the first follower I have with the condescending voice so it actually makes her more interesting despite sounding like a bitch.

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I noticed that one of the girl's summons was called something like "Corrupted Shade Melee 1H" and that just doesn't sit right with me, so I edited the names of all the summons to be something more immersive. Same with the rings, they were called "Laura Custom Race Vampire Immersion Killer Ring 5000 of the Erudite" so I renamed those too. Anything you want is just an xEdit away...

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Now it's time to roll up those sleeves and get down and dirty into the CK because these girls are way too OP and I don't know how to delete inventories from xEdit. Start with loading up the plugin by going to file>data>followerpluginnamehere.esp Speaking of which, if it's an .esl you'd better go into xedit and delete the flag under file header and rename the file to .esp before doing any edits unless you really know what you're doing but .esl is nothing but trouble in my experience.  Make sure you click "set as active file" and load the plugin.

 

Pro Tip™ As with many things in Skyrim modding, or file exploring in general, you can type the first letters of your mod to quickly find it if you have a large list of plugins.

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On the left I click actors, I have to sort by name to find them since apparently the mod author is an ex Bethesda employee who just made the editor ID the same as the NPC name out of habit (it's nice if they use a prefix for easy access) Ah yes, I'm looking through these inventories: 2000 gold, mehrunes razor, custom enchanted ebony weapon, every spelltome for their op summons, 5 lockpicks.. This will not do, 5 lockpicks?? That's a game breaker right there, do you know how rare and expensive lockpicks are in my game!? So I've deleted all of their inventories aside from a special ring the mod author claims they need to regen mana, I'll leave those for further testing, I gave them default leather and hide outfits respectively since the player shouldn't be getting free mid/high tier stuff by simply visiting Windhelm. These options are under the actor's inventory tab, just delete things you don't want them to have and you can change their outfit in the little drop down menu. I used vanilla outifts like HideOutfitSimple or something weak as I like to have the opportunity to level and gear up with them. I also replaced their ebony weapons with the iron equivalent by finding items>weapons on the left panel and dragging the weapon I want into their inventory. When you're in the editor, you press "ok" after you've made changes to save them, then you can hit the save button on top of the CK to save the plugin. Don't hit "ok" on anything unless you've specifically made changes you want to save to that form, if you accidentally open iron greatsword and hit "ok" to close it, you just saved a new record in the followers plugin which will overwrite the vanilla iron greatsword, that's called an ITM (identical to master) running SSEEdit auto quick clean on your plugin will remove ITMs if they happen..

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Well,  let's see how they look!

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I think they're pissed I took all their things..

 

The new skin is alright, it's very bright, probably meant to be used with EnB which I refuse, weighing my options, I could easily revert to default textures. Laura seems quite broad around the shoulders so I might want to change that as well.. Can you tell which one has the condecending voice? Then again, we haven't even gotten around to balancing (deleting!) the god summons they get at level 5.. There's always more that can be done, but for now hopfully you've learned a little more about how to make your followers fit in with your playstyle while giving them a more personal touch.

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[Grey Cloud]

Interesting idea and a good start.

A couple of points:

Not sure if it has been ported to SE but Manipulator by ffabris here on LL, is a nifty little mod which allows you to do all sorts of things including stripping an NPC. I have that function hotkeyed so in game I can just hit F7 and strip them while I have a look at them, then F7 and they re-dress. It also allows you to look at any NPCs inventory.

 

Setting default outfit and weapons can be done in T5E simply enough. Lot easier than relying on the CK.