Anybody else have a bug where the companion Constance refuses to follow you walking, and instead just sort of hovers around, with her legs moving like she's treading water?

It happened to me once.

She could have her strength attribute damage, have you tried to cast Restore strength or Cure common/blight disease on her ?

Well, this happened as I arrived in her starting area for the first time, so I never saw her ever walk normally. I don't have those spells, is there an easy way to apply them to her to see if that fixes the issue?

Thanks!

That's weird then, it didn't happen to me before I finished her questline.

Do you use other mods?

Plenty, although most of them are as a result of installing Morrowind Oblivion Overhaul, MGE etc. in a preconfigured setup with an extensive guide. Haven't had any other probelms with it, aside from some missing spell-related NIFs I'm trying to resolve as well. I'll post my load order when I get home this evening.

One common trick to kind of "restart" a companion's AI is to:

Hit the ~ key to open the console thingy, click on Constance so that her ID is selected, type "StartCombat Player" and hit enter, and then (still with the console up) type "StopCombat" and hit enter. Then exit the console (press '~' again). Starting and then stopping combat should "reset" her.

Not sure about your specific problem, but it's worth a shot!

Apparently, this she-not-following-you issue is linked with the dancing animation that is attached to her. Do you use animation replacers ?

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/15712-name-thief-companion-constance/page-2

Thanks guys, I'll try the console commands and check for animation mods. I know I haven't installed any knowingly, unless some have come in via the overhaul mod(s) I installed by the book. I've been installing mods for these games for years so I'm generally careful what I throw in there.

If I had to guess, you should probably download the animkit, and run the repair animations function.

The MGSO credits list LizTail's AnimKit and Dirnae's Animation Mod.

Sounds like what happens in my game at times. I've had success telling her to dance and after dancing for a moment telling her to stop. Also check her encumbrance, might be overloaded.

Thank you for this! I had noticed that starting combat with something would fix her but sometimes there's nothing in the cell to start combat with. Never thought of using the console.

I tried the console Start+Stop player drill but it had no effect. Ran the Morrowind AnimeKit UI (it was already installed) and disabled Dirnae's Animation Mod which was the only one installed (there was a Dancing mod in the list but no installed) and still no luck, even when I did Start+Stop again

Emma said on the thread about Constance that it was better to let her in Wander mode when installing mods after her mod.

From what I remember, when it happened to me with Constance, I could always mess around until she's eventually fixed. I didn't use MGSO or an animation mod, though.

Did you unpause between StartCombat and StopCombat? Does she not even try to attack? Did you try to get her to follow you from the dialog afterward?

Try messing around with it, you can also try to run the following console commands on her, and also attack her, to see if any get her to move:
aiwander 100 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 (try just aiwander 100 first, you may be able to skip trailing zeroes)
aifollow player 0 0 0 0

EDIT: Even if they work, an NPC might not immediately start moving after calling those functions, especially the first one, so be patient for a little bit.

If those and StartCombat player all don't work, maybe try getting her to fight something else, like a rat. You could try placeatme rat 1 1 1 1 and then StartCombat rat.
If you get her to move at all, then problem solved. Just get her to follow you again, afterward. If she insists on fighting you, SetFight 0 and StopCombat will stop it.

If nothing works, to rule out some stuff (you could try this first, really), run getspeed on her to see if her Speed is drained to 0. Run getfatigue to see if her Fatigue isn't negative. You can also use setstrength 999 to rule out overencumbrance, but you can probably just see that in the Share interface. If it's still unfixable, it might be related to animation modding, I guess (leftovers in the save?). I'm not familiar with that side of the issue. In that case, perhaps running an animation playing function from the console might possibly help, or not...

As a hard fix, you could delete the current Constance and spawn a new one using the console, but that's not desirable, as she'll be in the state she is in the beginning of the mod (including script vars), so you'll probably lose progress, and it may create other problems. A better approach to do the same might be to unload the Constance mod, make a save without it, then load it again and start over with her from the new save.

Did you try the animfix program? It does sound like an animation conflict.

Thanks Nakashi I'll give those a shot and report what I find. Kateri, yes I did try AnimKit, used it to disable Dirnae's Animation mod (see previous post).

This may sound stupid, but you did press the fix animation errors button, in the bottomof the anim kit window, not the apply animation mods button right?, and you also verified it was set to the correct file path in the top of the anim kit for morrowind.exe right?

it could be AI problem due to warping around and trying to reach old destinations as already said. This is usually solved forcing the NPC to combat something like explained: important thing is to exit the console after startcombat player, wait for it to apply (e.g. hear combat voice), reopen console and type stopcombat. Usually the startcombat player can be replaced with punching the companion bare-fisted.

Another common cause of problem could be companion having strength reduced to 0 due to bonewalkers Brown Rot disease or other blight disease. In this case, Better cure/restore than force strength high with modstrength/setstrength.

In case of advanced companions, often there are spells available, e.g. for Constance
you can try opening console, click constance and type
cast aa_con_cure player

then
cast 1gr_restore player

for generic companions, you can try curing from blight with e.g. a Scroll of Daerir's Blessing
player->AddItem cureblight_ranged_en 1
and from common disease with a cure common disease scroll e.g.
player->AddItem "cure common disease victim" 1
then make the NPC restore strength
e.g. open console, click the companion to see the companion id in console header, type
cast "restore strength"
(you can try restoring other attributes with similar spells, e.g.
cast "restore speed"


[EDIT]typos

Yeah, you don't want a companion with 999 Strength; my instructions were merely to identify possible problems. If a specific one is identified, then it's trivial to reload the save and solve it. That one I just included for completeness, though, as companion overencumbered-ness is easy to identify even without using the console, in the Share interface or by the NPC, normally, still turning and attacking but not being able to move.

Yeah, I think this is the way to do it (whereas in my post I said not to exit the console) -- definitely wait until you hear her say something like "I'll kill you!" before halting combat. Sorry for the misinformation! I guess it's just been a very long time since I've played...

Hi guys, thanks again for all the input. Matilija's suggestion to run "fix animation errors" in the AnimKit worked, I hadn't done that prviously (only disabled Dirnae's animation mod).

Happy days

That's great to hear. Constance is one of the best companion mods out there, it would have been a shame if you had had to ditch her.

^Yeah. Nice.

Yeah she's Vilja for Morrowind. Probably talks as much too!