After setting up a player home and getting the Navmesh working from using the CK Turorials and Youtube vids ( I presume it's working as followers have no issue following me about). I'm looking to bring followers and spouse in and not standing around like dummies.

I've read up as much as my limited understanding allows and as far as I can gather, the follower/spouse routine in the house is mainly controlled by sandbox and idlemarkers when not following the player. I've set up preferred pathing between the focal points of the house, I would now like them to do alchemy/enchanting etc when left to their own devices.

How do you set up up sandbox to effect the variety of followers/choice of spouses that could come to your home? I've found the player house sandboxes in the CK that list all the actions I want them to do but I can't seem to make them operate ingame... am I missing something basic?

Could you give a few more details about what's going wrong?

There's a couple issues you may be running into. One may be the navmesh bug, which makes NPC's in custom houses stand around doing nothing if you've entered that space several times in a single play session (basically the navmesh load the first time you enter that session, but will not reload when you return).

Another issue is that your sandbox package might be conflicting with other sandbox packages already running on the NPC. To get a spouse to move, you need to clear the current house sandbox and apply the new one (the vanilla marriage quest does it through a quest alias). Take a look at the script RelationshipMarriageSpouseFIN (or something very close to that) for a sense of how the vanilla spouse moves worked. You might take a look at our http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1351014-adding-spouse-to-new-player-home/ for some ideas about this, too.

Now a problem some of us have run into is that if you assign a custom sandbox to a spouse, another mod will not be able to clear that sandbox because it has no way of knowing its name (so you can switch between your mod and the vanilla houses, but not between two mods, which is fine if you only use one custom house, but a lot of Skyrim players try out multiple houses at once.).

Emma and Amgepo put out their Spouses Can Live Everywhere mod yesterday, which is a nice, elegant solution to the issue. There, too, if you're using that mod, you wouldn't necessarily be able to clear their ai package to replace with a different custom one, but you don't need to because their package will update the location where the sandbox package will be active with a simple spell.

Their package should allow your spouse to interact with all idle markers, crafting stations, and basic furniture.

I am using Emma and Amgepo's mod and it works with my spouse Aela. She does appear inside the house after travelling time but when she does, she just stands still. I first of all thought it was a navmesh issue and I did think about the navmesh bug but from what I understand, that wouldn't kick in if I was starting a new play session. If I ask Aela to follow me, she will follow me anywhere inside the house. When we part ways, she just stands still so it does seem like a navmesh issue from that point of view as there is plenty of stuff for her to interact with.

If it is a navmesh issue, I'm not sure what else to do there. the navmesh has been checked and finalized. This is why I was looking at the sandbox to see if I had missed something there.

I have been following your thread so I'll have another look to see if I've missed something.

I don't have any other mods that could conflict with sandbox.

Might be a silly question. Have you checked the patrol checkbox on all the markers, items you want them to use?

Not created patrols yet, I didn't think it was needed as everything is centralized. I created a follower to live in the house and she does all the things that were put in her package including walking from one room to another to sleep/work in the armoury.

Aela will work in the armoury if I place her there but she won't go into the kitchen or bedroom like the follower.

It's not about patrols. You need to apply one of the DefautlSomethingSandbox AI Packages on your companion I believe. Or even better, create a custom AI package based off one of these.

Are you using the last update of Spouses Can Live Everywhere? We updated it to allow AI pacakge to operate in a greater radius (8 times greater), as the default package while enough to vanilla size homes wasn't enough for the greater ones. As you said Aela won't go from one room to another, it seems you are using the previous version.

Dudster, with the house mod, I could apply the same parameters to Aela that I have done with my house follower and I'm sure that would solve it. However, I can't do that for other people who download the house mod (it's called Boulders btw and it's a little on the large side:)

Amgepo (thanks for the mod), I am using the latest version but she still isn't moving to the bedroom/kitchen although she keeps herself occupied in the armoury. As your mod works for others, it makes me think that I'm missing something in ck construction. Am currently experimenting with idle markers etc. Also, I might backup the data folder and do a fresh, one-by-one mod install to see if anything is conflicting.

Could it possibly have something to do with Aela? I think NPC's sometimes have certain behaviors that are allowed or disallowed. So, if her basic characteristics tell her that she won't do housework, she'll ignore sweeping markers even if her AI package allows them. And make sure your bed is owned by PlayerBedFaction.