So a while ago i started the blades quest, and i made lydia, who was my follower at the time, a blade as well. recently, i decided i should recruit two other followers as well, to finish the quest. i dismissed lydia, and then went to recruit other followers for the blades (i chose one of my other house carls and one of the mages from the college of winterhold). after getting the third recruit, i wanted to have lydia as my follower again, only now i can't find her. she isn't waiting for me in breezehome, she isn't showing up at mount anthor for the kill the dragon quest i got from esbern (the other 2 i recruited are there, but no lydia), and she isn't waiting at the solitude house where i picked up the other housecarl (i read somewhere that if you have dawnguard, she may just stay where she is once dismissed). i haven't checked the college, and i doubt she's there because i didn't pick her up again after recruiting my housecarl. i've tried using console commands to find her, but i had the problem a while ago where i accidentally killed her, and i used a console command to spawn a new lydia, then gave her everything from the corpse of the first. now, whenever i use the player.placeat console command, i automatically teleport to where lydia first died, not where the new one is. normally, i would just spawn another lydia with console commands, but i would be losing all the gear i had given her, which included a full set of daedric gear as well as a lot of my dragon bones/scales. how can i find her so i can get her back in my life?

Did you check Skyhaven Temple?

Don't create copies of dead named NPCs, it can create problems - use the resurrect command if you really want to bring a follower back. You're likely teleporting to the 'old' Lydia because you're using her ID in the console command, not the ID of the 'new' Lydia. You could try the console command help "Lydia" to try and get the correct ID.

You can also create copies of lost equipment via the console.

I only realized after this string of events that it can cause problems. When i used the console commands to create the copy of her, it was the first time i had actually used console commands, so i didn't know it cause problems for me later. as for the help command, the id it gives me isn't helping me get the current lydia back. and i know for a fact that the current one isn't dead, because after creating the copy, i used the console command setessential to make sure she didn't die again.

yes, after she wasn't in my house in solitude or in whiterun, but she wasn't there either