(Posting here rather than the Spoilers forum because...well, I'm actually trying to find a way to create a mod to "fix" this. For my personal use/testing if nothing else.)

Okay, so--it's well known that when you take the Odahviing Express to Skuldafn, your follower goes walkabout and will not accompany you the last leg of the main quest. Which...I frankly find stupidly aggravating from an RP perspective, but that's an argument for another thread.

What I'm trying to figure out now is how and why your follower is prevented from going to Skuldafn/Sovngarde with you.

I've nosed around in the Creation Kit a bit and can't seem to track down the cause. I know for other areas where your follower can't go (Nightcaller Temple, the Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary, etc.), there's a script, "defaultNoFollowDoorScript," that prevents this and spits out the "your follower cannot accompany you here" message. However, this script isn't attached to anything related to Odahviing, Skuldafn, and so on. Guess that would be too easy.

I've turned over pretty much every stone--scripts, dialogue, actors, etc. on MQ303 and still can't pinpoint whatever it is that's keeping followers away from Skuldafn. Then again, my knowledge of modding is still stuck somewhere halfway between Morrowind and Oblivion, so it's very possible I'm missing something. Anyone have any ideas?

I'm unsure without looking, try looking for a trigger or something at the locations this happens. otherwise, idk sorry.

I'll be taking a look at this in the next few days, as it's something I need to look into for my own follower mod. I will report back my findings if nobody beats me to it.

I can say that:

1) I don't think there is anything that prevents a follower from interacting correctly in Skuldafn once you get them there. My follower has a teleport ring, and once I teleport her to Skudafn, everything works fine there and she even follows through the portal to Sovngarde automatically. So you might be able to just add a location change Story Manager event to trigger a small quest/script to transfer the follower when the player makes the trip to Skuldafn.

2) Followers don't return from Sovngarde when you get sent back to Nirn, so again, you'll need to add some sort of functionality to bring them back with you.

I've checked the Skuldafn cells out pretty thoroughly, as well as the Odahviing actor and all the MQ303 quest stages and dialogue, and can't find anything that seems specifically geared towards stopping a follower from...well, following. It's entirely possible I'm missing something, though I can't think of what.

I suspect it has something to do with the cutscene you get of the PC hopping on Odahviing and flying off into the distance, but exactly what and where and why I'm not sure.


I would definitely appreciate that!


Yeah, I figured actually getting them to Skuldafn/Sovngarde would only be half the battle. I'll worry about that bridge--and possibly the scripting; oh dears --assuming I even manage to make it that far.

FWIW, I had a look at this over the weekend. I think what happens is that the quest just uses the MoveTo command on the PC to move them to Skuldafn (in stage 60 of MQ303), but doesn't touch the follower. And because the follower cannot path to Skuldafn, they end up staying in Whiterun.

In other words it's not that anything was added to "prevent" the follower from accompanying the player; there's not any sort of block on them doing so (as with defaultNoFollowDoorScript). It's just that the way the quest is written, there's nothing that tells the follower to move with the player. And it would be needed in this case, because unlike some of the fast travel functionality that seems hard-coded to bring followers with you, the MoveTo command only impacts the object it is used on.

Cheers for that--that explains why I couldn't find the cause. I was looking for something deliberately stopping a follower from accompanying you. This looks like it was more a mistake rather than deliberate. I assume the MoveTo command is used on the PC at the end of the MQ as well, to get them out of Sovngarde--which explains why even if you do manage to get a follower to Skuldafn/Sovngarde, they don't then follow you out.

What's the best way to go about addressing this, then? Change the MoveTo command to something else? Or is there a way to include followers in the MoveTo command as well?

you might be able to substitute MovetTo with Game.FastTravel. fastTravel will bring all accompanying followers with you whereas moveto will not. FT function doesn't always work though, but its worth a shot.

if it wasnt for the navmesh bug, you could create a dummy door that connects skuldafn to tamriel so that followers can reach it by "foot" and then you would substitute moveto with dummydoor.Activate(game.getplayer()) then it's as if you used to door to go to skuldafn, in which case all followers come along.... in theory. but the navmesh bug will likely kick in and throw it out the window (since you would have to finalize the navmesh in a esp in order for the door to even be recognized at all)

Yeah, using some kind of dummy door system was the first thing I thought of, but I had a feeling it would lead to navmesh issues, or something else equally terrible. Fast travel will probably be the way to go, then--though when you say it doesn't always work, are you referring to the fact that followers will sometimes fall off the face of Nirn when fast traveling? I've had that happen a few times, but as I don't use fast travel very often (if at all) I can't say how often it happens in normal play. Unfortunately I can't think of an alternative that won't lead to navmesh issues.

I'll have to test out substituting fastTravel then, see if anything explodes.

fasttravel is affected by navmesh to some degree (primarily origin's navmesh in this case)

some things i have learned about fast travel:

if the destination is an interior cell, will generally not work (might have something to do with that interior's permissions for fast travel).
if the destination is a non-tamriel worldspace, all actors including the player will be sent to have tea with sithis in the void. this can only be prevented if the origin's navmesh is on an esm (either skyrim.esm, or custom mod converted to esm)
if the destination's navmesh is on an esp, followers might get lost (navmesh bug)
if the origin's navmesh is on an esp interior cell and that cell has past the unknown "threshold" for esp memory limit, and the destination is a non-tamriel worldspace, the game will CTD (can be avoided by either converting origin to esm or sending party to an empty "purgatory" first, to dump the memory, then to the worldspace)
if the destination's navmesh is in a worldspace that has no landscape or landmass data (i.e. statics-only) the entire party as well as any actors in the currently loaded cells will levitate into the air with no possibility of getting down (fast travelling to a vanilla, non-modified tamriel navmesh might solve the problem, but not always)

typically vanilla to vanilla fast travel will always work except for destination interior cells.

You could use a mantle type spell to take the id of all the characters following the player (if getteammate || isinfaction("currentfollower"...) and place them in a list. When the player is moved to the destination point using the moveto command you can use the same command in each character on the list using a while loop (I have already used all of this except the moveto part, so it works).

EDIT: one more thing. Don't forget to clear the list after the while loop.


EDIT2: Oops! I said mantle type spell. I mean cloak type. Sorry.

I didn't actually check this, but maybe it's simply the reason that scripts/whatever that teleports you simply doesn't reference them? Everythin that teleports you, and is not related to fast travelling doesn't affect the followers, I had that every time. For example, yesterday I was doing a quest for Meridia where she teleports you twice during that quest, and both times Lydia was left in front of the statue.