A lot of people seem to be posting about lost followers, so here is a series of steps that can help locate/respawn them to you or find them if they've been lost.

Note that in hardcoe mode followers can be killed, if they are not marked "essential" than these steps may not work if they have been killed.


1) Wait 24 hours, see if they have been trying to run to your location. This especially applies to followers that are triggered to spawn at a location by a quest, like Lilly. Note, save before you do this if your game is set to autosave after waiting to avoid saving your game in a bugged/incomplete state.

2) enter an indoor location, followers are set to spawn to you when you change maps but this doesn't work outdoors. They might respawn right next to you.

3) Check to see if you still have their perk. If you do, you may need to wait/sleep/do other things and see if after a week of in-game time or so it says you have lost their perk. you can skip right to the below if you don't have the perk or you are impatient.

4) check the lucky 38/your home base if you haven't unlocked the 38 or have lost access to it. Usually before reaching New Vegas and speaking to Mr. House this will be your motel in Novac if you have it. If you don't have any home base, go to #5 and hope for the best. the doctor's office in goodsprings is not considered a "base" and I've never seen it or heard reports of NPCs hanging out there but check to be sure.

5) Check the NPC's spawn location, IE, in Primm for ED-E, the Follower fort in Freeside for Gannon, ect.

6) if on PC, use the console to force-move you to their location of them to yours.

7) if on a console without access to the console (how ironic!) or if the NPC doesn't act normally after being force-spawned at your location, curse loudly, reload a prior save

8) come to the forums to yell at the devs.

Note, step 8 is a last resort... not a first, second or third. Yes bugs svck. But bugs are also an inevitable part of any game with scripting and AI more complex than "follow player, shoot at things durr." If you wanted a game with simple, crude scripting you'd go play Halo. Give the devs the benefit of the doubt and try to resolve the problem yourself before you come here. In many cases it's faster and easier to solve it yourself using the console or other resolution steps rather than hoping for a patch fix or reloading a save that loses you hours of work.