What is WK Followers? Take a great game with an incredibly engaged modding community, say Skyrim, and an overly ambitious woman who took it upon herself to add more life to the otherwise unfortunately lackluster selection of Skyrim companions and you get Weedsekatze Followers. A pack of six standalone, fully voiced companions with their own follower framework, affinity system, personal quests and romances with different branches and outcomes. Main-, DLC-, as well as sidequest-commentary and their own banter system. Nexus Profile Coming when it's ready. PS: If you want to help me spread the word about this, please reblog this post.
It’s come to my attention that every now and then one reddit post or another redirects people to this page. Now that Tumblr finally has a feature to pin posts, I’d like to let y’all know what’s going on and why this blog is pretty much radio silent.
So, let me address a couple of asks and questions I get across other accounts of mine.
Has this project been abandoned?
No, it has not. Rather it’s on somewhat of a hiatus now, due to changes to my personal life (that I have to take care of before I can fully focus on this project again), and a computer that’s slowly breaking down. Don’t worry about the mod’s files, though, they’re already backed up safely.
Do I still check this Tumblr account?
Sparsely. If you’re here because a reddit post recommended you this page, you can reach me over there. Tumblr users get their updates from here.
I messaged, commented, etc. etc. you on the Nexus, did you see?
I most likely didn’t, I’m sorry. You have a far better chance reaching me on Tumblr.
Can I reach you on Discord/Is there a Discord server I can join?
I prefer to keep my Discord private. A Discord server does exist, yes, but as of now it’s not yet open to the public.
Now that we’re all stuck inside because of COVID-19, I understand that many of you are looking for something to kill their time with. I’m sorry to say that it most likely won’t be this mod, though.
That being said, I hope you all stay healthy! Stay inside whenever you can, practice social distancing, wash your hands, and wear masks!
TL;DR WK Followers isn’t abandoned, it’s on hiatus.
Hi, it's the anon from earlier! I was mainly interested in maybe making a companion myself one day (probably smaller scale than yours, likely just one character) and figured it wouldn't hurt to ask some people with experience than me. I guess my biggest question would be how to make a follower more reactive to your actions or giving them quests that you'd only be able to do after enough progress with them has been made. Thanks for the offer, btw!
Depending on how well you know your way around the Creation Kit, you might want to take a look at these links first: 1 | 2 | 3
Also, the CK Wiki is really a lot more helpful than it appears at first.
I know all of this might seem utterly unrelated, but the first two are very basic tutorials that have taught me a lot of necessary skills to get any of this started. Darkfox127′s tutorials add a lot of extra information, and the official Creation Kit wiki has become somewhat of a cheat sheet for me at this point.
If you’re intending to work with quests (and reactive followers need those, there’s no way around it) a lot, you should keep all of these handy.
I’ll put the rest under a cut.
Essentially, in order to have them be as reactive as possible, I basically reverse engineered Serana’s quests to meet my needs. You can find them in the CK by searching for the quests in the Object Window.
DLC1NPCMentalModel and DLC1NPCMonitoringPlayer are the ones I’m talking about. These are quests that interact with each other through scripts, and if you choose to go down this route, you will have to recreate them both in order for your follower to work as intended. Make sure to take out everything that you don’t want your follower to do, or they’ll just end up behaving in the same way as Serana (unless that’s something you want to achieve of course!). I wish I could give you better advice than “just look at these and try to do the same”, but this is basically the core of it. All of my other quests depend on these quests I recreated in one way or another, since they hold every kind of dialogue (outside their personal quests) that I’ve written for them, in order to keep them as unintrusive to other quests as possible.
Once you have that down, everything else becomes a lot simpler. At this point, all you have to do is to call on this script’s functions to do the job for you.
The next thing I wanna talk about are global variables, as well as dialogue and quest conditions. These are important because the global variable increases (or decreases) the follower’s relationship with the player according to the player’s actions, and this variable is always one of my personal quests’ starting conditions.
Create a new one by navigating to Miscellaneous > Global in the Object Window, right clicking on the Editor ID and hitting “New”. Enter the name you want to use for it (and make sure it’s simple and memorable, you’ll need it a lot) in the ID bar, set the variable type to “Float” and the value to 0.0000. Hit OK. You should end up with something similar to what’s in the screenshot above. This is the entire friendship between the player and your follower.
What I did next was adding a function to their mental models with which I can manipulate the global variable. Now this might sound confusing, but it’s a lot simpler than it seems.
If you’ve reverse engineered Serana’s quest right, your follower’s quest should have a script like this one in it. Right click it and hit edit source. We’ll add these functions.
Add your GV as a property to the script by adding
GlobalVariable Property YOURGVSNAME auto conditional
to the script.
Next we’ll add the functions to manipulate your follower’s relationship.
Add this piece of code:
Function NAMEOFYOURFUNCTION()
YOURGVSNAME.Mod(amount you want to give or take)
EndFunction
Do this for as many functions you want to add. Save your script and close your quest.
Now, all that’s left to do is have your follower react to things that are happening. You can do this through many different ways, by essentially referring back to these functions every time you want the relationship to change. For me, this mostly happens through dialogue, so I’ll show you how to do this. Let’s go there now.
When writing your dialogue, all you have to do is to add this little piece of code as a script fragment, either at the beginning or at the end. Your choice. What works for me might not work for you.
Now I’ve added several functions here. You don’t need all of this. I’m fairly certain you’ll find your own way to handle your follower’s relationship progression by the point you’ve taken a look at all the tutorials above for yourself. All you need to do is to point to your function in the script.
If your dialogue happens to be within your follower’s mental model (as your script with the functions you created earlier is), you add this piece of code:
(GetOwningQuest() as YOURMMSCRIPTNAME).NAMEOFYOURFUNCTION()
for me this looks a little something like:
(GetOwningQuest() as WKTMMScript).LikeReaction()
It likely won’t look the same for you.
Now, and this is important.
If your piece of dialogue is NOT in your mental model quest, you can’t use GetOwningQuest(). You will need to add your quest as a property to this script fragment, and cast this property as the mental model script. (Since I rarely do this, I might not be explaining this well enough. This has been explained in the links I added to the top of this post, though, and you will stumble over it if you take a look at Dawnguard’s main quests in the Creation Kit).
And last but not least, how do I make use of all of this to start quests once you’ve reached a certain point in your follower’s relationship?
It’s actually really simple by this point. Refer to this tutorial if you’re a little confused about dialogue still, though, and make sure you went through doughamil’s quest tutorial.
Within my mental models, I have a dialogue view for personal dialogue. In there’s where I start my personal quests through blocking topics. These blocking topics only start through a ForceGreet package on my Quest Alias once my GlobalVariable has hit a certain value (as well as a couple other conditions).
And that’s it!
With all of that said, this is not a beginner tutorial, I’m sure. I’m self-taught and I needed a lot of time to get these things figured out. I’m still learning as I go. So don’t be frustrated with yourself if anything’s confusing or too hard to understand at first glance. You won’t be able to follow along unless you have basic knowledge of the Creation Kit, which is why I highly recommend everyone who reads this to go and take a look at the tutorials I linked right at the beginning.
I hope this at least gives you pointers into the right direction anon!
Have fun modding!
I asked a question on your most recent Nexus photo and about five seconds later I realized it would have been a better idea to post it here. My bad. In addition to that one, I was wondering if you had any tips for someone looking to learn the creation kit? I've been thinking of making a mod myself but have no idea how it works.
This is a rather broad question with a lot of answers, depending on what you’re hoping to create! Shoot me a message off anon and I’ll try to point you into the right direction!
hey, just wanted to pop in and make sure you're doing okay? you dropped a ck update and then silence. nevertheless, i hope the holiday season has treated you well and that your 2019 is a good one!
Still here, still alive! Just fell ill over the holidays. I actually had a little surprise planned, but that evidently fell flat. I don’t know if I’ll be able to share it before the end of the year, but more content is on the way!
But likewise anon, I hope you had a nice holiday season and that 2019 will be one of the best years you’ve had so far!
thank you for making a new ck update! i understand you probably can't do them regularly at this point, and i'm very, very sorry to hear life has been rough for you in the past year; i hope 2019 is much kinder to you. but every little update or peek of info we get from you is wonderful, so thank you for continuing to share them.
No, thank you! Your support despite the huge delay means a lot to me! I’ll try to make the CK updates a semi-regular thing from now on!
Still on the fence about making this a regular thing again. It’d be repetitive and not very interesting in the first place. Feel free to add your two cents at the end of this.
TO ANSWER A COUPLE OF QUESTIONS:
Where have I been? What’s going on? Why is this blog so quiet? Did I die?
The answer is actually quite simple: Life happened. 2018 was a turbulent year, for sure, and I’m still trying to recover from all the curveballs that were thrown my way. That being said, it’s starting to look brighter each day and with that, I’m finally seeing more progress being made on the mod again. Am I anywhere near I wanted to be by this time? No, I’m certainly not, though. So with that being said, let’s hop right back into this again, as per a couple of requests.
HIGH PRIORITY:
Quests: I’m quite satisfied with the state of the MMs by now. However, once there’s one problem taken care of, another pops up. The thing with multiple choice endings spanning over several quests is, that sometimes bugs happen that just don’t make any sense. And they’re incredibly hard to track down. Worse, sometimes squashing bug A, means I’ll have to rewrite section B, because it heavily relied on the function section A (badly) provided. This happened twice now, and i fixed it twice as well. I’m still very cautious about this situation, though. “Unstable” is the last thing I want anyone associating this mod with.
Interior Cells: I know that a few months ago, this was all about dungeon optimization, occlusion planes and the likes. I moved away from them for now, but not without optimizing a couple of cells before. What I’ve repeatedly noticed when playtesting were imported meshes causing CTDs, so now I’m currently checking every interor cell twice just to be on the safe side.
LOW PRIORITY:
Actors:
Unchanged (read more here)
Magic:
Unchanged (read more here)
Models & textures:
Unchanged (read more here)
CK & folder structure cleanup:
Unchanged (read more here)
TES5Edit:
Unchanged (read more here)
So… TL;DR?
Life kicked me down a couple of times. Slowly getting back on track. The MMs might actually be done. I’m saying might, because knowing myself there can still be changes, although I doubt it. Small issues keep on resurfacing and I’m currently either squashing bugs or hunting down said issues that cause instability.
Can we have an ETA already? No ETA yet.
It should go without saying that I’m incredibly grateful for your continued support. I know it’s not easy sticking around when there’s months of complete radio silence. But know that I’m still out here, modding away at this massive project as often as I can, so I can finally hand the result over to you all. It’s gonna be worth it, I promise.
By now we’ve all heard (and meme’d the hell out) of the up and coming changes to Tumblr’s guidelines. Now that the dust has slightly settled, it’s time to talk about this place. As far as I know, nothing about those new rules being implemented on the 17th will affect this blog in any way. There’s nothing remotely NSFW about it, not one single post got flagged, and it’ll stay right here.
That being said, you can always find me on the Nexus. If shove comes to push, the Discord I was planning on opening once the mod got released will be announced early either over there or here.
I’m in no way concerned about losing this blog, though. This is merely a tiny announcement to let you all know on where we stand.
I’m honestly so excited for this mod! It’ll definitely be refreshing to play with such well thought out followers, especially since I’m limited to whatever follower mods are on the Xbox. If you don’t mind, can we get some details on how the development is going?
I’ve been getting this question a lot lately, and I think it’s time for another old-fashioned CK update. We haven’t had those in a while. Check back in with me this weekend, I’ll post some more information about the development either on Saturday or Sunday!
By now we’ve all heard (and meme’d the hell out) of the up and coming changes to Tumblr’s guidelines. Now that the dust has slightly settled, it’s time to talk about this place. As far as I know, nothing about those new rules being implemented on the 17th will affect this blog in any way. There’s nothing remotely NSFW about it, not one single post got flagged, and it’ll stay right here.
That being said, you can always find me on the Nexus. If shove comes to push, the Discord I was planning on opening once the mod got released will be announced early either over there or here.
I’m in no way concerned about losing this blog, though. This is merely a tiny announcement to let you all know on where we stand.
so i recently realized that i had no earthly idea how to pronounce laoghaire's name and due to its roots i was probably mangling it horribly. so i looked up how to properly say it, and i was indeed running it through a mental woodchipper. sorry, laoghaire.
You and me both, anon! I read it in a book as a kid, and since I’m not a native English speaker I mispronounced it up until my teenage years, all the way until I finally decided to look it up. We’ve all been there, unless we grew up in Scotland, I suppose!
GOD i was looking at the playlists again and remembered that brionna seems to pretty much be hiding as many secrets as thelen LIKE HEY BRIONNA. STOP BEING SO MYSTERIOUS AND ALSO BEAUTIFUL
I’ve got to be honest here. Brionna might have a couple of secrets, but compared to Thelen she’s a saint. Everyone is, actually.
i can't say for certain yet but i think leesil might be? my fave? the one i intend to first pursue at least. (altho i'm also fawning over sadesa and velius. like damn i saw 'i am loyal and will love you with my entire heart' and it cupid'd me.) (& brionna & the cinnamon. all of them are too good.) the bit about his resistance being 'easily broken' in his thalmor letter. holy shit. i need this boy to learn 1.) to love himself and 2.) love from others that isn't horribly manipulative and abusive??
Leesil has a turbulent past (they all do, really, but I’m willing to say he has one of the “heavier” background stories). There’s unfortunately a lot he’ll have to learn, yes. Despite (or maybe because of) that, he’s an incredibly nice person who is not too fond of violence and would rather find a peaceful solution. I’m willing to say he’s kind-hearted and gentle to a fault, even.
As for Sadesa, she’s selfish and stubborn. She too made experiences that scarred her deeply. She’s about 90% done at all times and it shows. She’s not heartless at all, though. There’s a vulnerability to her you wouldn’t expect coming from her after talking to her once. A bit impulse every now and then, though.
Meanwhile Velius is the anchor of the group. He’s been in this game for too long to let his emotions get the better of him. It takes a lot to upset him or for him to lose his temper. If you want a level-headed solution to a problem, he’s your best shot at it. However, he’s a little stiff and too set on his ways at times. He’s always willing to listen to another point of view, though.
Brionna’s issues lie less in her past and more in her present. Some might consider her a little slow, but her heart is definitely in the right place. She’s most comfortable when she has someone to lead her (into battle, don’t try it anywhere else), but she has a certain set of morals she won’t ever go against. There’s one thing for certain though, at times she’s her own worst enemy.
And there you go, anon. A little bit of extra information on your favorites so far. I hope it sates your curiosity, at least for a short while! Again, thank you so much for your patience.
