Skyrim: Here’s How To Resurrect Companions/Followers

Followers are an important aspect of Skyrim’s gameplay. They can make your questing experience easier, they can carry your equipment and perform several tasks based on their range of skills and abilities. Naturally, since most followers are not marked as essential, they tend to succumb to their injuries when overwhelmed in combat. Losing a follower mid-combat can be an inconvenience, but it does happen regularly. In today’s guide, we’re going to address those issues and give you solutions. Let’s see, is there a way to resurrect your followers in Skyrim?

Is there a way to resurrect companions or followers in Skyrim? 

There is a way to resurrect them, and it involves using cheats. If you were counting on a spell, for example, something that reanimates dead NPCs from the restoration school of magic, you’re out of luck. Most reanimate spells only work for a short amount of time and are not long-term solutions to your problem. The only way to resurrect your follower permanently is to use the following console commands:

Using a resurrect console command 

If your follower dies, and you have direct access to its body, you can always resurrect it with the resurrect command. To do that, follow these steps.

1. open the console with ~
2. Click on the follower’s body
3. type resurrect 
4. if you’ve done everything correctly, your follower should be alive and breathing, well, at least figuratively. 

Using the resurrect command might reset your follower’s inventory, and the game will still register it as being dead. For example, if Lydia dies and you resurrect her, you will still receive her inheritance letter from the courier since the game registers her as a dead NPC. You can avoid that by resurrecting your desired follower instantly after it dies. 

In case the corpse of your follower has despawned already, you will need to use enable <NPC ID> to spawn the object back in the game and allow for it to be rendered. 

Using a player.placeatme <Follower ID> command 

f your follower has died, and it’s not convenient for you to search for its body, or you can’t reach its body any more, you can always resort to creating another copy of your follower. To do that, follow these steps.

1. open the console with ~
2. type player.placeatme <Follower RefID> In my case, as I’m trying to summon Mjoll the Lioness, I’m going to type player.placeatme 00019DF7 1 
3. If everything goes according to plan, Mjoll should stand in front of you, and you should be able to recruit her as usual
4. If by any chance you are not able to recruit her, simply type setrelationshiprank 3, followed by addtofaction 0005C84D. 
5. Now you should be able to recruit your follower as usual 

Is there a way to prevent your followers from dying? 

Yes, there is a way to make your followers virtually immortal, again, by using cheats. We’ve already mentioned that most of the followers in-game are not “essential” in nature. Being non-essential means that NPC in the game can be killed at any time. In contrast, being essential makes NPC immortal. To mark your follower as immortal, follow these steps. 

1. Retrieve the base ID of your follower, you can do that by using help command or searching here on this link.
2. After you’ve found your follower’s base ID type setessential <base ID> <1>
3. If you’ve done everything correctly, you can test your follower’s newfound immortality by throwing everything you’ve got at it. Instead of dying it should in the worst case, stagger around or fall on the floor. 

You should keep in mind that using this command on an NPC to make him non-essential (mortal) puts you at risk of corrupting your playthrough. Making essential NPCs non-essential puts them at risk of being killed, making some quests they are a part of virtually impossible to kill. If you’re using console commands in Skyrim, always back up your saves, especially when you’re editing NPCs and manipulating the game’s mechanics. 

And that’s pretty much it, remember there are some followers that cannot be killed at all like: Aela, Barbas, Frea, Erandur, Mjoll the Lioness, Derkeethus, Serana, Cicero, Farkas, and Dark Brotherhood Initiates. But if, for any other reason, you want to have some other non-essential followers, there are ways to resurrect them and mark them as essential.  

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