Skyrim: Here’s What To Do if You’ve Lost Your Companion (Follower)

Followers are an essential way of Skyrim’s playthrough. They can be an invaluable help if you’re playing on greater difficulties or just looking for someone to carry your burdens, literally. No matter how useful followers can be, numerous issues are associated with them, like the fact that they keep blocking your way, triggering traps, and sometimes appearing to have really bad pathfinding. The latter problem results in followers getting lost often, and due to this, we’ve decided to create this guide and present you with all the options you have at your disposal when you can’t seem to locate your followers any longer. Let’s see what to do when you lose your followers in Skyrim. 

Followers get lost all the time in obvious places 

No matter whether you are exploring Dwemer ruins or open plains near Whiterun, there’s a chance that your followers won’t be behind you when you turn around or decide to take a break. There are several reasons why your follower disappeared; we will list just the most common ones. 

1. Your follower is stuck in combat somewhere else 
2. You told your follower to wait for you at a specific location 
3. You dismissed your follower without realizing 
4. Your follower fell through the textures and is outside of the “game world.” 
5. Your follower is dead. 

Now that we’ve covered the main reasons why your followers disappear, it’s time to work on the solutions.  

Retrace your steps

Sometimes, the most obvious solution is the right one. If your follower is missing, and it was with you mere moments ago, it’s possible that it got stuck in combat somewhere else.

You can try retracing your steps to locate your followers and deal with the threat. You can likewise retrace your steps since you might have accidentally told your follower to wait for you at a specific location.

This usually happens in dungeons and ruins when you’re going through dialogue options too quickly. 

Fast travel or go to your follower’s starting location 

Sometimes, retracing your steps doesn’t work, and your follower is nowhere in your immediate vicinity. In that case, to find your follower, you should try fast traveling or visiting the location where you recruited that follower. 

Just like with horses, fast traveling seems to spawn your followers right next to you no matter where they are and what they are doing at the time when you’ve decided to fast-travel. This works only for followers who are in your active service. 

If by any chance you’ve dismissed your follower accidentally, the follower will leave your service immediately and start traveling toward its home; most of the time, it’s the place where you’ve recruited them.

Followers that are faction-specific should be at their faction’s headquarters. Sellswords you hired in various inns and taverns should be at that specific tavern where you’ve hired them. 

Housecarls are a little complicated, on the other hand, as it depends on whether you own your house in a specific city. If you don’t own a house in a specific city, your housecarl will be waiting for you in the main keep. If you do own a house, your housecarl returns to that house by default if dismissed.

Take Lydia, for example. If you decide to dismiss Lydia, she returns to Breezhome by default. If you haven’t purchased Breezehome, she will wait for you at Dragonsreach. 

Morthal, Dawnstar, and Falkreath Housecarls are much the same. They will return to their keeps unless you have estates purchased and built in their respective holds. If you dismiss your spouse from your service, it will return to its primary residence. 

You can try using console commands to locate your followers 

Sometimes, the problem of a missing follower is not in the game mechanics but due to bugs. Followers can get stuck in the game world in various textures and meshes, and they can likewise “fall through” the textures and get stuck “outside” of the rendered game world. Normally, those areas are inaccessible to you, but you can use several commands to either teleport the specific lost follower to you or to teleport yourself to that specific follower. 

To teleport a specific follower to you, you will need the refID of that follower. Let’s again use Lydia as an example; Lydia’s refID is 000A2C94. You can check out the refIDs and baseIDs of every single NPC in the game by following this link. 

To teleport yourself to your lost follower, follow these steps: 

1. Open the console by pressing “~.” 
2. Type player.moveto 000a2c94 
3. Hit enter, and a loading screen should appear, indicating that you are currently being transported to the location of your selected follower. 

The teleport command is only useful if your follower is stuck in a location that is easily accessible to you, even without the console commands. If your follower is “glitched out” and outside of the world, it won’t be useful. In that case, you should teleport that specific follower to you by using the following command: 

1. Open the console by pressing “~.” 
2. Type Prid <refID> in Lydia’s case, RefID is 000a2c94; press enter
3. Type moveto player and press enter.
4. If you’ve done everything right, the NPC in question should appear at your location. 

What to do if your follower in Skyrim dies? 

If your follower in Skyrim is missing due to being dead, there’s really not much you can do about it. You can always make your peace with it and recruit another follower, and as a last resort, you can use console commands. 

Suppose your follower dies, and you can locate its final resting place. In that case, you can easily resurrect it by opening your console, targeting the follower in question, and typing “resurrect.“

The resurrect command is useful, but it can sometimes come with unpleasant side effects, so always make sure to save and back up your game before attempting to use risky commands. 

The easiest way to ensure your follower will never die is to make it essential. You can make your follower essential and unable to die by using the following command

1. Open the console by typing “~.”
2. Type setessential 000A2C8E 1 (replace the number with your follower’s baseID.)
3. Press enter. 

And that’s about. You can naturally recover your lost followers in Skyrim by retracing your steps, fast traveling, or simply going to their residence. If all mentioned solutions fail, you can always teleport the follower to you or teleport to its location by using console commands. 

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