Skyrim: How To Set Your Followers as Essential – Command Explained

Followers are among the most important aspects of Skyrim’s gameplay. Besides triggering taps in the dungeons and ruins and blocking your way in narrow passageways, they can be a real asset in combat and lug around pieces of heavy equipment. Still, not all followers in Skyrim are set as essential. In fact, only 7 of them are completely immortal in a way that other NPCs cannot kill them. If you’re tired of your followers constantly dying, you can always make them essential, and this is why we’ve prepared this guide for you. Let’s see how to make your followers essential to keep them from dying in combat. 

Only seven followers in Skyrim are marked as essential by default 

There are a lot of followers in Skyrim to choose from. From your loyal housecarls to dozens of followers you acquire during the faction-related questlines to sellswords, you can hire for Septims in just about any large city. There are also followers added by various mods, which can be, in some cases, vastly superior to followers from the base vanilla game. 

Still, most of those followers, whether they are earned through the game or hired through gold, have one thing in common. They are not essential NPCs meaning they can easily be killed in combat and disappear from the game forever unless you can resurrect them through command immediately before they despawned. 

Only seven followers in Skyrim are marked as essential and remain essential even after their respective quests have been completed. The essential followers are Derkeethus, Mjoll the Lioness, two Dark Brotherhood Initiates, Cicero, Serana (added by Dawnguard), and Frea (added by Dragonborn.) 

Other followers are essential, but only until certain points in the game. Take, for example, Aella the Huntress, which remains an essential NPC until the main Companions storyline is completed and loses its status soon afterward. 

Followers don’t necessarily have to die while with you in combat. They can also meet their ends during random world encounters as long as you are nearby. So, how do we stop non-essential followers from dying? Simple, we can make them essential through the use of console commands. 

How to make followers essential: step-by-step guide 

To make any follower in the game essential, all you need is their baseID. BaseID can be acquired on the wiki pages of the specific NPC, or you can use console commands and type, for example, “help lydia.” 

Lydia’s baseID is 000A2C8E, and now we have everything to make this command work. To make your follower essential, follow these steps: 

1. Open the console by typing “~.”
2. Type setessential 000A2C8E 1 
3. Press enter

Lydia should now be completely essential and immune to dying. You can check her essential status by clicking on her and typing IsEssential. If Lydia is truly essential now, the console should return the following output “1.00.”

You can likewise remove the essential status from any NPC (except from children) by using the same setessential command, but you need to replace the 1 with 0. 

You should always be careful while removing the essential status of a certain NPC since it can lead to unexpected consequences. Most of the essential NPCs are essential for a reason, and oftentimes, the death of an essential NPC too early in the game can lead to some quests being virtually impossible to complete or advance to the latter stages.

The same goes for adding essential status to NPCs that are bound or scripted to die at any stage in the game to advance specific quests. Always be careful while using any kind of command on certain NPCs, and do so only after you’ve made sure that they don’t play any kind of role in quests that you haven’t yet completed. 

Making your followers essential will likewise not make them immune to bleedout. If your follower receives sufficient damage, it will still crawl on the floor and be unable to fight for some time until enough health has been restored. The NPC in question will, however, never be able to die. 

You can make your followers in Skyrim immortal by using setghost command 

If you don’t want to make your follower an essential NPC for whatever reason, but you would still like to use them in combat without the fear of dying, or you are unable to retrieve the baseID of a specific NPC. You can always use the setghost command to make the “invisible” for all types of attacks in the game.  

The setghost command will make your follower “invisible” to attacks, meaning the spells, weapons, and other ranged attacks will not collide with them and will not deal damage to them. To set your followers in ghost mode, use the following steps. 

1. Open the console by typing “~.”
2. Click on your follower and type setghost 1
3. Press enter.

Your followers should now be “immune” to attacks dealt by other NPCs. However, they can sustain damage from traps or die by falling from great heights. 

Your followers can be made essential via Creation Kit, but this route requires extensive knowledge of modding and game files, and I would not recommend it to casual players since it can lead to your save game and game files basically becoming corrupted and unusable. 

Before attempting to use any kind of command that meddles with the game’s mechanics, back up your saves!

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