I need to make Serana leave??

[FluffyXai]

So I got a bug that apparently is a bit of a nasty bug many people get that was never fixed. Upon trying to enter Castle Volkahir during the Bloodline quest (when you first take Serana there), the guy opens the gate to welcome her home, Serana stops you to tell you to let her do the talking, and then we're due to go inside.
Except the door does not work. I tried multiple times to 'coc' command warp into the castle. (The one I tried was 'guildhall', I assumed that was the right one?) but the game would crash as soon as it tried to load the level.

SO I decided to do what you always do when you just cannot fund a safe way around a bug; the last resort; using the Setstage command to skip that section of the quest.

It worked and I was prompted instead to go talk to Israan as usual. Except problem;

Serana is still following me.
She's not supposed to be here of course. And I tried to ask her to part ways, assuming she would now go back to Volkahir since I was past that point in the quest, but she just refuses to leave. She also will be told to wait but will not ultimately leave you.

She's becoming a real problem and I'm honestly starting to be scared of the part of the quest when she rejoins you. BEST CASE scenario is the follower I have initiates the dialogue, but I'm scared a second Serana will appear haha. That or the game will just not know what to do.

I now have *two* kinda annoying followers coming with me everywhere and complaining about everything while getting in the way constantly, and I can't get Serana to leave me alone.

Anyone know how I might get her to leave? Should/can I just use the console to disable her or would that cause more trouble? (That has not worked out for me in the past)
OR does anyone know how to fix the quest?
Bear in mind that since doing that, it ended Bloodline and gave me "New Order" instead. (or whatever it was called). So I have sorta moved on a little and am worried about backtracking or if I even CAN backtrack.

HELP????
Thnx in advance.

[Kayneth]

I recommend you keep a good line of saves to backtrack through the process, since this is already quite the pickle.

setstage DLC1VQ02 05
player.moveto 0x003ba8
That's what you should've used to get yourself to Harkon to finish the job of delivering Serana to her home, where 'x' is whatever code Dawnguard's using in your load order. It may even work right now, so give it a try.

Another way would be to try completing "A New Order" and see what happens. Since Serana is already with you, and she has only one ID, there can't be clones (hopefully).
Once you're in the torture room with Isran and Serana, try targeting Serana by clicking on on her and using "moveto player" "set playerfollowercount to 0" and then "resetai". Save and reload to see if it worked.

If nothing else, just target her, then use 'disable'; save and reload, then use the "enable" command after re-targeting her.

You can find relevant ID's and syntax data on the commands from the wiki.
It is massively recommended that you use USLEEP or Unofficial Dawnguard patch, if you're not already using them. Bugsplating in Skyrim can take a lot of time and effort.

[Uncle64]

All that uses Serana knows that her AI is ehum little bugged.
Do you use any follower mod? Aft/Ufo/Eff/Flp or any other? You should not use any of those on her.

Sounds like her dialog was not finished before you did enter the castle, did you enter the castle before her? Dont tab or exit dialogs they may get hickups.

One good rule is always let the NPC you are supposed to follow go trou doors before you.

Note that Serana is supposed to follow you all the way to her dad, so you can have her as one extra follower and do many quests.

You cant disable here and leave her like that, it will ruin your game, you will need her later.

Best you can do is load one save BEFORE you go to the castle, since the error is already baked in the save you are trying to fix.
Coq command will not work since you need to activate some quest triggers.

Install Usleep if you have all DLC:s
Load the old save you have before you get to the castle. And try again.
If not try the setstage command.

[Eternie]

Do you have the unofficial patches? For this game they fix a lot of issues like this.

A lot of errors in Skyrim are from people cutting off dialoque and those scripts keep running, so naturally the game then considers you haven't had that conversation.

The other step to try is reload a save before going to the volikar castle go to a small bedroom and sleep for a month to allow all of your skyrim to reset. Then approach the castle and like Uncle said allow Serana to finish dialogue and let her lead into the castle.

[Uncle64]

Yea Eternie that have we learn the hard way. Dont interupt or stop dialogs, let npc go first.

[Eternie]

Agreed Uncle it is too easy to get impatient and want to just get it done.

Or like a poster here some years back that started a conversation with Jarl of whiterun about capturing dragon. While in that dialogue realised he wanted to do some other quest first so he didn't finish the dialogue just backed out, left it all going ... and was complaining that his game was mucked up as he couldn't get the Jarl to work properly when he eventually returned.

Instead he should have loaded a save before talking to jarl so that he didn't leave dialogue scripts running and quests left in limbo.

[FluffyXai]

Originally posted by Kayneth:

I recommend you keep a good line of saves to backtrack through the process, since this is already quite the pickle.

setstage DLC1VQ02 05
player.moveto 0x003ba8
That's what you should've used to get yourself to Harkon to finish the job of delivering Serana to her home, where 'x' is whatever code Dawnguard's using in your load order. It may even work right now, so give it a try.

Another way would be to try completing "A New Order" and see what happens. Since Serana is already with you, and she has only one ID, there can't be clones (hopefully).
Once you're in the torture room with Isran and Serana, try targeting Serana by clicking on on her and using "moveto player" "set playerfollowercount to 0" and then "resetai". Save and reload to see if it worked.

If nothing else, just target her, then use 'disable'; save and reload, then use the "enable" command after re-targeting her.

You can find relevant ID's and syntax data on the commands from the wiki.
It is massively recommended that you use USLEEP or Unofficial Dawnguard patch, if you're not already using them. Bugsplating in Skyrim can take a lot of time and effort.

Thank you for all of this Kayneth! Seriously that's a lot of helpful stuff. I will definitely try some of it tomorrow and I think I'll save some of this somewhere beause there are some commands you mentioned I've never heard.
I'll try it tomorrow and let you know if it works!
I forget what USLEEP stands for but I have all of the unofficial patches downloaded if that's what it refers to.
Yes I have had some weird bugs to have to work around.

Originally posted by Uncle64SwE:

All that uses Serana knows that her AI is ehum little bugged.
Do you use any follower mod? Aft/Ufo/Eff/Flp or any other? You should not use any of those on her.

Sounds like her dialog was not finished before you did enter the castle, did you enter the castle before her? Dont tab or exit dialogs they may get hickups.

One good rule is always let the NPC you are supposed to follow go trou doors before you.

Note that Serana is supposed to follow you all the way to her dad, so you can have her as one extra follower and do many quests.

You cant disable here and leave her like that, it will ruin your game, you will need her later.

Best you can do is load one save BEFORE you go to the castle, since the error is already baked in the save you are trying to fix.
Coq command will not work since you need to activate some quest triggers.

Install Usleep if you have all DLC:s
Load the old save you have before you get to the castle. And try again.
If not try the setstage command.

I don't know what any of those acronyms stand for. but I don't think I have any follower overhaul things.
I did let her finish her dialogue. I cannot let her go first, sicne as I said in my original post, no one can enter the castle. The door simply cannot be interacted with.
I did reload before this point last time I was playing, but this time I didn't and have been progressing a *lot* since then so backtracking isn't much of an option now. I'll try the fixes that Kayneth mentioned

At least, once I finish dealing with the main story quest since that's what I'm currently wrapped up in. I'm at Skalldafn so let's see what I can do once I have the "Dragonslayer" quest under my belt :3
Hopefully if those commands work and my game holds out well enough not to CTD when I try to warp into the castle main room, then I'll maybe be able to get it to work. My only worry is having the new order quest active and bloodline in the completed section, but we'll see.

[FluffyXai]

Update: I tried usign those commands but to no avail. So I tried moving on in the quest. The whole "set playerfollowercount ot 0" and "resetai" commands did nothing but onceI got through a conversation with isran, serana began the proper dialog and is now responding as she should (though still wants to come with me to find the moth priest) but it seems like fo now everything is okay?

I'll make sure I can dismiss her when I get a chance to.

[Kayneth]

You'll need to have Serana as a follower to complete the Dawnguard Questline, since many of the quests are related to her on a personal level.

Try taking her along again, then tell her to go home. If she agrees, things are back to about normal as Skyrim can be.

[Uncle64]

Did you as was told before load one save before you come to the Castle?

Serana is not one regular follower until you pick her up later. So your commands will not work.
She have one AI pack that allows her to follow you from the coffin to her dad even if you have zillions of followers.

Mjoll and Aerin have one similar pack that allows Aerin to follow Mjoll around Riften and that is why he settles in your house when you marry her.

You cant send her off, she will leave you after you have talked to her dad. And done the rite whit him.

[FluffyXai]

Originally posted by Uncle64SwE:

Did you as was told before load one save before you come to the Castle?

Like I said I can't do that. It was so long ago now I might as well jsut restart the whole game. I'm not undoing a week worth of ignoring my life to play this game :3

and like I also said, when I started playing this time, I'd apparently already loaded from before I found the castle last time I was playing and jsut went off to do other things, but I just didn't bother reloading this time. but reloading and trying again would have achieved the exact same result every time anyway so why does that matter?

[Uncle64]

Why cant you? How many hours have you dragged aroud whit Serana as one extra follower?

[FluffyXai]

Quite a bit. I just moved on and went about doing other quests including completing the main story. Not to mention just general advancing my character and all that jazz