How do I access ‘Settings’ in AFT?

[Alembrik]

I realise this is a Skyrim forum and not about specific Nexus mods, but I’ve searched Nexus and the Amazing Follower Tweaks (AFT) forum and I can’t figure this out. (AFT author is not taking new messages.)

I have one simple question for those of you who are more experienced with mods (and particualrly AFT) than I am: how do I access the ‘Settings’ and other options in AFT? I particularly would like to disable the ‘Synergy Points’ option.

I’ve read the readme textfile and in-game AFT documentation book, and I can’t figure this out. I can’t seem to access it out-of-game, through NMM or other possbilities, and I can’t figure out how to do it in-game. Are there global settings or do I have to do settings for each follower? (I know there are individual follower options in their dialogues.)

I’m experienced with computers and programming, but have only been gaming for less than a year, and have been using AFT for only a couple months.

[Incunabulum]

Talk to your follower for follower specific settings. If you don't get an option in their dialogue, move AFT to the end of your load order.

Other settings are in the Magic menu as a spell. I wish he'd do an MCM menu.

There are setting for each follower *and* settings that can be toggled for *all* followers.

Synergy points is in the follower's dialogue options.

[Alembrik]

THANK YOU!

I have AFT at the end of my load order already. I noticed the follower-specific dialogue options, though I hadn’t needed to tweak them yet. I want to disable Synergy Points because I consider them something of a cheat.

I’m getting used to game abbreviations and other shorthand, but haven’t encountered ‘MCM’ before. I saw it on the Nexus AFT forum, too. If I could trouble you with just one more question, what does it stand for? (My first playthrough character is at level 54 and even with that experience we all still seem to be on the steep part of the learning curve in all this.)

[gnewna]

Mod configuration menu, some mods will add this option to the screen which comes up when you hit Esc (you know, with save, load etc), if the option is there then you select it and it does you a list of the mods you have which use it (common ones are SkyUI, Frostfall and Skyrim Unbound). Very, very useful for mods with a lot of tweaking possible.

[Alembrik]

Thank you! I’m light on mods, particularly because I’ve read too many horror stories here about conflicts. So I don’t have much experience with them.

I would not want to discourage anyone from writing mods, but it would be nice if there was some sort of standard as to how they are constructed, so they would work and play well together rather than only with the game. It would also be nice if they had some sort of common interface so they were all intuitive in their behaviour.

[gnewna]

Very sensible, tbh! There are definitely mods which give more, and better, information on what they're compatible with, provide patches for other popular mods, etc. I try to stick to those, mostly, unless something's quite a small mod. There are loads of things which sound awesome, but they barely give any info and I just kind of run away, disappointedly.

[Alembrik]

Incunabulum — I did that, and learned (to my delight) that ‘Settings’ are global.

gnewna — I certainly endorse MCMs for all mods.

THANK YOU again to you both.

I have ‘Ignore Friendly Fire’ enabled in AFT, and I have ‘Companion's Insight’ (from The Winds Of Change), but neither of them prevented my (now four) followers from going after each other in a cave today. (They didn’t target me, but there was nothing I as a player could do to stop the fight.) I reloaded a previous save (I always save before going into a new cave chamber or before opening a door in a dungeon), and on the third attempt at replaying the same Save, ended up telling my followers to ‘Wait here’ while I killed the enemies. I then asked all of them to follow me, and all went well once we were all out of the cave. It would be very nice if we could finally solve that problem. (Maybe that’s the reason the ‘vanilla’ game limits us to one follower in most situaitons?)

[Incunabulum]

Originally posted by Alembrik:

Incunabulum — I did that, and learned (to my delight) that ‘Settings’ are global.

gnewna — I certainly endorse MCMs for all mods.

THANK YOU again to you both.

I have ‘Ignore Friendly Fire’ enabled in AFT, and I have ‘Companion's Insight’ (from The Winds Of Change), but neither of them prevented my (now four) followers from going after each other in a cave today. (They didn’t target me, but there was nothing I as a player could do to stop the fight.) I reloaded a previous save (I always save before going into a new cave chamber or before opening a door in a dungeon), and on the third attempt at replaying the same Save, ended up telling my followers to ‘Wait here’ while I killed the enemies. I then asked all of them to follow me, and all went well once we were all out of the cave. It would be very nice if we could finally solve that problem. (Maybe that’s the reason the ‘vanilla’ game limits us to one follower in most situaitons?)

Look at the optional files for AFT - I believe there is a friendly-fire bug patch.

The vanilla game limits us to one follower because the devs didn't want ot listen to people whine that the game was too easy or too hard if they had several or one follower. Multiple followers *require* balancing - because, you know, its *combat* that's what the game is all about, ♥♥♥♥ that faggy role-play ♥♥♥♥ amirite

[Alembrik]

Thanks. I’ll look for the friendly-fire bug files. They may already be part of my (fairly recent) AFT download, since I believe I’ve isolated the friendly-fire problem.

The problem seems to be with Mjoll The Lioness. She seems to have some programming bugs, in that she offered — and I accepted her offer — to become my Hjelarchen Steward, then she didn’t have any Steward dialogue. She went to Blackbriar Lodge for no appearent reason and just hung out outside it for a few weeks IRT. (Ria, my Lakeview Steward, goes hunting, but always returns reasonably quickly to Lakeview.) Mjoll also has anger issues — that seems to be the ‘friendly fire’ problem. No problems without Mjoll. I like her, but I may part ways with her, since she also doesn’t have any AFT-specific dialogue options, as do my other followers. I wish she’d just patrol around Hjelarchen, do normal Steward activities, and like Ria go on short hunting trips if she craves excitement. Mjoll’s code needs to be debugged.

Skyrim definitely seems to be more combat that role-play, although I haven’t done enough with enchanting, alchemy, smithing and other ‘craft’ skills at this point to know how they might change the way I play. (Since combat is so important, I want to be sure I have my combat skills reasonably high before I level up with ‘craft’ skills.) Having a small group of followers actually helps, and not only with combat. It can get lonely otherwise.