Starfield Improved Follower Behavior Mod v1.0.0

Various improvements to how followers behave while following you around.

If you’re like me, you enjoy bringing followers along in your adventures. Unfortunately, their actual “following” behavior leaves something to be desired.

In no particular order, I’ve noticed the following things about the vanilla following behavior, and have made the following changes:

•  They will keep an unusually large distance away from you while following. Sometimes you can be as far as 15 meters away from them before they begin to walk towards you.
They now attempt to keep an average distance of about 2 - 5 meters from you. Generally closer while walking, and further while running.

•  They will open fire on enemies before you have been fully detected [CAUTION], which can blow your attempts at stealth.
They will now only attack once an enemy has fully detected one of you [DANGER].

•  Their following behavior while sneaking is identical to their normal behavior. They will keep a large distance from you, and may even start to sandbox.
Followers will now attempt to stick very close to you (1.5 meters), and will no longer sandbox, while sneaking. This makes them much less of a liability in stealth runs.
NOTE: The “sandboxing while sneaking” fix is also included in the Starfield Community Patch.

•  They may have difficulty matching your speed while you are walking; starting and stopping behind you constantly.
They will now match your walking speed while they are close to you.

•  Similarly, it's quite easy for them to fall very far behind you. Particularly while exploring planets.
They will now be able to move 50% faster when they are more than 50 meters away from you. Let's just say they keep a stockpile of ultra-strength AMP on them, specifically for these moments. The effect usually isn't too visually obvious, but they do a little better job of keeping up with you now.

•  While exploring planets, they may stop following you, pull out their weapon, and stare at an alien creature if it gets too close. They do this until the alien creature moves away of its own volition, or until you perform an action such as sneaking.
This behavior has been disabled. Followers will no longer stop to bully the local wildlife.
NOTE: This fix is also included in the Starfield Community Patch.

•  They may start to sandbox while you are walking, making them lag behind even further.
Loitering radius has been decreased (15 meters to 6 meters). This means that walking is no longer slow enough for the game to flag you as loitering while you are walking in a straight line. This also makes followers stop sandboxing sooner when you start to move away from a given area, and won't lag behind quite so badly.

•  When you stop moving, they will attempt to get in front of you and to the right. This will lead to them trying to walk through you, or through level geometry. It can also cause them to block your shots while aiming.
This is all caused by followers attempting to fall into a formation around you. Sadly, this system is quite buggy, and often doesn’t work as intended. Better to just not use it.

•  It can be quite annoying to get them through an airlock with you.
They now stick close to you (1.5 meters) while you are in an airlock doorway. Shouldn’t have to leave them behind at those anymore.

Installing
Can be installed mid-save and should work immediately. No special steps required. Either use your favorite mod manager to install automatically, or manually install it by extracting the ESM into your Data folder, then updating your plugins.txt file.

Uninstalling
No scripts, but uninstalling at the wrong moment may lead to followers being stuck with a modified SpeedMult AV afterwards. This would need to be fixed manually via the command console if it happens.

Because of this, it’s a good idea to uninstall while you have no active followers, or in a save file where any active followers are standing still. Other than that, it's completely safe to remove this mid-save. Vanilla behavior will be fully restored.

Compatibility
Modifies the following records:

• SQ_Airlock_Doorway_Volume [ACTI:00046611]
• COM_CND_PACK_SandboxWhileFollowingPlayer [CNDF:0028BF2C]
• SQ_Followers_GroupFormation_FollowPlayer [PACK:002A9765]
• SQ_Followers_GroupFormation_FollowPlayerCustom_Template [PACK:0009C176]
  
  

  
  

Mod conflicts with the first two records are very unlikely. As for the follower packages, if you have another mod which modifies them, you will need to decide which one to use.

Make sure this mod is loaded after the Starfield Community Patch, if you have it.