Follower overview: Lydia - Omni-guides/Tuxborn GitHub Wiki
Wait, we hear you thinking, isn't Lydia a vanilla follower? In fact, your first major vanilla follower?
Yes. Yes she is. We all know Lydia from vanilla Skyrim. But Tuxborn is running the Improved Follower Dialogue - Lydia mod, so for our purposes, she actually counts as a mod follower. This version of Lydia has much more in-depth characterization. She reacts to a lot more of Skyrim's main quest, and additionally to significant vanilla side quests as well.
This isn't different in Tuxborn--you still get her as a reward from Jarl Balgruuf when you're made thane of Whiterun. But the conversation you'll have with Lydia as a result is a lot different!
Modded Lydia doesn't have a built-in way to summon her. But if you track her with the UMF follower management mod, you can bring her back to you with UMF's Check command, should the two of you be separated.
While her mod changes her substantially, it does not change what kind of warrior Lydia is. She still functions best as a tank. Give her heavy armor, and either a two-handed weapon or a one-hander plus a shield, depending on what weapons you come across that seem best to give to her.
This version of Lydia will react to a lot of aspects about your character: your race, your skills, and more. Her MCM covers many of the topics she can comment on, and you can toggle off any you don't want her to talk about. You can also adjust how often she speaks, if you find you'd like her to be more or less talkative.
Note that her commentary on your various skills will also change as you progress in them.
Lydia is scripted to deliver significant character arc commentary in response to your reaching important milestones in the main Skyrim quest. In most cases, she'll automatically trigger these responses. But if she doesn't, try to talk to her and take any unusual dialogue options you see. This will keep her commentary triggering at the appropriate points.
She will comment on a wide variety of side quest content in Skyrim, and her responses may well be different depending on how you play them. Examples of this are In My Time of Need, and The Forsworn Conspiracy/No One Escapes Cidhna Mine.
By default, Lydia will react very badly if you join either the Thieves Guild or the Dark Brotherhood. This is by design of the mod creator, as the mod's intent is for her to support "good guy" playthroughs. This option, however, can be toggled off in her MCM.
Likewise, Lydia will react very strongly if she thinks you've taken to worshipping Daedra, and if you get her angry enough, she may outright attack you. So plan your use of her as a follower accordingly, especially if you have designs on acquiring the Mace of Molag Bal.
Last but not least, she will also react to events in both Legacy of the Dragonborn and Wyrmstooth.
This Lydia is custom voiced. However, Tuxborn's load order also includes two patches to give her interactions with Lucien and Inigo. It's important to note that these patches assume Lydia has her original voice! So if you're running Lucien, Inigo, or both, you may hear Lydia deliver lines that sound like her original voice actress. This is not a matter of her mod being broken, it's simply a matter of the patches not accounting for Lydia not having her original voice.
Lydia has a personal side quest, as well as an option to romance her. This romance is well set up, even accounting for the power dynamic of the Dragonborn becoming romantically involved with their own housecarl.
You have to play through her romance options, though, before you'll get the ability to marry her via the usual ceremony in Riften.
If you do marry Lydia in Riften, her mod has an apparent issue with her getting into a stuck state and losing all of her prior dialogue options. She'll just talk about how she's so excited now that you and she and married.
This behavior is described on the Posts tab of her mod page, so it repros outside of Tuxborn. We've confirmed that a workaround described on that page does solve this problem in Tuxborn, though. The workaround is that you need to have at least one vanilla home available, so that Lydia's code will register that as a home she can move into. And by "vanilla" here, we mean, original base game homes, not even DLC ones. The most frequently recommended one to solve this problem is Breezehome. So we recommend one of two approaches, both of which have been confirmed to work in our load order:
- Before doing the marriage ceremony at all, go buy Breezehome if you don't have it already
- If you've already done the ceremony but Lydia is in the stuck state, go buy Breezehome, which should unstick her
In theory solving this problem should also work if you buy Proudspire Manor, Honeyside, Vlindrel Hall, or Hjerim, since those are the other four original base game player homes. We'll update this page if anyone confirms those homes work for this as well. (Of the four, we recommend trying Proudspire first for its proximity to the LOTD museum and the Safehouse.)
If you have a history of ignoring Lydia in vanilla and getting rid of her by letting her be Steward at a Hearthfire house, be aware this will not work with this version of Lydia. She is set up to specifically not be available as a Steward for those houses. You'll even have a dialogue prompt with her where you can ask her about this, and she will turn you down if you offer her the position, on the grounds that it will interfere with her primary job of defending you. This is very much by design on the part of the mod creator.
She can be recruited as steward at Goldenhills Plantation. But while she'll have the expected dialogue options, because her (mostly) vanilla-compatible code is hooking into the AE code, she does not have audio for those lines. Her mod is not known at this time to include those lines. So if you want to see her saying them, you'll need to turn on subtitles.
If your personal preferences lean towards not starting the main quest immediately, or if you dismiss Lydia and then re-recruit her later, be advised that this may make interacting with her a little weird. You may need to work through a backlog of her scripted responses before she catches up to where you actually are in your game.
Thanks to the following players on #txbn-general who contributed info for this page:
- EldritchOmen, for confirming that both approaches to getting Breezehome unblocked Lydia from being stuck post-marriage
- Gen, for reporting the issue with Lydia not having voiced lines when serving as Steward at Goldenhills