How can I fix purple textures from a custom follower mod?

[TylerFL]

I’ve been trying to get a custom follower mod to work with my existing load order, but every time I install it, the character’s face textures are just a weird purple mess in-game. I’ve checked that all the required assets are in the right folders and my mod manager isn’t showing any conflicts. Has anyone else run into this specific problem with a custom companion?

[Luke.M]

I had a similar problem last month. The purple mess showed up only on the follower's face textures, not on other characters. After double checking assets, I found a texture path mismatch in the follower mod's files. Once I fixed the path to the exact folder the game expects, the textures loaded normally.

[LunaA]

Another time it happened with a different mod, and it turned out the follower shared textures with other assets via an atlas. Replacing the conflicting texture with a unique name and re-saving fixed it for me.

[Samuel_A]

Could the problem be something else in the pipeline, like a shader setting or a save file cache? I tried with a clean profile and the purple texture still appeared.

[LilyA]

I ended up pulling the plug on the custom follower and ran with a vanilla companion for a while. It felt frustrating, but at least I could tell when textures were loading and when they weren't.