What could cause purple skin and missing armor meshes with a follower mod?

[EvelynAG]

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 textures are completely broken in-game. I’ve run it through the tools and checked for conflicts, but I can’t figure out what’s causing the purple skin and missing armor meshes.

[JamesB]

I’ve had something similar where the character looked fine in the menu but came out purple with missing armor in game. I eventually found it was a texture path mismatch in the mod archive and sometimes you need archive invalidation enabled for the textures to load correctly.

[Robert_T]

One practical step I took was to test with only the follower mod and its required files loaded, then add other mods one by one. I also made sure the follower ESP sits above any texture replacers in the load order. When it wasn’t, the colors went wild.

[Andrew.D]

Do you know if the follower mod needs a specific body or armor replacer to match its textures? If you have a conflicting body mod, that could yank the textures apart.

[GeorgeDL]

Maybe the real issue is the save file or an older texture cache. A quick test is to start a new game with just the follower mod and see if the problem repeats. If it does, it’s likely the mod pack; if not, the save-state or a conflicting mod is to blame.