What load order should I use for NPC follower mods to prevent crash?

[CamilaYH]

I’m trying to add a custom follower to my game, and I’ve got all the meshes and textures in the right folders, but the game just crashes on load. I followed the mod author’s guide exactly, but I’m wondering if there’s a specific load order for these kinds of NPC mods that I’m missing.

[KevinKW]

I've had a crash when a follower mod loaded and the game tried to render a mesh before the base NPCs were ready. I ended up adjusting the load order so it loaded after the base NPCs, and the crash went away.

[Kenneth39]

Could be a version mismatch rather than load order. The author might have updated assets and the version you have expects a different texture path.

[MadisonBG]

Do you have a crash log or error line that points to a texture, bone, or script?

[Grace_T]

I once found that a missing reference in the mod's manifest after a patch caused a hard crash at startup. Even with the meshes in place, the game balked until I fixed that line.