[Essential Tutorial] The Follower Mod Installation Tutorial Along with Some Issue FIxes

[Commander]

Oh boy I really don't want to make this tutorial. This thing is a bitch. If you tried to install this thing before, you know the pains. It hates you and you hate it. It is quite literally not made for games like Reborn and Rejuv where cutscenes happen every 5 minutes and stairs are your worst nightmare. So you wanna know why the follower mod isn't widely used. Well, that's not what we're here for. Today we're simply for the simple installation of the follower mod and the number of fixes on how to get past the dev oversight. I haven't worked out all the kinks but let's just get started:

 

Where to begin:

 

https://www.pokecommunity.com/showthread.php?t=360846

 

I can't find the wiki used for the original tutorial but here's a good place to start. It contains all the download links for the basics of the follower mod. As for the graphics, technically we have up until USUM but I'd rather see if I can verify if a few dozen of these graphics were taken as free use or not. I've verified some of them as such but others I don't even know where they came from. If you really want that file, PM me and I'll share the sprites. I'm not going to rewrite this piece as all it really is doing is copying a script and pasting it into RMXP like this:

 

 

Pay attention to that top part as that's where most of your issues and crashes are going to come up as. This is a custom made script designed for Reborn which is why the switches and variables are high. It's best to put them near the tail end so that you can keep track of them in case you need to make changes. But anything in 1400s is a variable, anything in 2400s is a switch, and anything 90-100 is an animation. Plug this all in and you're almost done with the base installation.

 

If you do this and keep getting crashes starting the game up, you probably forgot to put the animations which are shown here:

 

 

If you're lazy, technically you can copy and paste them from another game (like I did from the follower mod) instead of trying to import them in. There's also the common events page where you need a common event that shows like this below

 

 

You may notice common events 68 and 69 (event 67 is a personal one for me) and I'll be going over what those are in a bit. Why do you need a common event that does nothing? I dunno. Probably poor scripting. You need it and it works so don't question it.

 

The next thing you need to do is activate the follower mod system which can be done with the following script in an event:

 

 

For the normal person, this would make as much sense as Cain's maturity level. I'm going to break this down as we're starting to get into more of my custom stuff (because typing 20 lines of code gets annoying after event number 50). I'll start with the Follower EV#. That is a variable that is used for the event that'll become the follower Pokemon. Each map with a healing machine needs to have a blank common event for the follower. This one happens to be map 70. It's not doing anything now but will in a minute. pbPokemonFollow(69) is the direct command to make a follower Pokemon the event. So in this case Event 69 is set to follow the player. Act Fall Switch is the switch that activates follower Pokemon so that needs to be turned on.

 

pbToggleFollowingPokemon needs to be done twice. So the first one actually is used to make the Pokemon appear (why the event should appear off camera) and the second one will make it so the Pokemon pops up from behind you. And that's it. You're done. You now have a follower behind you...now you just have to do a whole bunch of stuff to make it work everywhere. Let's start with healing:

 

 

So let me take a deep breath and explain all of this. So to remove the pokemon you need to use pbToggle twice (plays animations) before using pbRemoveDependency (makes mon disappear) and make sure to turn the switch off. Then you need to add the follower back using pbPokemonFollow(event on map) turning the Act Follow switch back on and the use pbToggle again. It gets better when you have fainted Pokemon but we're not there yet. If you mess this order up or forget a step, you get an error and your game crashes. That seems like a lot of work to do the same thing over and over again copying one set of lines then another so I was lazy and came up with this solution:

 

Remove Follower:

You can set it to dependency2 as it doesn't need to be three and...

 

Add Follower:

and this is to add the follower back

 

So whenever you want a Pokemon to go away, you'd just use a common event remove follower. And then to add them back just use a common event called add follower with the scripts show above. You may be wondering "Why is there a 108? There is no 108 event." and "Do I need to make it event 108 every time?" And we'll get to that. Now let's look at the much cleaner version of doing this

 

 

Now you only need to do 3 things. First thing is set a variable to be the Event tile to what you need it to be. Then use the common event remove follower to get rid of the mon. Then at the end use add follower. So now the last thing to do is make is so that the variable above is used to determine the event instead which is done simply but inserting this little in the script right here:

 

 

Is that the best way to do it? No. Does it work? Yes. Now you have to deal with the other half. What happens if you wipe:

 

 

Just need to do Add Follower. You already healed there so it remembers everything else. Just add follower. Switch 2466 is a personal edit that fixes the escape rope problem but since that is situational I'm not going to cover that mix. Maybe if people need it. You just need to make edits to the when people join you or add a 3rd dependent event script depending on your preference.

 

Now we have the fun stuff. Let's just start with the flashing. Those Pokemon balls like to flash more than a stripper who has nothing to hide. When you walk out of a building, they flash. When you reach a new map, they flash. When you open the menu, they flash. When you use the PC, they flash. I'm going to go over a couple script edits that help fix most of these problems:

 

Turning off Flash for map travel

 

put a "#" in front of these things

 

Here:

 

And these two places:

 

You'll thank me later as that'll stop you from so much grief working on this damn thing. Literally no reason you should not do this once you get the script. Zero reason not to.

 

How to Disable the Flash

 

I need to pinpoint what I did as it disabled the sound but one of the biggest things when removing the follower is the big flash it'll make using the "Remove Follower" common event or the normal style I showed before. I use a global switch 2469 to stop the animation from showing when enabled and in the following places

 

 

(not the best pic but ctrl+f should find it)

 

(this one is under the surf tab so you can probably skip it in most scenarios)

 

 

basically if it says refresh_sprite or Animation in it, you probably need to make a condition to turn them off. There's probably a better way to script this but I'm not a programmer but I do know a thing or two about this. Anyways once you do that it's actually really simple to turn on and off

 

 

Turn the switch on to stop it and...

 

 

This'll add the partner back and nobody will ever notice it was gone. Technically you should have a dump variable and have it look more like this:

 

 

This is mostly used for cutscenes where you need to hide the player and their Pokemon which two objects and be really difficult to deal with. That last event is to avoid having Jimmy run into trouble and wiping causing the game to crash. Don't be like Jimmy.

 

Stopping the flash in the Menu and PC

 

So first thing I'd recommend doing is for the PC which is found below

 

 

$Trainer.party[0] is the first Pokemon in the slot. If it's the same Pokemon, it'll ignore the refreshing the sprite. It's probably better to do a script variable instead of a global variable here but I'm bad at scripting. Anyways, you'll need to go into a section outside of the follower section for this next part to insert a piece of script here:

 

 

And anytime you don't change the lead for the PC you won't experience a flash. Pause menu is slightly easier as it's actually done if you did the part above. Now onto the last thing:

 

Moving a follower Pokemon

 

So this is a feature that exists that I don't see get talked about. Let's say a certain follower behind you blocks the way. You could move them out of the way by doing this:

 

 

You have to use the script command but this allows for you to move the partner however you like. Just make sure it's above a Wait for Move's completion. The partner can do everything in the move setroute in RMXP put you have to type it in by hand like above. That example the mon moves left 4 tiles before going down 3 and turning around to face south. Not critical but something good to know in case you need it.

 

Sorry if this isn't the most helpful but this mod is a beast and I see a number of people just trying to download it and plug it in somewhere expecting it to work and just crash. I mostly used Redux's files (don't kill me, Ame) just so I could show pictures of what to look for and some things you can do. And if you have any tips and tricks I'd definitely say share them.