When doing a Companion quest “Proving Honor” and your Skyrim freezes while leaving Dustman’s Cairn – resulting in an endless loading screen – I might have a solution for you.
I entered the dungeon normally and cleared it with no problem. But once I tried to leave, the game went on for an endless loop of the loading screen. I couldn’t even teleport out of the dungeon (with a console command like “coc whiterun”), the loading screen would still hang.
Dustman’s Cairn problem caused by too many followers?
When I first entered Dustman’s Cairn, not only did I had my companion, Fargas, but also my real follower Jenassa with me in the dungeon! They were quite effective together, cutting and slashing spiders in half, before I even could say “a kitty-kat”. I didn’t remember how the game had played out in the past, but it had made me suspicious.
As it turned out, an extra follower happened to be the cause of my problem. At first I tried removing some of my mods, but it didn’t help. I use a mod called Amazing Follower Tweaks which – from a number of other things – raises the number of maximum followers to five from the normal single one. This might have been the cause in the first place, but disabling the mod didn’t help me anymore.
Solution #1: Leave your follower before entering Dustman’s Cairn
Easiest way to avoid my problem is to leave your real follower before entering Dustman’s Cairn. However, if you’ve already cleared the dungeon and/or don’t have an earlier saved game, you might need to try the second solution.
Solution #2: You need to disable your follower in Dustman’s Crypt
I tried many commands, but the best method, which did not result in a crash, freeze or a lost follower was to use some console magic.
- When you’ve cleared the whole dungeon, stay in the lower level, Dustman’s Crypt.
- Target your second follower. At that time, my follower was Jenassa.
- Open up the console (normal key binding is ~).
- Click on your follower to see his/her object reference ID show up on the middle of your screen. (Jenassa’s ID was 000e1ba9)
- Write the ID number down, so you remember it later.
- Type in disable in the console and hit enter. It will make your follower disappear.
- Now go back to upper level Dustman’s Cairn. And exit the dungeon.
- If everything worked, you should be able the leave the dungeon succesfully! You might want to try a few times, if at first you did not succeed.
- Once you’re out of the dungeon, you can can re-enable your follower with console command enable 000e1ba9, replace the code with your followers ID.
- Teleport your follower back to you with a console command player.placeatme 000e1ba9, again replacing the code with your followers ID.
- Now you’re good, I hope!
If you won’t succeed on your first try, try disabling some more addons.
Now for something completely different
If I didn’t solve your problem, here’s a fashion video for you instead.
