Squadmates System
Last Updated: May 31, 2021

Gun For Hire gives you the ability to recruit a squad of three followers! These recruits come at the conclusion of one of the jobs you will receive from your assistant, Storming The Gates. Should your reputation be high enough and should you have the caps, you can hire the client to become one of your team. Though this particular job will fire off indefinitely, you will only have the option to hire the "client" a total of three times.

Once the NPC has been recruited, the will make their new home inside the Gun For Hire office space. They are set to sandbox within the whole cell and will make use of any furniture or markers that you place around the office. When you dismiss them, they will return to the office.

And yes, to answer the question now, you can in fact have all three of your squadmates accompanying you at the same time! Each one shares a single controller script, a custom built amalgamation of Bethesda's Followers Script and the HC Manager. Because these are custom followers, they will not use any of Bethesda's follower systems, from the scripting, the factions, the survival mode stuff, none of it. They are controlled 100% by my own custom made script. Which is to say, the can operate as individuals in your company, just as well as they can as a team.

They have a fully-fledged dialogue wheel that allows you to control every aspect of their AI, as well as the usual things like trading, getting out of power armor, recruiting or dismissing. You can set their following distance. You can set their combat stance. You can even set them to not measure on the stealth meter or to become ghosts, unable to be hit or hurt in battle. And what is best about this is that each thing you tailor, per squadmate, is a unique setting to that particular squadmate.

These followers are fully voiced! Clients in GFH use femaleeventone/maleeventone voicetypes and the squadmates do as well. But to broaden the available dialogue output, I have also incorporated lines from BOSFemale02/BOSMale01, which are voiced by the same VAs as the eventoned voices used on clients. So, the followers have some military/mercenary type lines they will speak. Not only is their dialogue wheel fully voiced, but because I made my own followers system, they also have, like all NPCs do, situational awareness. They will comment on certain player actions like healing them when they go down in a fight or when the player kills and enemy. They have all the same sorts of output that normal companions do, when traveling with them, aside from the annoying "hellos", those one-liners that companions spit out every so often.

Not only are they voiced, but they are also persistent references, so you can use looksmenu on them to tailor their looks to your own preferences, on top of being able to equip them however you wish to.

The holotape you receive when becoming the owner of the office space also has some generic settings for squadmates. You can turn off their chatter with it, meaning those situational awareness lines mentioned above. You can make them entirely silent, except for when you enter into their dialogue wheel, if that is something you prefer. You can also enable a customized version of survival mode's bleedout rule for companions, where when they go down in a fight, they stay down until you heal them. And if you leave them behind, they will auto-dismiss and return to the GFH Office. When the bleedout rule is enabled, you can also then enable a Bleedout Death rule, where if you don't heal a squadmate within 30 seconds of them going into bleedout, they die! You can also toggle how they handle ammo - whether they use standard NPC ammo handling, where 1 bullet means unlimited ammo, or you can tell the mod that you will handle providing their ammo needs for them.

And that's not all! As if it wasn't enough to have three fully fledged and voiced followers that operate outside of the companion system, they also have the ability to be upgraded via perks. Such perks improve their abilities to sneak or to use different weapon types to better effect! On top of all of that, they also have a default outfit and leveled list for their initial clothing, armor and weapons, so you could make a patch file to change that too!

And yes, you did understand that part correctly - they are NOT part of the companion system, so in theory, you could have Man's Best Friend installed, you could have Heather Casdin installed and Gun For Hire as well. And in that scenario, you could have Dogmeat, Heather, a vanilla companion AND the three squadmates, all traveling with you at the same time! That's a seven person team. Imagine the possibilities!

A note about summoning your squad. There are two different ways in which your squad can be called to you. One, located in the holotape's squad section, is a tool that will summon ALL available squad members, as if you had gone to the office and asked them to travel with you. When you select this tool, no matter where you are in the Commonwealth, the available squad members will switch to recruited mode and come running to your location. The second method is a consumable that you can put into your favorites. When you use this, it will summon your currently recruited squad members to rally up on your location, ala Mass Effect's rally command. If a squad NPC is not currently recruited and is in the office location, they will not come to you with this - its main purpose is to be used during combat to make the squad form up on your location. When you consume this item to call them to you, it will automatically be replaced.