Oblivion player assembles army of 16 knights using console commands
One player in the Oblivion remaster finally managed to pull off a trick from five years ago – simultaneously gathering 16 followers from the Knights of the Nine order using peculiarities of the follower system and console commands. The result looks like a full-fledged crusade through Cyrodiil.
The trick is based on a peculiarity of the companion system in the Knights of the Nine DLC. When a named knight dies in combat, they are replaced by an unnamed respawning Knight. If you ask the original knight to follow the player, their unnamed double will also follow – although the latter only exists after the original's death, they can be summoned with console commands.
Meryl_Whitestrake detailed the process:
First, summon all eight unnamed knights using the moveto player and enable commands with RefIDs from UESP Wiki. An important detail for the remaster – the RefID prefix changed from 01 to 0a, though the exact value depends on mod load order. Then recruit the named knight, wait 10 seconds for their unnamed replacement to start following, and reset the following flag with the command set ND00.following to 0. This allows hiring the next named knight while preserving the following AI for previous ones. Repeat for all eight named knights and pray your PC doesn't explode.
The gamer noted nuances – equipment depends on NPC level. Named knights have the player's level plus zero, unnamed ones minus three from the player's level. At character level five, named knights receive silver weapons, unnamed ones only iron. Equipment can be improved through the console with the additem command. It's also recommended to make knights essential using setessential, as death can break the pathfinding system – especially concerning Sir Lathon, who regularly dies in the cave.
The community suggested leading the knight army to storm Oblivion gates or the final Battle of Bruma to feel like commanding a real army. One player warned that in the original, most NPCs freeze due to too many characters for the engine to process.
The gamer noted using 32 gigabytes of RAM for collecting knights, so if you decide to replicate this, keep in mind that your PC might hang with less RAM.
