I recruited Lydia as my follower and had never dismissed her before the bug occured. Here's the current situation:
(a) Lydia keeps going home.
(b) Lydia's dialog indicates that she is
following me (I can tell her to wait, go home, do things for me, or
carry my burden).
There's nothing I can do to change these two things. She WON'T wait or go home, but is willing to pick up or exchange stuff when requested.
I also tried disable/enable, recycleactor, resetAI, kill/resurrect and their combination, but the problem remained. When I set playerfollowercount to 0, neither Lydia nor my other follower (Serana) went home.
I've never used any follower-related mod. But I do have Vilja with me. The Vilja mod has a feature which enables me to have a friendly fight with any of my followers, and I think the problem occured after my friendly fight with Lydia. What can I do now?
I'm aware of this question, but it does not help me.
Best Answer
If none of the other suggestions are working you might have to try spawning an entirely new instance of Lydia. Go wherever you want Lydia to consider home and use a player.placeatme command. (Maybe consider killing or disabling your old instance of Lydia after if this works.)
Note: I'm not entirely sure, but you might have to reset your relationship stats with the new Lydia too.