Followers can't chop wood?

[FrozenWolf150]

I'm planning on making a lot of arrows so that I can train up my Archery skill. To do that, I need a lot of firewood, since I already have several hundred dwarven ingots. Although you can buy firewood from general traders, I thought it would be easier to just chop it myself. I read on the wiki page that you can order a follower to do it while you leave the game running. So I gave my Dark Brotherhood Assassin a woodcutter's axe and told her to chop wood. I left the game for about 10-15 minutes. When I came back and told her to stop, I checked her inventory and the firewood was not there. I reloaded my quicksave and tried again, this time stopping her after a couple of chops. Still nothing.

I also read a tip that said you can go to Riverwood where there are multiple chopping blocks, and set your follower up at one while you use the other, to double your productivity. However, I have no idea how this is supposed to be possible. You can't activate the other chopping block yourself while you're still in follower command mode, and exiting that in order to activate the chopping block causes your follower to stop whatever they were doing.

I'm not sure what went wrong. Was there a patch that removed your followers' ability to chop wood? I'm using both the latest official and unofficial patches.


ETA: I did some testing with other followers. I switched out the assassin for Lydia, ordered her to chop wood, and this time it did work. I know there are some followers who can't be ordered to perform certain actions, but the assassin didn't actually refuse, and she went through all the animations and everything.