Can anyone please explain what exactly a "seventh party member" is?

lollers

Is it like a workaround for the hard coded 6 member party limit? Could it be possible in theory that characters other than the ones I know about can become "seventh" and all come along with us?

TheArtisan

You cannot expand the party limit. The best thing you can do is have a permanent controllable follower with the same mechanics as a familiar. It is possible to have interjections and other party-member features and you could do inventory and spellbooks by temporarily joining them into the party. But this all has to be specifically coded.

Endarire

To build upon what AionZ said, an extra party member takes no party slot and may be treated (via scripting) to act like a controllable/allied NPC party member. These units likely only have inventory access and leveling ability when they're in a party member slot. These units likely participate in combat via scripting if they aren't party-controllable directly.

Isewein

Also, as far as I understand, you can really only have a 7th (not 8th, etc) party member, so you have to choose between the dog, Solaufein and Afaaq.

argent77

You can actually have more than one "7th party member". For example, the Golem Construction mod uses the same mechanics for all the golems.

There is no hard limit for the number of followers. However, it's not practical to have more than two or three since they all must be within close distance if you want to leave an area or you'll be seeing the dreaded "You must gather your party" message over and over.

Isewein

Oh, mea culpa. I took the advice in the readme for a hard-coded restriction, then.