Ever notice how NPC homes are often totally lootable? Goldenglow Estate, for instance, or Arcadia's Cauldron after doing a small delivery quest to her.

I have submitted one or two bug reports to the Unofficial Patch, however the majority of what I'm talking about occurs after you have done a quest for the owner/member of the faction the cell is owned by. I imagine it is some sort of system whereby the player becomes 'friends' with that faction, however it results in the player having free reign in many homes, aside from weapons, armour and potions, generally.

I am intending to release a mod remedying this; the player will never have free reign to take whatever they want from Dragonsreach for instance. If anyone has any more details on how this system works I'd appreciate it.

It's a matter of the items' value. When you've become friends with something, they're not going to care if you take something that's only worth a few gold.

I don't believe this would be within the scope of the USP, because it's working exactly as intended.

As ishmael said this is an intentional design in the game. Friends let friends borrow things and eat with them, so it isn't classed as theft. Only expensive valuables are still considered thieving.

Hey! At least you won't get your head chopped off for picking up a fork anymore

Yeah, if you want to change it I assume there'll be a few gamesettings like fBorrowFriendValueMax or what have you that'll govern what the value of things you can take from a faction that considers you a friend/ally/whatever.

It would actually make more sense if they had a set limit and actually asked you to return something to them rather than just let you freely walk away with every book in their home without ever having any intention of returning them. Like how merchants have a set limit to the amount of gold they can give you, make friends have a set limit to the amount of crap you can borrow.

That said, this is something more along the lines of an actual mod, not a patch.

Cheers guys, and it sounds like it'll be easy to change. Excellent.

Another downside of it is that, say, if a Thieves' Guild quest asks you to steal something from a home, and you are already friends with that home-owner/faction, then picking the lock and waltzing about the place while they look on (going into sneak mode for 2 seconds to actually pick up the item) really removes the challenge of burglary.

I will definitely make a little mod.