Hey all, so I posted http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1406028-req-dead-thrall-improvements/in the Skyrim Mods forum a couple months ago, and as you can see I haven't gotten any help, so I thought maybe I'd ask here. In a nutshell: is there a way, via the Creation Kit, to make an NPC's body not despawn after they die? I've modded Morrowind for years, and in the CS it's as easy as flagging "bodies persist" in the general info; obviously that doesn't exist anymore. So, anyone have any thoughts on how to do this?

Replace the dead body with a copy that starts dead? (a la Daynas Valen of Folgunthur in the Forbidden Legend Quest, he is an actor that I'm pretty sure can be resurrected but starts dead)

Well, my reason for wanting to do it is so that dead thralls won't despawn after you leave them alone for a day. So, the idea is I want to be able to kill an NPC, and then have their body not disappear afterward. There must be a way to do this, since certain NPC's already behave this way in vanilla (i.e. Orchendor) but hell if I can figure out what's causing it...

Perhaps if you made a quest which could track up to a certain number of NPC's and put them all into Alias'?

In such a state/role I'm pretty sure the won't be allowed to de-spawn/respawn. Alias', and to a certain extent, quest's aren't really my forte so hopefully someone else can chime in here on this idea.

*EDIT: This seemingly indeterminate property/quality that Orchendor seems to possess may in fact be that he (and others like him) still fill Alias' in certain quests and are never cleaned out of those roles..........

There is a default script added to most NPC's in major settlement. When they die, it removes their body and transfers their items to a coffin in the hall of the dead

- Hypno

If you want them to 'persist', you might look at the Render window, double-click on the NPC you want to persist, and click on the 'Persist Location' tab, and enter the 'location' you want them to stay in.
You may have to make your cell a 'Location' object first. Look in the 'WorldData' folder on the Object Window for the Location objects.

All methods to make an object persistent through script: http://www.creationkit.com/Persistence_%28Papyrus%29#What_makes_objects_persistent.3F

Hey everyone, thanks for the suggestions and links! Scripting is definitely not my forte, but I'm going to go play around with it and see if I can make something work... if anyone wants to add any further pointers or suggestions though, I would certainly appreciate it