I'm looking for any suggestions on ways to target ANY chest with a spell, or by whacking it with a staff etc. The chest cannot have any tweaks done to it, this needs to happen from the spell or the weapon doing the targeting.

What I'm doing now is sending a projectile which drops an explosion, which in turn drops a MISC debris item. The Debris item starts a Quest to look for the "closest" Container ref within 5'. The problem is that "Closest" seems to be based on an arbitrary 3D origin point, rather than what the MISC is actually touching, so it often grabs the wrong chest if they are close together... in other words, it's touching Chest A, but Chest B's origin is closer, so B get selected instead.

Normally it works ok, but in some mods like Hearthfire the chests are so close together that my players are having problems selecting the proper container. It's like trying to hit a flea with ADHD jumping on the back of an epileptic chihuahua.

Open to any suggestions here EXCEPT "put a script on the container" since this needs to work on ANY container... see my mod http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/28196to see what I'm doing here.