I had some NPC's in Riften vanish recently. I think it had to do with the open cities mod I had installed. I'd really like it if there was a console command that shocks the game into repositioning NPC's who've wandered or got themselves killed. I managed to recover some noticeably missing Riften NPC's by using console command, "player.placeatme " where base-ID of course is the base ID of the NPC in question.

This method seemed to recover the missing characters and they went back to their duties. Though I don't know if more are missing I'm unaware of. So it would be nice if there was a wide-sweeping solution rather than having to respawn individuals. Is there?

I can't answer your question. I play on the 360. But I would like to see something similar.
Had about 275 hours on my first character. Level 53 Mage. Gave up and started new after glitches and freeze-ups.

And I was AMAZED at how many people were around in the new game!
I guess the slowness of the depopulation kept me from noticing.
I guess if you maybe played for 2000 hours or something, you'd be playing in a world devoid of all life! (?)

This really needs to be addressed somehow.

IIRC the placeatme command creates a clone of whatever it is you called for, it doesn't give you the "original" thing. It's not recommended for use with named NPCs for that very reason.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Console#Targeted_Commands

Not sure what the longterm ramifications are when you use it, but if an NPC simply wandered off and you duplicated them, it's very possible that you now have two instances of the same specific NPC in your game. If the original was already killed I don't know that duplicating them by using placeatme is going to alter that fact, the duplicate might not function correctly in some cases (for instance if the NPC was a vendor or involved in any quests, those functions might have "died" with the original and the duplicate may not offer them).

Hm, so there is no solution whatsoever... too bad. In fact the three missing NPCs in Riften I spawned went back to their stalls and appear to be fully functional. But thanks for the heads-up.

You can use the resurrect command to bring back dead NPCs, I've done it once with someone who apparently was killed in a dragon attack while I was in the middle of a fetch quest for them. I suppose you could just use prid and then resurrect (or resurrect 1 may be preferable IIRC) if you can't locate them to target them, I didn't know that at the time and couldn't find a body (didn't really know the person was dead at that point) so I used player.moveto to move me to their location which is how I found out they were dead. I think I used enable/disable once I found and resurrected them but I'm not sure if that makes any difference. The NPC functioned fine for the completion of the quest and appeared to walk back to her normal location and go about her normal business after the resurrection.

If you are just concerned about the location of missing NPCs you can use player.moveto like I did to see where they've gone, if necessary you can also use

prid
moveto player

to bring them to your location. I usually go to their location first just out of curiosity. I always save before using either command so I can reload if something goes terribly wrong. If necessary I will use moveto player to get them back where they're supposed to be assuming it's someone who has gone missing from their normal routine.

Except for the one resurrection I have only used this type of thing for NPCs who appeared to have bugged out due to mods, or when I'm testing out the effects of some mod and need to locate an NPC very quickly. It's not something I do on a regular basis just because it's possible, OTOH, I've never really had an NPC go missing without a really good reason and I can count the number of random NPC deaths that made a noticeable difference to my game on the fingers of one hand so it's not like I've had a lot of reasons to play around with it.

If the game bugged out somehow and the originals of your missing NPCs were actually removed from it entirely for some reason, I guess it's possible that the new ones you created are now functioning as originals and not duplicates. I don't know. I just wouldn't use placeatme on a named NPC if I can use moveto and find out what happened to them before I try anything else.

Well! If I knew there was a command to bring MY character to the NPC I would have used that. Thank you! Now I wish I had, to see where the heck they were.

No problem, it comes in really handy if you've lost track of someone. Great for missing followers. And like I said, if you save right beforehand you can locate someone and then if where they are isn't a problem you can just reload and go about your business secure in the knowledge that they aren't dead.

Right, so I discovered I'd actually had a save just before things went wonky. I place the blame squarely on open cities mod. I reloaded the save and the missing characters were there, but the town was not complete. Many missing textues and meshes. I walked out of the city (the Riften gate was missing so I could stroll right out of the city, even though that mod is removed), then reentered (the gate materialized behind me) and the town looks right again but the NPC's are missing. I used the moveto function and was transported back to the broken city. So it seems there are two instances existing, one where the missing NPC's are hanging out in a broken riften town and another where a Riften looks normal but the NPCs are eaten up in the void. Standing int he complete town and using the command to get the NPC to move to me (rather than respawn) seems to work. Too bad there might be other missing characters I'll never know about, though...

This reminds me of Oblivion, where npcs would leave Imperial City for a stroll and got eaten by an ogre. Many npcs would "disappear" this way.

Except in this case, they left the city and were eaten by a mod.

@colvax: glad you were able to get some idea of what was happening, but... a duplicate "broken" city? That's just wild.

Here's a list of Riften NPCs, don't know if that's all of them but it's certainly a fair sized group.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:People#Riften_People

Sounds like some kind of weird quantum-like world you've created in your game! That's awesome...

In the vanilla game?

I know, it's like Skyrim's own episode of the Twilight Zone. I would expect to hear a voice-over by Rod Serling popping up at some point...

Ive never had this happen on 360

Alright, I found others saying their Riften's also went [censored] up after installing and then uninstalling the open cities mod. I've managed to disable my cloned NPC's and pull the original ones out of the depths. I just wandered the broken Riften and made note of everyone I found and wrote down their reference ID's. It was crazy but it worked. There might be more missing that I didn't see, but I guess they'll have to stay in the void til I notice their absence. Poor little Ritenites.

Moral of the story: Avoid the open cities mod.

So the Open Cities mod is no good?

Correct.

Simply have generic NPC's respawn in place of the dead NPC's.. They only need guard dialogue, some can be merchants and mine owners as well and will move into the dead NPC's houses and run their buisnesses.

This really shouldn't be too hard to implement and I really hope Bethesda release this in a future patch, depopulation is becoming quite a concern for me now, it's unrealistic as well as people would purchase the property and businesses of deceased NPC's and make them their own.

NPC's in cities are all there for me to the best of my knowledge. Some of the towns have been hit by dragon attacks though.

Any NPC equipped with an AI package that takes them out of a city and who is not set as essential could potentially die in vanilla Oblivion. And it's the same in vanilla Skyrim. It is not a problem exclusive to the Open Cities mod.

No, non-essential wanderers are indeed fair game. Their deaths add some spice to the game. My only issue with the Open Cities mod is what it's done to Riften.

Not correct, and I'll say nothing more on this except that someone ignored the directions in the readme. (Really? Saved INSIDE a city then removed the mod? Yep, YOUR fault, not the mod's.)

Oh, does that only occur if a save's been made inside Riften and then the mod is removed exactly following that? I wasn't aware I'd made that error but if that's how it happens, good to know.

However, I just went and checked the mod's description on the Nexus and there's no mention of "Do not save within Riften and then disable the mod because your city will explode!" Kind of an important point to leave out of the main mod description. Still blame it.

An excerpt from the README from both Nexus and the downloaded archive:

They are called readmes for a reason

Yeah I saw that after Arthmoor pointed it out. But those instructions should be in a more prominent place - such as the mod's main description. There's no reason to have it separated.