Hi everyone. If I commit mass genocide on a town do the towns repopulate with generic NPCs? I have asked this a while back and got mixed responses. I know that dungeons and locations such as caves, bandit lairs, etc, do repopulate. But I do not know if towns repopulate. I recently killed a shop keeper and a whole village and waited for an ingame month and still nothing came back... the shop keeper was still dead and the town was utterly a ghost town...

So does it have to be like 2 months or something or do the towns even repopulate?

I am pretty sure any named npc is will not respawn.

Named NPC's do not respawn and some cannot even be killed. Its probably alot less for the game to remember when respawning "Bandit Thug" or "Bandit Outlaw". And its a bit more realistic since immersion wise, it would be worrisome that an entire town was affected by necromancy lol

Towns will not repopulate... If you needed an NPC in there later for some quest that wasn't a main quest then you should have thought about that before you decided to commit genocide... If they were related to the game's main quest then the game wouldn't allow you to kill them, any of the side quest lines can be ended by killing the wrong NPC though...

Which is why its essential to have a 'for fun/massacre' save for those occasions when you just cant resist.......I used that file alot upon meeting the adoring fan in oblivion.

Oh ok. Well it seems a little unrealistic dont you think for that to happen? I am sure immigrants from all over are coming to skyrim and would house themselves or even the abandond town would be used by bandits or something. What do you think??

Perhaps, though I personally wouldn't like to live in a town where everyone was murdered.


Slightly off topic: I wasn't actually sure caves and ruins etc respawned! I know they did in Oblivion, but then what is the point of the "*Cleared" message when hovering the mouse over a cleared cave on the world map?

If I heard tale of a crazy overpowered maniac was slaughtering innocent townsfolk in skyrim I definitely wouldn't be making that my first choice in where to live lol Plus its a harsher land then some of the southern provinces and only the hardy and adventurers/merchants come there.

Haha you have a point. But Bathesda should know that there are some people who just play the game to become notorious killers... So if a player kills everyone in skyrim then what? Since the towns dont repopulate with even generic NPCs then there is nothing els to kill. Or lets say you kill all the shop keepers well then you cant sell or buy... If you kill everyone then the world is completely empty right? I would think Bathesda would have calculated that..

After all their games im sure this is something they haven't overlooked. If they can't program self control into the players then they would have to program it into the game which would restrict even further the freedom/consequence aspect of the game. In morrowind they have a message that will tell you when you have killed a main quest breaking NPC and have doomed the world or something, but still allows you to continue in "the doomed world you created". They know these things they just like to leave it up to you to decide.

For future references just play around and see what you can get away with and what makes your game less enjoyable. In morrowind i persisted in my doomed world and cared less. In skyrim, im a bit more immersed with the world so im choosing carefully what I do...or hitting F5 then going nuts and watching the consequences lol

Why should the game maker compensate for you deciding to kill everyone? I say it's your game, you should be able to play it however you want...but your actions still have consequences, and the game shouldn't erase them. There aren't many towns where you can kill absolutely everyone, and there will always be random folk roaming the roads, bandits and necromancers in their hideouts, etc. Murdering everyone in Skyrim sounds like a fun thing to do once I get bored with everything else, though... If only it were possible.

(I am also one of the ones who think there are too darn many "essential" unkillable NPCs, and that I should be able to ruin quest lines if I want to, but that's another topic altogether)

Wow. Sorry the devs didn't make this a mass murderer simulation.

It seems the consequences of being a mass-murderer may be your own lonliness then. Bethesada does give u the option of saving your game and reloading to before u screwed it up, or u can just start a new character if u do not like the ghost towns u have created.

Named one's are gone forever, only guards respawn

Yeah Iearned this the hard way. Don't kill anybody in cities...

I wish they did repopulate. Riverwood has taken a beating from dragons. Nearly every NPC who spends any time outdoors is dead in my Riverwood. Even the guards haven't respawned, there is only ONE left in Riverwood. The streets are lined with bodies. I've dragged a few into the river. But dragons have devastated that poor little town. Every time I travel there, one attacks.

For the most part NPCs are original and do not respawn, this isn't Fable where any and all of them are cookie cutter characters that just restock themselves like a garden grows vegetables. xP

Yeah, I wiped out a whole town as well. I don't like going there because there's no life there whatsoever. It's pretty creepy.

On the computer, are you able to click on essential NPCs and open the console and type "kill"? It used to work in FO.

What about DB contracts?

The game will create these npc's upon accepting the contract.

Hm well that does stink that towns dont repopulate. Like I said you would think that even a few people would populate the towns after some time... Also in my game riverwood is being demolished by dragons and like 2 people remain there and you would think that when I kill the dragon or something that people would start coming to the village to reside. I wish the devs could speak more on this machanic really, like have them tell us exactly how the living world works and how the NPCs populate areas and perform tasks. Anyone have any dev developer info on it or something? I would love to learn about it. I wish they would answer this question of towns repopulating in detail.

Bump

Has anyone seen a bandit cave repopulated yet?

In short yes but...

This is still my first character in Skyrim and having played a few Bethesda games in the past i am well aware of exploring first having blown through Oblivion in a few days as i just did the main quest with out really understanding how the game works. Now i screw around, play around with the other stuff like crafting, and explore the map content to clear every place as i locate it. I have had places that did respawn that i had previously cleared but i had quests that sent me back in to the area. The area still showed cleared on the large map but upon returning they were restocked and the thing/person i was after was too. I am not sure if this is the quest (kind of think so) or is it a time frame thing as i do think some locales do seem to respawn, but as i said still new to Skyrim i am not really sure it does seem so to this traveler.

Asai