I've created a set of guards for a new village and am running into a bit of an irritating problem. I'd like for these guards to patrol their assigned area for 14 hours a day, have a 1 hour meal in the morning, a one hour meal in the evening, and sleep for 8 hours.

I copied them from the existing civil war guards just like other towns have done but my guards are ignoring their assigned AI. Two of them are supposed to sandbox in a guard tower for their 14 hours, they simply stand there and do nothing. The others have patrol routes that follow linked idle markers and those work, but they never break from this to go eat and sleep when they should.

I've even built then a handy barracks with enough beds and table space to accomodate them. I've put them in a faction that owns the building. The door to it has no lock. The navmesh is perfect. I can walk in with two followers and there's enough room to get around, though with guards in there it would be somewhat crowded.

When I copied them from their original forms, I set them to use LvlGuardImperial and LvlGuardSons (depending on who controls the hold etc). I made sure I unchecked the "use AI packages" box as well as the "use factions" box on both sets of NPC records. Yet it seems as though the game is ignoring this and using the original AI packs buried in the nested mess of templates that guards all generate from.

Is there no way to do this and still use the underlying guard templates? Or are we expected to just ignore the fact that guards never eat and sleep?

That's strange that you are running into this problem mate, because in my mod I've made my own "vanilla guards" and I've got them to have daily routines, which works ok over here.

I'm at work at the moment .I cannot think of anything off the top of my head that stands out from what you've already described.

I'll pm you my esp. Maybe having a dig around in it will make something jump out at ya

- Hypno

I have guards around the Dovahkiins Warehouse and Bedroom that follow patrol patterns and guard set areas but I have not yet built the barracks and worked with their packages beyond the patrols. One thing I have noticed is that their behavior seems to be set when you first enter the area after they are created and is then stored in your save games for some period of time. I tried to use the vanilla packages for guarding a fixed spot, like a door or a gate, and had issues with their agro behavior causing them to attack each other and the player. Even after changing them to patrol packages like the others, they still had agro issues in testing until I reverted to an older save. I also noticed that they will continue to follow old patrol patterns after I change them and if I remove their patrol markers after assigning new ones, they just stand idle since their markers are gone. I don't know if the issue applies to you because I don't know if you are using progressive saves or not. Just a thought. I fixed the issue for players by copying the affected guards and deleting the original. The new FormID breaks the save link.

Well your ESP and what the vanilla city guards did seems to indicate I need a buffer template in between using the leveled guard template and making my own instances, so I've now got a base Stormcloak guard and a base Imperial guard that are both based on the vanilla templates, with the AI and Faction boxes unchecked. My new guards are then based on my buffer template.

It seems to have at least partially worked. The sandbox package kicked in on the two up at the guard tower, but it's past when they should have left for bed and they're still up there. So something still isn't right.

And for clarity, this is all being tested from a save prior to the mod's existence. It's all virgin data to my game. As inconvenient as that is considering I built the thing a hair too close to a nearby Dwemer ruin which is attracting the mecha dragons from that one mod that adds them. Awesome stuff, except I have to console kill them or they'll eat my guards alive.

My Manor house guards and supervisors have switching eat /sleep/ patrol shifts and seem to be working fine inside my Manor house. I made the AI packages from scratch and did not use any guard templates, AFAIK.

Hrm, well I'm not sure what I did, but I loaded up and went over to the village and now they're all shuffling off to bed as expected. So.... uh... ok. As long as it stays consistent I guess that's fine.

lol, never a dull moment with the ck!

I'm glad you got it sorted mate. The amount of things i've learned through your posts, i'm happy to have helped (didnt really do much but still )

- Hypno

I figured that would be the case but your description of the problem was very familiar to what I saw. I have a favorite save from before I ever started modding the game that I like to start from. But it forces me to go through a number of steps to get from Breezehome to my exterior where the guards are. I was not going back to the original save for each test but starting from the auto save when I left the building. It never occurred to me that the guard behaviors would be set by the save so my changes wouldn't come through until I actually saw it happening.

Maybe that was my problem then too. A combination of loading an autosave and not having made the buffer templates. Though I have no idea why buffer templates should have been necessary.