I've tried a couple different times to mod Farkas so that he wears Wolf Armor. It's not that difficult and he wears it consistently...right up until the point where he transforms into a werewolf in Dustman's Cairn. He comes back in ArmorSteelNoHelmet outfit and stays that way for the rest of the game.

I noticed that Kivan had some luck modding Farkas' weapon in the Unofficial Skyrim Patch and tried to reverse engineer what he did. So far as I can tell, in the Quest script (C01>Scripts>C01QuestScripts>Properties), there is an entry for Farkas' weapons and outfit. It appears as though the unofficial patch modifies the weapon entry, however my attempts to change his appearance have failed.

So I'm thinking there has to be something else governing this? Do I need to start a new game to have this take hold (I've already tried restarting the quest and reentering the cell)? I've tried digging around for a conflicting script, but I'm coming up empty handed.

Does anyone have suggestions?

Thanks!

Farkas base Actor: Actors > Actor > Nord Race > Male

Amend his outfit in the Inventory

And, I think you have, but also make sure you change it in the property you identified

I think once the Quest is over, Farkas is defaulting to his base actor costume

That was how I got his appearance to change originally. In previous attempts at this mod, his outfit did not revert after the quest finished.

I'm still curious what is governing the change though. Any thoughts?

Outfits can be attached to radiant aliases.

This is good information, however I'm afraid I need just a little bit more context for it to be helpful.

I know that Farkas is given the "Observer" alias, but I was unable to find any outfit associated with it. What am I missing?

Thanks!

I did some more digging today, however I didn't make any progress.

I tried disabling all the other mods in case there was a conflict.
I tried removing the value for the property in C01QuestScript.
I even tried seeing if there was a way to hardcode ArmorCompanionsOutfitNoHelmet into the script itself, however it's been 15 year since the last programming class I took and none of my edits would compile.

I'm beginning to wonder if Farkas wears Steel Armor because it's hardcoded into the game somewhere.

I only had a quick look, so there could be other quests/aliases governing what the character wears, but I could only find the two places that were altering the Outfit.

The base actor - which is what the NPC will wear when not involved in a quest (it's the default if you like) and a property in the C00 or C01 Quest (I can't remember which is was).

Change the value in the base actor and change the value of the script property ... The one in the script is used to remember what the character was wearing before werewolfing. Also check every occasion you can find of the NPC being an Alias in a Quest (Aliases can have Outfits assigned).

There might be a scripted change elsewhere ... Farkas as an Alias appears in many of the C0x quests ... To try to find it, right click the base actor in the left-menu-tree and do "Use Info", that will give you a list of things (quests etc) that use the actor - Then check out any that look like they might be having an effect (double click in the Use List)

Note that it is possible that this is a Dirty-Save Issue ... Have you used coc from the main game menu (without loading a game, or starting a new game) and then used console commands to advance quest stages? ... If not, you should; you could be spending time chasing something that is fixed in clean saves