Hi all,

Background: I am trying to create a "teammate standby" quest that allows dismissed followers to hang around the current cell until re-recruited, on request via dialog, ie "please hang out here indefinitely." The idea is to gather followers together so that one doesn't have to go hunting for them all over the map.

The desired behaviour is to have the NPC enter sandbox mode within the current cell indefinitely (until overridden by player dialogue), overriding all other AI packages. From what I understand, the easiest way to do this is to assign them to a quest alias, but it seems a quest alias can only be assigned to a single reference at a time.

So how would I override the behaviour of a number of NPCs like this? Assuming I've added them to a "TeammatesStandingBy" faction, I would like to override the behaviour for everyone in this faction without having to explicitly add the package to each possible follower's package list manually.

Any guidance appreciated. I apologize for lack of clarity, or if I've asked a particularly stupid question.

EDIT: To be precise - all I want is a way to add a behavior package to a set of NPCs dynamically. If it will make it easier, I will add the NPCs to a faction at runtime. Is there a way to do this?

So should I assume this is not possible?

Bumping and some info: It may well be that this is not possible to do. The "multiple followers" mod (being discussed in another thread on this forum) has faced a similar issue and got around it with alias trickery, ie keeping a pool of aliases available for any NPCs to be managed and assigning them to an alias dynamically.

This seems like a kludgy solution though, so If there is indeed a way to make this simpler I'd really appreciate some insight.

I don't know anything about how to do this, but in case it helps, in Fallout: New Vegas there was something like this. You could send all of your companions to a certain area (One of the casinos, I believe) and they would stay there and do random things. I'm not sure how it works, but if you have the game you might want to look into that. Sorry I can't be more useful than that.

You could probably control all of your followers with a scripted magic effect, they would be able to ping back to the follower script and tell the player their status. You could store them in a formlist in the follower script, that has the advantage of staying truncated.

What you are talking about in the first script is giving actors packages, if I read it right. I've been looking for this too and there isn't much in the actor script about this except for EvaluatePackage(), GetCurrentPackage(), etc, not very useful if there isn't a forcepackage() or some such. I imagine we'll have to wait for SKSE to add more to this because Papyrus seems totally gimped.

I'm not sure what you have done so far, but I've solved this sandbox issue for a simple generic companion. Game companions use a sandbox package with the target set for editor location so they will return home after 3 days. But if you place an a sandbox AI package with the location set for the current location instead, when you tell them it's time to part ways, they will stay put in their current location, eat, sleep, cook, etc. whatever you designate in the sandbox package.

Hmm... this is an intriguing idea. I'll give it a shot.

Speaking of forcepackage, I actually quite like the quest-based override system compared to the old unreliable addscriptpackage. It would be great though to be able to alias to a formlist of actors, with the alias overrides applying to each of them. I guess it's unlikely for them to add a feature like that to the CK and game engine at this late stage. SKSE to the rescue?



Yes but I'm trying to avoid messing with their default package list at all - since it means customizing each follower and causing conflicts with other mods that might edit the NPCs or their package lists.