I want to have guards going on patrols around town. In order to avoid creating many different actors with different package with predefined patrol routes, I thought about making only one actor with a sandbox package, so that they'd randomly walk between different idle markers in the game.

I've created the Actor with one package from the Sandbox template, with no conditions nor schedule. The package has everything off except "Allow Idle Markers". The location is the editor location with 4000 radius, which I think is way more than enough to cover the whole area.

The Idle Markers are the type "PatrolIdleMarker", I've set the Actor as the Owner and they don't have any patrol data.

Should this be enough for it to work the way its intended? What could be wrong? Currently, they just stand in the editor location and they never use the markers. I have this problem in 3 different locations with 3 different Actors so something must be wrong with the way I'm doing things.

Have you made the navmesh ? If your actor stays exactly at his editor location, you probably don't have a navmesh in your cell.

I do. My follower and other NPCs with other AI packages, use it without any problem. Even if there was a problem somewhere, I'm having the same problem in multiple cells, interior and in Tamriel, some have been copied over from the base game along with the fully working navmesh. Other NPCs sharing the same space, walk around without any problem.

Do you have your NPC link referenced to the idle markers by any chance?

They're not linked to anything, do they have to? The markers are also not linked and they have no patrol data.

Actor seems to ignore PatrolIdleMarker in sandbox mode. And if you set "allow wandering" to false, they don't move.

You can also use sandbox multilocation, with random to true.

Thank you! The multilocation template is perfect for what I wanted. I never used it before.

The interaction with the markers is still hit and miss though. I figured the shield was preventing them to interact with some so without it, they're interacting the the wam hands one and the clean weapons one but still, not with the patrol ones.

I got to move them around the place patrolling without micromanaging each guard's routes which was the most important thing. Thanks a lot!

Try using EmptyIdleMarker. Do they walk to that location?

You could also try an idlemarker that they don't seem to actually like. I know I tried to get some guards using the LookFarSomething idlemarker and they just treated it like a regular old mark.