is there a way to determine if a container resets/respawns?

Doh! Can someone move this to the Creation Kit forum, please? Thanks!

http://www.creationkit.com/Containerbut I guess you looked there. As for doing it on the fly I guess you could call http://www.creationkit.com/OnReset_-_ObjectReference, but you wouldn't know until it resets, which may well be too late.

Thanks, Ali!

I found something that I can use for finding chests that are player owned.
The Condition IsInMyOwnedCell works: http://www.creationkit.com/IsInMyOwnedCell
It doesn't exactly detect if the chest will respawn or not, but it will do for my needs.

Isn't there a "respawns" checkbox in the edit popup from double clicking on it in the render window?

Yeah in the CK it's easy. It's detecting within game that's the problem.

Yes, since resetting restores all object attributes and script variables to their starting values, you can't detect resetting directly in a script. What you can do however is rely on the fact that these are restored to their defaults. For example with actors, you can use the Variable* Actor Values (though in Skyrim these have mostly been reserved) to avoid altering any 'proper' actor values (like Strength etc), changing the value of one of them when the actor is spawned. When a cell resets and the actor resets, the Variable* is reset too and you can detect this.

Objects (like chests) however are different, as they have far less properties and no unessential values like Variable*. However, there is at least one factor that does reset with any object that has 3D: scale. If you change the scale of an object via script after it's loaded, and the cell resets, it will be restored to its initial size (for most everything, this is 1). This is how the Savegame DeBloatifier gets around the fact that placed references in Skyrim don't trigger the OnReset() block (references placed with PlaceAtMe are automatically persistent and don't trigger OnReset()) when fixing duplicative Nirnroot empty roots. They're set to a scale of 1.01 and detect when scale == 1.

And... I just realised you probably asking if there's a way to check if contents reset, given a chest set to not respawn will still have its 3D reset. Placing a non-playable token in the chest (which means it won't show up when looting) and detecting if it's present or not would indicate the contents have changed.

True, this would detect after the container already has reset; but, is there a way to detect in script if a container is going to reset? I'm trying to do something like this currently myself and would like to give the player a warning "this container will reset/respawn" so they're less likely to lose their stashed gear.

A quest works with a PlayerREF ReferenceAlias via an OnItemRemoved() event. The script will detect if the recipient container respawns via checking a FormList.
InnocuousARMO, however, would be removed upon respawn in which case the below script would probably replace it, ensuring each container reference only warns the user once.

A simple solution if you're just concerned about vanilla containers is to go through each container in the CS, find which ones don't respawn/reset and putting something like "storage" or "safe" in their name.

While that would work, it would leave all kinds of room for conflicts. Setting up the alias setup above would be faster and wouldn't necessitate the editing of any base forms. When SKSE's SetName() is available, using it to change the names might be the way to go as it wouldn't have any side effects.