I would like my companion to only wear what i give her and not fall back to her standard outfit.

At times, i want her to be without clothing, at other times i want her fully dressed.

Now if i dont select a default outfit, she will start out naked, even though she has something in her inventory.
To make matter worse, when i leave her somewhere, she will also unequip whatever she wears and revert to being nvde.


So...any way to disable the default outfit ? As nice as the idea might have been, i think its one of the worst things in Skyrim...

you need to create a OTFT (outfit) entry. the outfit will contain a list of default clothing/armor. just find an existing OTFT entry in the editor and delete whats in there, then drag the clothing items you want her to wear inside the OTFT window. rename and save this OTFT. then in the default outfit in your NPC's editor window, select the OTFT you just made

Thats the problem unfortunately You see, i want her to start out as a prisoner with ragged clothing. Later in the game, when i leave her somewhere without clothing or when i give her clothing with a lower value, she will revert to those rags then. This is what i wanted to avoid There is nothing wrong with her starting out with a default outfit...but i dont want this to "respawn" on every occasion...

i think the NPC's "choice" of which outfit to wear is hard coded into the game as far as I can tell. she will only equip the item which you give her if they have a higher armor value than what her default is.

also, when she is not following you she will always default back to her default set of clothing like how Lydia for example, will always wear her regular outfit when she's hanging out by herself in whiterun, regardless if she has legendary Daedric armor in her inventory. but she will equip that armor once she starts following you again.

i'm not sure how you can override this behavior without using scripts, as i have a feeling it is coded into the AI's script.

let her not have a default outfit plan, just drop the outfit in her inventory.
Now if you remove all her clothes she will be left nvde.

If i do that (as i currently do), she will be naked at the start of the game, despite having clothing in her inventory. Furthermore, when i dismiss her, she will also be naked again as soon as i leave the area

Actors wear their default outfits (which are set on the base actor, unless changed through script), unless they are set as teammates (http://www.creationkit.com/SetPlayerTeammate_-_Actor). If set as a teammate, they will equip their "best armor" automatically (same as in Oblivion).

You can override that using EquipItem with abPreventRemoval = true, for individual items, but that may not be useful for what you're trying to do.

But they will still change back to the default armor when you leave a "teammate" npc in a house, even if they have a better armor than the default.

Exactly It looks like we need specific SKSE functions to solve this one...

Only if you're using the default follower functionality which was used in Skyrim (which clears their teammate status when you tell them to stop following). If you customize it, you can leave them as teammates when they're not following if you want them to continue to wear their best armor - you can make anyone a teammate, it has nothing to do with whether they're following you or not (which comes from the package they're running).

I'm really new to this... so I don't know how to customize it.

And if all I want is to remove from housecarl default armor AND give him/her my choice of clothes to wear at home? How do I go about it?

Dont you just change their Default Outfit under "Inventory" to "NOTHING"? That makes it so that when they dont have anything in their inventory to wear, they wear...nothing.

Oh I know what not to do!

And how do we go about doing that?