HazardousGourd

I've been using the Populated Cities mod to add some life to towns for a while, but I've had a few differences of opinion with it. So I decided to tinker around and flavor it to my liking. A few hours later, I have solved all but one problem: NPC spawning. What I'm trying to do, specifically, is replace the NPCs that spawn in the Ragged Flagon with some shadier types, so instead of four "Laborers" and three "Citizens," I get an assortment of Smugglers, Lowlifes, and generic Thieves. I was able to change the leveled lists, and basically re-skin the actors that spawn to suit my preferences easily enough, but there have been some problems I don't know how to address, because I can't figure out how these actors are actually set up to spawn in the Ragged Flagon to begin with. 1. The first issue is that the NPCs that spawn are always the same ones. It's really not a big problem, just that on several new test characters, the generic NPCs are always the same ones, like the list just defaults to these few every time. If I manually placeatme a new copy of the NPC, I'll get one of the others from the lists at random, and I assume if I killed one of them, and they respawned normally, they'd likewise be random. 2. Building on the first issue a little bit, sometimes I get NPCs spawned from the original lists. I'm not sure why, since I basically just removed all the original choices on those lists, and replaced them with new actors. This basically means that one of those seven leveled actors is always being spawned as a Citizen, instead of one of my generic Thieves, and that sometimes when I spawn a new character in, it will rarely be one of the default actors who shouldn't still be an option. 3. Multi-Sector sandboxing. I wanted some of these generic NPCs to be Guild Members, and occasionally pop in to the Cistern training room. I copied all the faction and AI package settings that regular Guild members have (from Rune, I think,) but the Thieves never seem to act on any of them. This is probably something simple that I'm over-looking, but I'm not sure what. I had thought I might just do something else entirely, and replace the generic NPCs with a few hand-made background characters, and remove the Populated Cities actors, but I can't seem to locate the marker(s) that spawn(s) any of them. Out of curiosity, and because I'd rather have hand-made characters show up piecemeal as quests advance, I thought I'd try and see how the Opulent Thieves Guild mod adds it's new members over time,but I can't seem to find what in the actors or the quests controls their appearances in the Flagon and Cistern. So basically, in summation, I have no idea how to make my actors spawn when I want them to, or as I want them to.

Yes, both LOOT and SSEEdit are in use. I was able to resolve the merchants issue by shutting off every mod that had any known effect on merchants, but I'm still trying to figure out which one was the culprit. Braith is still adoptable, and I guess I can live with that, because she's a pretty cool kid, and I've never actually bothered to adopt any of them, so I guess I'll make the most of that.

Pretty much out of the blue, on a relatively new game (level 6 I think,) I brought Farengar's frost salts to Arcadia, and she stopped being a merchant. I mention this quest, because I'd swear she had the "What do you have for sale" dialogue option available before I selected the quest dialogue. I've tried a few things, including recycling, resurrecting, dis/enabling, and manually adding her to the merchant faction, as I'd seen suggested for others having the same or similar bugs with merchants, and none of it worked. She simply doesn't have the option to buy and sell. To test this, I started a new game, and went to speak with her, and she still had no merchant option. Simultaneous to discovering this problem, I went outside and happened to bump into Braith, who was moping about her parents being dead, which is sad and all, except as she was telling me this her ding dang dad walked right on by us. Looking into this, it seems to be another (possibly unrelated?) glitch, where sometimes children (frequently Braith,) just erroneously get assigned to the orphan/adoptable faction, despite their parents or guardians being alive. I ran every console command I could to fix Braith as well, but again, nothing works, and unlike the Arcadia problem where some folks have been able to resolve it, I can't find anyone concretely fixing the delusional orphanism issue. This brings me to the irksome "remove mods, see what happens," stage, but I have a ton. Most of which have been working just fine on previous games totaling dozens of hours. So I guess before I go through the hassle of trial-and-error troubleshooting, I just have to ask if anyone has any ideas, solutions, or better ways to get to the root of the problem.