Oddities with overruling placed NPCs in interior cells

[Dutchygamer]

I've been doing multiple runs with ThuggySmurf's mods, specifically Outcast and Remnants and Fusion City Rising. There are certain quests which spawn a lot of high-level enemies, and eventually I wanted to tweak the difficulty a bit for myself. With some trial and error I've figure out that with an additional .ESP loaded afterwards you could overrule the Level Modifier of the placed NPCs in the cells.

 

For outside cells this worked fine, but for interior cells I've run into a couple of issues which I can't explain. For this example I will use the Vault59 added with Fusion City Rising where I've encountered the most issues.

- When I overrule all (or most) placed NPCs of the same faction (in this case to tweak the Level Modifier of the Swords of Atom NPCs), sometimes when entering the location all the NPCs are gone.

- I've figured out that when I do not overrule a couple of the NPCs it has the largest chance of working without issues, but still this isn't guaranteed.

- Strangely enough reloading a save before entering the cell and re-entering the cell may fix this issue (causing all NPCs to spawn as intended), but it's still a game of chance.
- Note that I intentionally made the changes before entering the Vault's cells for the first time, as I realized that once the cell(s) were loaded, any changes later on will probably not work as intended.

- In a similar note I recently re-entered the same Vault to just run it again. Here I ran into the second issue: very few of the NPCs had actually respawned. Where in example I would normally encounter at least a dozen NPCs I now only encountered one. After some double-checking it seemed that this again seemed to match with the NPCs I overruled or not; only those that I didn't touch seem to respawn properly.

- This was done several dozens of real-life hours after I last entered the Vault, so it isn't related to the generic dungeon reset timers not having time to complete yet.

 

Some information I've been able to find:

- The Location connected to the Vault cells had the following Keywords: LocTypeDungion, LocSetVault, LocTypeClearable and IsCommonwealthLocation

- The Cells have the Is Interior Cell and Public Area flags

- All placed NPCs have the Respawn flag

- All placed NPCs are placed as Temporary (not Persistant)

 

Now I have the following questions:

- is this the expected behaviour of overruling placed NPCs in interior cells? Or do I need to change something on the Cells / Locations?

- I can't wrap my head around what gets and what doesn't get reset when the generic dungeon reset timers have run.

- From what I've seen this again differs between exterior cells and interior cells, where with exterior cells both NPCs and containers get reset, but with interiors cells NPCs always get reset but with containers it seem to vary?

 

I hope I've explained my issues enough. Any help / advice is appreciated :smile: