NPC Spawn and De-Spawn Cycle Question

[LCountach]

My question is, How do I use Creation Kit to set up a repeating spawn and a de-spawn cycle for NPCs to populate my city?

 

I have created my first map in CK. It consists of an Island for the exterior cell and several interior cells. On said island is a city. Instead of populating this rather large city (By Skyrim Standards) with a dozen or more named NPCs that walk here and there on a time schedule. I wanted to make a few Key NPCs. Then fill in the rest with what would seem like a more random assortment of NPCs that spawn, walk through town, and de-spawn. That de-spawn then triggering the spawning of another NPC to walk through. OR perhaps the spawn is triggered by the player walking into a trigger zone setting the event off. Said NPCs would be randomly pulled in from a large list of NPCs. Forgive me I don't know Skyrim's terminology but I think it's called a level list or leveled NPC. Similar to how I believe dungeons work. When the player enters, the dungeon is then populated with bandits from a list of pre-made NPCs of the appropriate level. In this case, I wouldn't be using it to detect the players level. Just the list functionality. Learning how to do it all and experiment would be good though.

 

I have been using tutorial videos mostly to stumble my way through thus far. However unfortunately I don't know the terminology to most things I want to do and have wasted hours searching for the simplest things that could have been explained in 5min. Hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction for some tutorials on this matter or explain it for a noob to CK like I am.

 

Thanks in advance.

[greyday01]

Simplest would seem to find a bandit in the game somewhere that spawns from a leveled list. Then find the leveled list that it is spawned from. Duplicate and rename it. Edit it so all the npcs in that leveled list are non-hostile and are called something other than bandit. You probably want to edit their default outfits also. Then just scatter them around like populating a dungeon with bandits except these will not attack. Let the game manage the spawning and unspawning. Scatter some idlemarkers around to they have something to do.

[LCountach]

Thankyou for the response. It had been so long I thought I wasn't going to get one.

 

It's funny, I hadn't even thought of poking around, duplicating, and deconstructing how the leveled bandits work. My brain doesn't tend to think like that. I like to study up on something (Tutorials). Understand its workings. Think about and formulate a plan of execution. Then take action implementing it. What you suggest Is almost the reverse of that but it may work for my needs. Except I do need to understand how to control how spawning and de-spawning works. The city is very large (By Skyrim standards) and the main focus of my map. The player will spend 90% of their time there. I am not sure I can rely on leaving the city for whatever time Skyrim requires before it refreshes the NPCs. The player won't be leaving very often but perhaps its big enough where it would de-spawn far away NPCs? I'm not sure how Skyrim works. Also I wanted the list to have a small number of bandits mixed in the large number of generic citizens. This would add excitement and action to the city. The chance would be slim BUT the player would never know when a bandit would spawn. That is one of the key foundational elements to make the map interesting.

 

Thanks again for the response.

Edited March 20, 2023 by LCountach