Enemy archers always have a single iron arrow

[Guest deleted2027229]

Enemy bowmen always have a single iron arrow in their inventory in addition to their regular stock. For example kill bandit > loot body > see 15 steel arrows and 1 iron arrow. This seems to be the way the game ensures enemy archers always have arrows as discussed in this topic - http://gamesas.com/single-iron-arrow-t409870.html

 

Is there any way to remove this magic arrow from enemy archers so that they have limited stock?

[RomanR]

Through the Construction Set it should be easy. Locate all defined BanditMissileMale and BanditMissileFemale NPCs in Object Window and remove this single arrow from their inventories.

[Guest deleted2027229]

Why exactly do they have this extra arrow though?

[GamerRick]

I let TES4Edit open my entire load order. I expand to the NPCs in Oblivion.esm and go to BanditMissileMale2. Under items, I see that the Oblivion.esm has added a single iron arrow and a leveled-list with arrows in it. So, it's the vanilla game that is doing this.

 

Further in my load order I see that OOO makes further edits to the Bandits inventory, but leaves that iron arrow alone, and nothing else touches it either. So, I have been getting the same thing you are, but just never cared.

 

The UOP doesn't touch this NPC.

 

As to why Bethesda made it this way? Who knows?

Edited August 17, 2023 by GamerRick

[Striker879]

I think it may have something to do with Bethesda not wanting the archers to run out of arrows (similar to how -1 food item will give NPCs an inexhaustible supply of food or drink).

 

NPCs who run out of arrows can have trouble switching to blade unless the player approaches close enough to trigger the switch in my experience.

[RomanR]

I made some tests and it seems that Striker879 is right. Removing the other arrows from bandit bowmen's inventories forced them to use only this iron arrow and it behaves as unlimited supply, though it's edited with positive stack. Maybe there's some trick to make it unlimited for NPCs, but I was out of luck to digger some info from CS Wiki, it's very hard to use its search engine if you want to find something in particular.

 

Editing to negative value (I tried -1) resulted in interesting glitch - it made this item unlootable, but if you gave same arrows to dead bandit inventory, after attemping to take them all inventory got another stack of them substracted by 1. So you can take them multiple times until this stack become of one arrow only and will be unlootable again.

[Striker879]

I recall Emma going through a lot of trouble finding a way for Vilja to reliably use archery but switch to blade if she ran out of arrows (which to me is a reasonable expectation for the game engine to handle without cludges). I'm not 100% certain what she settled on as a solution but I know I pointed out the single iron arrow vanilla game trick for working around the limitation.

[Guest deleted2027229]

I removed the iron arrow but no matter how many times a bandit shoots me with their bow, they will always have 15 arrows in their inventory. Is it possible to force NPC archers to have limited arrow stock and if so how? I did this in Skyrim and enemy archers switch to melee if they run out of arrows, which makes for more interesting combat.

[GamerRick]

The idea is that what you see when you loot them is the arrows they have left, not the total number they started with, because from the player's perspective (versus the modder's perspective) that would make sense.

 

To make them actually use arrows might be possible with scripts.