2 X Arcane University NPC's

[StanIsTheLaw]

This is an odd one. I came back to Arcane university after completing mage guild recommendations and found there are copies of NPC's running round, i.e., 2 Raminus', 2 Traven's. Found at least 4 duplicates so far.

 

Prettys sure they were not there when I was doing the Ta Meena discussion in the main quest. I had installed a few mods recently but none were to do with mages guild stuff and I am certainly not running 2 copies of Oblivion.esp.

 

Wondering if anyone else ever had this happen?

 

Thanks.

[David Brasher]

You have a dirty mod. Probably one of the new ones you installed recently. The mod creates copies of various NPCs, possibly in a totally remote location. But their AI packages tell them to hang out at the Arcane University, so they travel there to hang out.

 

You can go into console mode and click on the duplicate NPCs. The real one will have a form ID like 00XXXXXX. The one added by a mod will have a form ID like 23XXXXXX where 23 = hexidecimal position in load order. Use Wrye Bash to see what mod is in that position in the load order. This will show you which mod creates extra and unwanted NPCs.

[StanIsTheLaw]

I can't get wrebash to work, so I use OBMM.

 

Both Raminus come up as 00034e18.

 

Does the game create copies of NPC's for any reason, say when part of a quest is completed, newer version of NPC with different attributes, and is supposed to delete the old one?

 

On a separate thread I have been having trouble with the mages quests. basically Raminus will not send me on the Mages Staff quest after I completed the recommendations. There are 2 Raminus' in the lobby and they only say the same thing, "arn't you supposed to be getting that staff", this is after the bit about welcome to the university and here is your robe, try it on.

 

The problem is i recruited a Lineage Elf way back near the start of the game. She had a fire staff which I took to sell. When I put it in my inventory I got the message "Mages Staff Quest completed". Did not think anything then but when I ran into the problem of not being able to advance the mages quests, I checked that file. The NPC had been given a copy of the Mages Staff, MG08, and I did not realise it.

 

Is it possible that duplicate NPC's were created at this point but the old ones not deleted?

 

BTW, thanks for taking the time to reply.

Edited July 27, 2011 by StanIsTheLaw

[David Brasher]

I guess you could deactivate large groups of mods and play-test repeatedly until you get the second set of NPCs to go away. You just keep deactivating and reactivating sets of mods and making the range of mods that could be the bad one narrower and narrower until you pinpoint the one bad mod. For maximum speed, you would want to do things by halves. On your first stroke, you would deactivate half of your mods. If the game was still messed up, you would deactivate half of the remaining mods. Etc. etc.

 

Some actors are played by multiple characters at various stages of the game, but there is only one actor for Raminus. I have never heard of the game glitching this way unless there was a bad mod at fault. So I believe you have a bad mod that either duplicated the Arcane University lobby in a new cell, duplicated its contents, or manually placed copies of the duplicate NPCs.

 

I have not actually used RefScope but people say it is a great utility. It could probably determine what mod the second Raminus came from even if the console code check failed in this instance. I assume that Refscope always goes off of Ref ID instead of colloquial name or Base ID #.