LE Repopulate the World

[toastysquirrel]

What began as a question I figured I might as well turn into an actual *request*. As far as I understand, because nearly every NPC in Skyrim has a unique name, many with unique dialog, if a player decides to wipe out an entire village/town/province/country... they're going to be left with a pretty empty country side because most NPCs aren't respawned nor "replaced".

 

I think it'd be pretty cool to have a mod that "repopulates" Skyrim after a certain amount of time. Here are some ideas for how it might work...

 

• Spawn new or random NPCs to replace the original slain NPCs.
  
• Names could be generic "Winterhold citizen", "farmer", "blacksmith" etc. Or perhaps it could pull names from a pre-generated text file of names.
  
• Appearances of new NPCs could be random or re-use models of existing "slain" characters.
  
• If all else fails for spawning "new" NPCs, I suppose it could simply respawn the slain NPC.
  

I realize this might be a pretty large undertaking, especially if it incorporated the first 3 points above instead of the last one. And I get that it might require the Creation Kit, whenever that's released. But I think it'd be a pretty cool mod, especially for the gamers who would like to play an evil character.

[jmalkavian]

How about a mod that exports your char with all skills perks etc?...into a new game.

 

Am sure i seen it in mod files...although just did a quick search and couldn't find it, it'd be easier than re-populating {my guess}

 

and it would kind of explain why you're gonna get ya head cut off at the beginning....although it would mean re-doing quests that you've already done.....but such is the evil path...tc.

[toastysquirrel]

Am sure i seen it in mod files...although just did a quick search and couldn't find it, it'd be easier than re-populating {my guess}

Could be easier, I wouldn't be surprised.

 

But I'd still prefer the immersion of (for example:) laying waste to all of Solitude while in the middle of the Dovahkiin storyline. Then gradually have the city become less of a ghost town *without* having to start the world and all its quests and side-quests over from square one.

[DeadxPixels]

Well, the codes are there to spawn npc's and resurrect and all that. The only problem I see is how to implement it into the game,, I don't know scripting to well, but my guess would just be some sort of counter for each npc to count at death and after maybe 10 days they're resurrected.

 

And resetting how npc's react might be an issue. You know, someone dies, npc's will talk about it later.

[jmalkavian]

Am sure i seen it in mod files...although just did a quick search and couldn't find it, it'd be easier than re-populating {my guess}

Could be easier, I wouldn't be surprised.

 

But I'd still prefer the immersion of (for example:) laying waste to all of Solitude while in the middle of the Dovahkiin storyline. Then gradually have the city become less of a ghost town *without* having to start the world and all its quests and side-quests over from square one.

 

Yeah i'm with ya man, it'd be good if the "new or resurrected-replaced" party would have knowledge/remember {i guess resurrected sounds silly -but they could be a thrall} what happened in the past and treat ya accordingly.......BUT the thing is the vanilla game can't even keep track of quests correctly and to do what ya want to do would require the game to have a record of what you've done and not done...so as to replace accordingly.

 

Personally i like the idea but it would require the base vanilla to function correctly and then someone to do the mod...would take a while...Then again there's some wizard-like modders out there maybe they could fix it aswell as do the mod in one hit...who knows?. tc.

[perfection]

I have to say this would be a good idea, especially the randomly generated new townsfolk, because I did wipeout riverwood once, and then I couldn't really do anything with it afterward, and it would be nice for those of us who are more evil inclined if there were more respawning villigers to slaughter that were not lousy guards.

[toastysquirrel]

I have to say this would be a good idea, especially the randomly generated new townsfolk, because I did wipeout riverwood once, and then I couldn't really do anything with it afterward, and it would be nice for those of us who are more evil inclined if there were more respawning villigers to slaughter that were not lousy guards.

I've only done minimal modding myself (weapon stats, placement, etc), but I think this mod would be totally doable, even without all the potential frills.

I don't know scripting to well, but my guess would just be some sort of counter for each npc to count at death and after maybe 10 days they're resurrected.

Exactly, and then the counter would trigger either resurrecting the applicable NPC or (ideally) spawning the "replacement" NPC.

 

And resetting how npc's react might be an issue. You know, someone dies, npc's will talk about it later.

I think that's what would take some effort; having the "new" NPCs aware of what previously happened. The new dialog -- even if just statements and not dialog trees -- might be more tricky to code in. And I'm pretty sure it would just be text (not such a bad thing) as adding brand new spoken dialog would be a new beast all together.

 

But I think a counter that's trigger on the NPC's death is the key. Then it's a matter of newly generated NPCs.

[AndrewsDad]

Make the children grow up or somthing like that

[Kalimni]

Replace the slain villagers with dunmer imigrants.

[LazyLionus]

Please excuse my inability to quote properly. I'm fairly new to this forum.

 

Anyway, several people have said that here would need to be a counter for each NPC to make this work.

 

On this topic, I'd have to disagree. I am not entirely sure this would work but... There has to be a list of which NPCs there are in each town, and these must have a "dead" or "alive" value. Seeing as you have those, you could simply keep track of a number of npcs in each hold, and then have the spawn NPC script check which NPCs are still alive and which are dead, and spawn accordingly.

 

It could even work to scramble the NPC's history (I frankly have no idea, but it seems it should be possible, as there must always be an original to find somewhere), and then change their features such as name, voice set, race, apperance, etc. This would mean that even though the ID of the NPC would probably be the same, the new NPC could be unique and unrecognizable.

 

I have extremely low experience of making mods, so take my word with a pinch of salt. I'm just proposing an alternate way of doing it.