SSE My mod is messing with vanilla NPCs' packages, help please.

[cumbrianlad]

Edit: doing a bit of digging around I found some info by Arthmoor who stated that all of these location records can be ignored because the game merged them at run-time. Looking at the exterior navmesh records in SSEedit, I found that a few navmeshes had been deleted. How this happened I don't know but I'm guessing that this is at the root cause of my apparently senile NPCs around Ravenrock. It looks like I've no choice but to drag the vanilla meshes down and redo four or five exterior meshes completely. That way I don't screw up the references. Now I'm really wishing that Severin Manor had been slap bang in the middle of one navmesh, instead of straddling the intersection between four of them!

 

Consider this thread closed, at least until I sort out all the navmeshes and see if it cures the problem!

 

Hi

 

I hope someone can help with this.

 

The mod.

 

The mod is a Severin House mod to which I added a housecarl and wanted to make it family friendly. to that end I added various idle markers inside and outside in Ravenrock. The majority of the external markers were added because moving a family there resulted in kids and partner standing in an unnatural huddle on the narrow strip of navmesh between Severin Manor front door and the path to Ravenrock. I also tweaked the navmesh and landscape slightly around the manor to make the whole area navigable for npcs. finally I added 3 patrol markers for the housecarl to use morning and evening.

 

The results.

 

The family now behave naturally, the housecarl uses his patrol and all NPCs navigate the navmesh properly. Mogrul and Slitter even took a shortcut from town over the new navmesh when they wanted to threaten me. That's the plus side.

 

The downside is that the Ravenrock guards are not patrolling properly. If they patrol at all, they get stuck at a spot nowhere near their patrol idle markers. Captain whats-his-name (Veloth?) does the same. Merchants don't seem to arrive at their stalls on time but the smith, Glover Mallory is worst affected. He goes to the pub when he should but then can't get further than the corner of his shop when he should be sleeping. During the day he is often near Severin Manor, sometimes he's standing in between his shop and the abandoned building.

 

When the NPCs misbehave like this entering an internal cell and going back out into Ravenrock can clear the problem temporarily (until the NPC package requires them to do something else). With Glover this has to be done several times. Each time he is standing closer to his shop, until he finally gets there and starts working.

 

The Cause?

 

I don't think it's the navmesh changes because they were small, located close to the manor and largely involved adding new triangles to knit up the gaps in the vanilla mesh before checking for cover edges, bad triangles and finalizing. Also, all NPCs are navigating the area properly. I made no changes to the navmesh squares in the town centre where all these problems are.

 

I think it's the addition of the idle markers that's the problem.

 

SSEedit now shows a whole swathe of yellow highlighted records, all under Ravenrock location. The pictures below show what I mean. The ACSR records show that my new markers have displaced the original Ravenrock markers. I'm wondering if the NPCs now don't 'know' where they're supposed to be and just land at random in the cell instead.

 

What do you think? Is this the cause and if so, how to solve it while keeping the markers so that my housecarl and family behave properly. One thing I didn't do was to give each marker a unique reference ID. I could try various things and test but testing is lengthy because my save game is before the end of the quest 'Served Cold'. The quest to change the manor only starts after served cold is complete and the player has the manor. I then need to test the behaviour of the NPCs both before and after the stones are cleansed since some of Ravenrock residents work on the stone at night (Glover included). It takes an hour or so for each test.