Where am I looking if I want to set up a merchant that travels between multiple settlements?

[MaeroTheMaestro73]

In all my digging in the creation kit I haven't found anything that explicitly shows how an NPC is directed to go from one location to another as a recurring schedule, or to wander autonomously as a roaming "random" encounter.

I tried looking into the caravan traders as my first step. Nothing in their AI packages gave me anything useful. Not their sandbox, not their travel, nothing. Just vague keywords like "workshopref" "workshoplocation" and "location/location/location"

Not even their quests had anything useful. And of course, naturally, their "schedule" tab is completely empty.

Since physically dropping an NPC into a busy cell is impossible for me at the moment, I need to find an alternative way to make my NPC appear in-world for testing purposes. I'm trying out some dialogue and I want to see if I've done the flow correctly.

If there's a better way than the one I'm looking into, please let me know. Thanks for reading!

[SKKmods]

The base game caravan quests CaravanBase and CaravanTradePostX contain most everything you would need.

 

The only difficulty is probably finding a trigger kick to start the quest as I would guess that your trader should only travel between player owned workshops and the game starts with none, so no starting point or destinations.

[MaeroTheMaestro73]

In all my digging in the creation kit I haven't found anything that explicitly shows how an NPC is directed to go from one location to another as a recurring schedule, or to wander autonomously as a roaming "random" encounter.

 

I tried looking into the caravan traders as my first step. Nothing in their AI packages gave me anything useful. Not their sandbox, not their travel, nothing. Just vague keywords like "workshopref" "workshoplocation" and "location/location/location"

 

Not even their quests had anything useful. And of course, naturally, their "schedule" tab is completely empty.

 

Since physically dropping an NPC into a busy cell is impossible for me at the moment, I need to find an alternative way to make my NPC appear in-world for testing purposes. I'm trying out some dialogue and I want to see if I've done the flow correctly.

 

If there's a better way than the one I'm looking into, please let me know. Thanks for reading!

Hey, thanks for responding. I appreciate your time.

 

I looked into the forms you mentioned. CaravanBase does in fact show explicitly which stops, for example, Carla is assigned to make. But I'm still not seeing where those are triggered or how they are triggered. All I am pulling so far is that if I want to set up an NPC vendor to wander between multiple settlements, I need to assign some Forced: Location entries and create some Location Ref entries.

 

I'm really puzzled by what this POIJeffB04Location is doing in here. Another name for DebugTestCell maybe?

 

CaravanTradePostX [in my example, Carla for convenience] doesn't reveal anything useful. I mean, there's an unlabeled script fragment referring to a hitching post [to my knowledge this is only unlocked through progression at Bunker Hill] and teleporting the caravan to that hitching post. Beyond that, all I can see are alias entries for "workshoplocation". And the entry for that specifically addresses "hitching posts" again. I am really not sure how to process that.