Debugging Help: Unable to access new settler dialogue in "BanCo - Bank of Commonwealth" mod

[Vaisaius8]

Hey everyone,

 

I've been playing FO4 with a large mess of mods, and after a lot of trial and error, I managed to get together a stable build. I had gone several weeks without any issues or changes when one of the mods (Banco - Bank of Commonwealth: https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/16822) started acting up.

 

Banco adds a series of workshop items, some of which work as vendor stations. The player assigns a settler to one of these stations, at which point the game renames the settler as "bank teller". The player then speaks to the bank teller, with one of the dialogue options to either open a new account if they don't have one or open up an account management interface if they do.

 

For several weeks, the above is exactly what happened. Then, about a month ago, I started a new character, constructed a vendor station for a bank branch, plopped down a bunch of other workshop object from the same mod without incident, and assigned a settler to the branch. The settler's name changed as soon as they got to the station, but when I talked to them, all I got was default responses (hoping I wasn't there for them, opinions on Goodneighbor and the Slog, etc.); the dialogue menu for my character never even came up. This prevents me from opening a bank account, which... kinda defeats the purpose of opening a bank.

 

So far, I've tried re-downloading the mod, trying it with the patches available for download, and have gone over my mod list with LOOT and FO4Edit (I'm aware these aren't exhaustive tools, but they're also what I had at the time). Now I'm digging thru the .ba2 archives using Champollion/Notepad++ and thru the plugin itself with the Creation Kit. I'm scouring CK tutorials to try and figure out where exactly BanCo is having issues; I know that something is preventing the bank teller from accessing the new dialogue options, but I don't have the experience with modcraft to figure out what. Has anyone seen anything like this with other mods?

[Vaisaius8]

Okay, so I tooled around with FO4Edit a bit more, and I think I've made some headway. Since the mod's workshop items loaded in correctly, I know that the mod did actually load; the question is, where did it break? Assigning a settler to a bank station changes the settler's display name to "Bank Teller" like it's supposed to do, so I know that much already works. I also know from times where this mod worked correctly that it should bring up a dialogue box allowing me to open an account with the bank, so I know where the mod is broken. So, conceptually:

 

[bank Teller assigned] --> [Player talks to Bank Teller] --> [*something magical happens here*] --> [Account opening dialogue prompt]

 

becomes:

 

[bank Teller assigned] --> [Player talks to Bank Teller] --> [*something breaks here*] -X-> [Account opening dialogue prompt]

 

Okay, so assigning a display name seems easy enough; I've seen modders on Nexus do that with .bat files. If I can find what part of the mod assigns the display name, I can walk forward from there until I find the dialogue I'm missing.

 

I've seen a lot of these display name changes associated with quests, so I open up the Quests in the mod and find a quest labelled "BNKDialogues". Not what I was originally after, but if it contains the dialogues I'm after, I can walk backwards from this point. BNKDialogues has a topic labelled "BNKQuestGreet" with six subtopics; the first four have conditions involved with robbing the bank (kind of putting the cart before the horse, if you ask me), but the last two have conditions involving not robbing the bank - and the second-to-last one, xx001EF7 has a NULL reference in its Previous Info field, meaning this is the line given to a player with no open account.

 

Getting warmer...

 

xx001EF7 has a quest, "BNKQuestStage1", listed under its Start Scene field, so I look up BNKQuestStage1 and find that it has fields for player responses: positive, negative, neutral, and question. I know from prior experience that the Player Positive response is used to open an account, so I look up that dialogue topic and find three lines of dialogue, all three used to either open a new account or access an existing one!

 

I've found the end of the problem's range! Now I just need to find its beginning.

 

Going back to BNKDialogues, I open up FO4Edit's "Referenced By" tab and find that this quest is referenced by 35 other records. One of them is labelled "BNKBankTellerName", which I'm guessing assigns the "Bank Teller" name to an assigned settler. Checking this, it turns out I'm half-right: BNKBankTellerName is only referenced by one other record: BNKDialogues. It turns out that BNKDialogues assigns that display name under Alias #2 in that quest.

 

So, assigning these records to our conceptual diagram:

 

[bNKDialogues gives settler assigned to bank station the display name "Bank Teller"] --> [Player talks to Bank Teller] --> [*something breaks here*] -X-> [bNKQuestStage1 allows me to open an account]

 

The prime suspects are BNKQuestGreet and BNKQuestStage1: either BNKQuestGreet isn't initializing BNKQuestStage1 correctly, or BNKQuestStage1 can't initialize properly on its own. My plan from here is to go thru the conditions in each and see what's going on (and also take the opportunity to proofread some of the messages).