This and the other Articles, as I have the time to write them will be living.
I should have taken better notes, with this as the goal, but to be honest when I started this mod I didn’t think I’d go this far down the rabbit hole.
So I spent a good deal of time learning this, some of the information is available in snippets here and there, many people suggested I google the Creation Kit related articles (Due to Bethesda’s website updates most results ended in dead links) and a few authors were helpful in sharing information.
I’m going to start with an Explanation of what Templates are and a warning.
Templates Actors:
Are how the game manages to add variety, randomize faces,races and traits, stats, inventory etc.
An NPC can have none (normally then a target for other NPC’s) or all of them, and generally speaking Lvlxxxxx actors (Example LvlRaider) will be nothing but Templates.
Warning…
Do not Edit Templates in FO4Edit…
Generally speaking, don’t edit NPC’s in FO4Edit if you can help it…
Creation Kit is painfully slow, a little intimating and can seem like the worse of two evils with its frequent crashing.
But part of the reason it’s so slow when editing the NPC’s especially, is due to how (apparently) it loads and handles the NPCs and the Templates they reference (or are references by) when you make an edit and save it, it’s pushing those changes to the NPC and the linked references.
FO4Edit cannot do this.
To be clear I love FO4Edit and am not badmouthing anyone, but I’ve found that editing NPCs, and sometimes even creating (Duplicating) NPCs in FO4Edit can cause corruption and can be the root cause.
Example and Pictures below.
-NPC is Copied as an Override into “Unique NPCs”
Spoiler:
Show
-NPC is Duplicated as a new record, then the TemplateActors are redirected at a NPC I created in Creation Kit, but all of the NPC edits on this actor is in FO4Edit.
Spoiler:
Show
-The NPC Opens in CK (Corrupted NPC Records can cause anything from CK crashing when opening period to crashing when opening the specific NPCs) and all the “Template Actors” look correct but Check point 4
Spoiler:
Show
-Looking more closely, at the bottom left corner, the NPC is showing Templated Actors not listed in what Creation Kit shows in the list of currently assigned actors.
This error CK was able to recover and clean it, but think about what could have happened if I tried to turn this “Templated Actor” into
one without Templates? Or changed it to a different faction, etc..
Spoiler:
Show
Next Article will Explain Each Template and what it links to.
1 comment
Edit: I guess it's bc in some instances the Use Template Actors flag for "inventory" is clicked on and other times it isn't? Would it be okay to change that? I would imagine it would might make their inventory otherwise empty though, which is not ideal. I guess I'll check back.
Edit2: He (the npc Winlock) was wearing the different outfit and he still had a random inventory, so it seems to work, just still unsure if this is a safe change to make in fo4edit. Thanks for reading