I would use NPCs as followers more often if it were easier to give them stuff. As it is I end up leaving them as craft bots more often than not because a folding cart is more convenient. I propose that if they’ve already agreed to follow you, they should be available in the AIM. The options I see are as follows:
1: Make their inventory usable with the “vehicles” tab. Pros: the framework is already in the game. Cons: very hacky. Accessing their inventories while on a vehicle would be… difficult.
2: Make a separate tab for NPC inventories. Pros: less hacky and you could possibly set an option to ignore individual NPC inventories in the “all” tab from their misc options. Cons: probably harder to do, although I don’t know how much. This is my preferred option.
3: Leave as is. It’s not that big of a deal if it’s prohibitively hard.
That’s a really good idea assuming they trust you totally.
I use the AIM a lot, especially when looting with my shopping cart. I always give my followers gear so they can be mules, but always forget to use them as such. Trying to give them a stack of items, like rags can be a pain too, it should be a bit easier. I already tend to recruit NPCs, and with something like suggested they would become a whole lot more useful for me as well.
Sweet! Glad I could help. I have a couple of other ideas that have to do with NPCs.
1: They constantly climb onto my cart, often when I’m right at my weight limit. It ends up being this silly Benny Hill moment where I’m running from my mob while all 7 of them are running ass-first after my cart. Maybe a misc option to disable them deciding that I’m their personal rickshaw driver?
2: I would love to tell an NPC to drag a cart. This could be complicated, as carts are technically vehicles. I propose that if you are standing next to an NPC and a cart, you have the option in their 'e’xamine menu to make them drag it. That way the action can be aimed in all directions like the 'e’xamine action, just make it throw up a log message if the NPC isn’t also standing next to the cart. This would probably apply to vehicles as well, but it could be kinda cool to have 5-7 NPCs collectively dragging a wreck out of the way that none of them could move by themselves, so I’d call that a feature instead of a bug. This is probably the most difficult thing to pull off, so probably not that high a priority.
3: Add a “come here” option in the 'C’all menu that makes the selected NPC move next to you. Once they get beside you, they revert back to normal pathfinding so they don’t glue themselves to you (the option would probably be there if you 'e’xamine them as well, so this would probably be required to make the feature work). This could make it easier to keep track of NPC carry limits because you see all of their names in a list instead of having to individually check, and gives an alternative to just teleporting items into their inventories across large distances for the immersion-centric player. It would also make it much easier to have multiple NPCs dump their inventories in one place if you implement the AIM change proposed above, just 'C’all up to 8 of them to surround you and ‘move all’ onto the floor.
I’d really like the ability to manually adjust an NPC’s inventory. For instance, if I give an NPC both a light survivor suit and an O-Yoroi, which can stack without penalty, I’d like them to wear both! Or, failing that, at least let me see their inventory screen the way I can see mine, so I know why they’re ditching whichever one I gave them least recently.
shadowdragon, what do you mean? if you walk into an NPC you can “examine armor” and ajust it there directly already.
I can relayer their armor. I can’t tell them to wear both the Survivor Suit and the O-Yoroi. They drop whichever one I gave them least recently to put on the newer one, and I can’t figure out why.
push e while in the armor layer screen to tell them to wear something directly.
They drop one or the other because they have a limit on the max encumbrance they’ll wear.
That’s… Annoying.
I don’t want them dropping torso encumbrance, especially since they like to stand their ground. If they are gonna stand and fight, I’d rather they be armored like a srick bhickhouse.
I think that encumbrance limit is 30.
You can tell them to only fight if their life depends on it, and that’ll help.
Another thing is to jump into the nearest vehicle, they will disengage and run over to hop in too. Even a bicycle will work, though you’re likely better off hopping back off and running on foot than trying to pedal it with a couple of NPCs hanging on, that’s no worse than jumping into a wrecked car to get them to flee.