So this is something that have just happened to me.
I recruited this NPC that gave me the quest to find patient records. Being the person that I am I decided to wait until we are a little more prepared before venturing that deep into zed territory.
First of all, I didn’t even know this quest was timed. Why would it even be timed? It’s not like she will-
She just spontaneously died for no reason.
What I think happened here is that some stray code from the antibiotics mission got tied up in here which caused the mission to be timed and kill off the NPC if failed to complete in the allotted time. Did anyone else notice this?
EDIT: Windows XP ( I know… ) SP 3 / Graphical version
I’m not exactly sure, but it was definitely longer than 40 hours. I know for a fact I had stationed her as a guard for a couple days ( I guess 4-5 ) in my base as I didn’t have armor for her at that point and then I’ve done some looting with her for a day or two.
But she died literally the same turn the mission failed. It was literally like this:
Mission ‘Finding Records’ failed.
Jane McNPC died!
Actually, this reminded me of something. I do recall her having a blue wound after a fight with some zeds, so I wanted to disinfect her but then when I was about to do that the wound mysteriously vanished. I thought she had disinfected it herself ( I assume NPCs do that ). But yeah, that wound was definitely gone, I’m 100% sure about that.
Well, after the “blue wound” phase comes “infected wound”, which is colored in green. The text for each bodypart (when examining wounds on an NPC) is green by default. What I think may have happened was you forgetting about the blue wound, but when re-checking the NPC’s health it turned infected by which point it was impossible to discern it from the regular color of the health UI. That’s probably why she died. Her dying also ended your ‘find records’ mission, hence the failure; it seems like the messages were switched around, as the game notified you of the failure before announcing the NPC has perished.