NPC companions sharing resources

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

An idea I had, as opposed to every individual NPC handling their own supplies: what if companions (not wandering NPCs, which is a bit different from this) traded/shared resources like food, water, medicine, ammo, etc. amongst each other? So instead of immediately complaining to you when they’re in need of supplies, they’ll instead check all of your other companions first and get whatever they need from whoever currently has the most. This allows for less micromanagement (restock everyone at once when they start complaining to you instead of restocking individually); and gives some purpose to specialization between NPCs by being able to give lots of high volume clothing to one or two NPCs to act as the party’s walking supply depot (with the added benefit of making nomad/scavenger gear not totally useless).

Completely understandable if this doesn’t fit whatever vision there is for NPCs, just thought I should put it out there. Or maybe a system to handle NPC needs is already planned/in the works, I’unno, I’m not too involved in development.

2

Not a bad idea, but the NPC inventory code is rather slow and brute forcing checking everything could visibly lag.
This would require either NPCs to remember what they checked already or the checks to get much faster.

3

The inventory and stuff like it could be stored in the follower faction itself, allowing for a hive mind of sorts for your follower npcs. And maybe you could even issue commands or set rules for all followers at once using this system.

An issue I can see is figuring out what is stored, and on whom, when you decide to split up the group. As having the entire combined storage of your followers available, even when you only have one of them with you, is a bit cheaty.