They allow taking their weapons since they stopped caring about their debt.[/quote]Is this particularly new? From what i’ve seen in the experimental I’m running, NPC’s weapons and clothes aren’t listed in their trade menu.[/quote]
I tend to update experimental about once a day to every few days. As of at least a couple of days ago NPC equipped weapon is listed in the trade interface (ie you can take it from them). You still need to ®earrange armor (via (e)xamining them, not via conversation) and (u)nequip items you want to take off of them. Be sure to then trade to take the item from them, assuming they had the storage volume.
As for those mentioning taking ammo and such from NPCs… I don’t bother. I just set their combat commands to either ‘Don’t use guns anymore’ or ‘Use only silent weapons’ as well as ‘Don’t use grenades anymore.’ This way if they do have a firearm and something nasty pops up unexpectedly I can tell them to use their guns (in my NPCs case, a shotgun). Saved my but a couple of times while I was still VERY new to the game and a Mi-Go came wandering around from the other side of an RV II was siphoning from, for one example.
It seems like NPCs do care about nutrition, as in how filling something is, so finding something with a long shelf life and high nutrition (ie some type of oatmeal) is great for about a week or more. I mention this as when giving them a bunch of junk and low nutrition food I saw them eating something pretty frequently while something like cooked buckwheat I notice it FAR less. I go ahead and give them clean water (gallon jug/3l bottle) just in case I goof up and need something to drink. I’ve mostly left them to not auto pickup since they try to rummage through my shopping cart (and last I tried to set their pickup rules it didn’t keep between sessions which I gather is being looked at).
I haven’t messed with engagement rules a whole lot as I’ve mostly used ‘Attack enemies that get too close’ and ‘Attack only enemies that I attack first.’ The former has a range of about 5 tiles from the player or them, and they will abandon moving to fight an enemy if you get too far away. The later is nice for slightly riskier situations or firearms (assuming they are allowed to shoot). I’ve been pretty satisfied with those behaviors so far.
I’ve observed that if you are a lot faster than they are (when my character had roller blades on) that if you stand on stairs they will get one tile away from you, good for going down into the unknown assuming there is room for them to come down the turn after you go down. Annoyingly they do have a tendency to wander right into the line of fire (I re-broke my NPCs leg with an arrow once). It’s usually not too bad though as stepping one tile to restore clear line of fire usually works, the zombies will have tended to re-target for the NPC instead of me by then.
Oh and it seems like talking is noise enough to attract zombies. ie talking to an NPC or the NPC complaining about something like being tired, hungry, etc. I’m not certain on this.
As for telling an NPC to guard a location, that seems to throw out all settings, while they are guarding anyway. Things go back to settings when they are following you. ie if they are told to stay quiet but they have a gun and told to guard a location, they will use that gun. This was rather unexpected to me but makes some sense in hindsight. Also probably so they don’t starve or something if you leave them alone for a few weeks.
For sleep issues… I tend to make a point of telling my NPC it’s ok to sleep when I’m going to sleep, otherwise if exploring I tell them to stay awake. If they complain I find my car (assuming it’s nearby) get in, wait for them to get into the passenger sleep, then say it’s ok to sleep. One turn later and they are having a nap.
As for NPC head explosions… I haven’t seen this yet (and the only game I’ve played this past month has been CDDA). I did see a huge performance hit when NPC inventory was full and they wanted to pick up stuff around my base (I have a lot of stuff) but zones (I didn’t know about them then) and telling them not to pick stuff up (and probably the pickup rules) would be a counter to that issue.
From reading the NPCs seem to have gotten a LOT of work and I’ve observed quite a bit more work on them just in the short time (about a month) I’ve been playing the game. IMO NPCs can be worth it depending on your character and play style. Having another person who can soak a few blows (and dish it out a bit too) is pretty nice (and literally has saved my character at least a dozen times that I can clearly recall). They do seem to knock a chunk of time off of construction/batch crafting too, which is nice. There are a few things I’d wish were tweaked on them… but then thanks (in part) to a certain vehicle toggle bug my dev environment can now handle C++ so I can git some code and step my way around some bugs maybe to offering up a side of code with my suggestions/complaints… 
