NPC Needs/Inventory Micromanagement

Game Talk The Bunker
1

Am I missing a trick here?

It seems like the only options for making sure NPC needs are satisfied are:

  1. Manually add and remove food and water to their inventory
  2. Use the autopickup rules

Option 1. is obviously extremely annoying, tedious, time consuming, but I can’t work out how to set up 2. in a way that will actually work.

If you have multiple NPCs and only a limited surplus of food/water, there’s nothing to stop one NPC grabbing everything and leaving the others to starve.

If you have a decent surplus of food or water, on the other hand, there’s nothing to stop an NPC filling his inventory with food and having no space for water, or vice versa. Similarly, there’s no way to stop them filling up their inventory with food/water when you’d rather they leave some room for other things to pick up.

There’s also the problem of their inventories slowly filling up with empty bottles unless you micromanage getting rid of them.

Is there any trick to this that I’m missing? And if not, is there a way of editing may savefile to disable NPC needs? Would be ideal if I could just designate a stockpile zone in my base which they’d automatically take from only when they’re hungry.

2

This doesn’t solve the primary issue of micromanagement but, if you want to forgo NPC needs entirely. It is relatively easy to add in the mod that removes them to your mod list by editing the file. I use Notepad ++ and all and then you can just add the right line to get it added into your world without much issue. better to be safe and back up everything though.

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3

I don’t mind micro-managing, but I do agree that there needs to be a zone for NPCs to just take from if they have need.

4

Kind of like the camp food distribution zone? I agree just make it a “dining zone” so they eat food places there but won’t take it. That should solve the possible issue of other NPCs taking all the food and leaving others to starve.

That would be neat.

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5

So I didn’t get NPCs to take food from a zone, but if you have a faction camp, they will passively eat from its stores whenever they are hungry and near the camp. If your camp has a well, they will also drink from its stores when they are thirsty.

This cuts down on NPC micro-management so much.

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