What does disabling "Def Pack List" do exactly?

[oldrayzor]

Hi - I've been working on a mod for personal use that changes the armor on bosses (non-faction). It's a lot of fun and works pretty well. it replaces 40 armors with those I like and which I can retrieve as unique sets after killing the boss. Mostly warlocks, bandit cheifs, etc. Anyway, I have accomplished this on the leveled bosses by changing the default outfit and disabling the "Use Def Pack List" under Template Flags. Early testing seems to perform well but I'm not an expert on stats so am curious if anyone knows what the flag actually effects.

[RW311]

Default package lists are similar to ai packages but do not use location specific instructions, so they can interact with objects and walk around and talk no matter where they have been placed in the world. This is more useful for actors who respawn using level character lists.

When NPC uses actor base any flag you check below that is what it will use from that base file so in order to have made inventory edits to your npc you must have unchecked the use inventory flag as the package list flag would not allow the inventory to be edited.

[oldrayzor]

Thank you very much @RW311 ! I'm not advanced at this, as I say it appears to work, but inheritance is confusing because there are several template settings on an NPC. My interest is strictly oriented around altering the outfits.  In TES5Edit, a good example is the NPC Fjola because she has player interaction. If you simply change her default outfit, she will not wear it (the TPLT-LCharBanditBossNordF will overwrite). However if you disable "Use Def Pack List" and add the master package list to her Default Package List she will wear it and without altering her AI, Stats, Interaction or anything else (so it appears). But how could Def Pack List impact her outfit? I have replaced 40 of the bosses and about half only work if the Def Pack List flag under TPLT is disabled. Again, thank you very much for your time.

[RW311]

Changing package list the npc uses could cause npc to reload since it's last state in the stack would no longer exist or  it now only exists in base id instead of the current id. So I think your inventory changes worked fine assuming you did disable use inventory flag, but you could not see they had worked because npc was not updated. This is all assuming you made these changes during game play and did not start a new game after all the edits, but there could be another reason why it ignored your inventory that is also affected by the package list and how it relates to leveled characters but it is very hard to test that out.

[oldrayzor]

Yes, you are correct and I failed to mention - the inventory flag is also disabled in all the cases where I disabled the Def Package. I am still testing, but so far more than half have had no performance problem. Those that didn't work , there were an additional 7 which I couldn't  finesse , I am not going to force. There's plenty to support an option of retrieving unique armors through means other than crafting, which was the objective. Thank you. Really helpful. Really appreciated.