NPC's switching gender/preset after capture. Puppet, MindControl

[Pfactor]

I've been trying to gather a little harem of captured beauties but they have a habit of switching genders and presets if I'm gone a few days. This also happens with the Guild Starter mod.

 

What happens? I capture a female NPC with either the Puppet mod, or Sexlab Mindcontrol, or both.. leave them in my basement for a while.. come back and it's now a man. Normally an ugly man. It's happened with hunters, bandits, charmed Vigilants.

[gvman3670]

Geez, that must suck. I've never seen or heard of such a thing. Normally if there's a gender change the head doesn't change. So it's especially weird.

[Mizu78]

Are these named NPC's or random people you trap.  Looking at the oblivion CS I see that there is the chance of a spawn point giving you one of several candidates. If these are unnamed NPC's then there is likely a script in the program that changes one random bandit for a different one every few days.

[Pfactor]

It hasn't happened with specific NPC's, just the general population.

 

Another bug I discovered, I had posted about earlier but got no response, was random invulnerability. I think it might be related to this gender switch problem too.

 

After capturing someone using Mind Control, they'd be added to the possible follower pool. I then used UFO to make them essential. It appears Skyrim can't tell the difference between my barbarian and another random barbarian NPC... so I'd be out battling bandits and what not and a random one would not die. I'd have to remove them using MARKFORDELETE. This was a game breaker in such quests as joining the Imperials when you'd have to clear out a fort. The game couldn't tell if you killed all the bandits. After randomly trying things out.. I decided to not make my captured NPCs essential. That fixed a lot of problems. But they still switch genders etc

[Pfactor]

Are these named NPC's or random people you trap.  Looking at the oblivion CS I see that there is the chance of a spawn point giving you one of several candidates. If these are unnamed NPC's then there is likely a script in the program that changes one random bandit for a different one every few days.

They are random bandits and barbarians. The named ones stay static.

[Emberheart]

NPC's can be spawned from a NPC list. This happens when in example a bandit template redirects to such a list, which usually has 10 or so NPC's of a same level but of different genders and races. When the game spawns a bandit, it doesn't remember this bandit is a nord female with blonde hair and a tattoo, it remembers that is a certain bandit of a certain level which can borrow 10 or so different appearances. This is working as intended. To prevent this, create a custom NPC in the creation kit after capturing a bandit and make them use the template that matches the NPC's appearance. Also tag this custom NPC as unique in the creation kit to make them persistent.

[Pfactor]

It's very odd because when I used Paradise Halls I never had this problem. Everyone I captured stayed the same. PH no longer works at all.

[Emberheart]

Paradise Hall probably adds an alias to the NPC's so that they remain active even when you're not near them. A good way to test this is to be far away and from the command console write player.moveto <NPC ref ID>. If it says the NPC cannot be found, then the NPC is 'retired' to safe memory load and a new one is spawned in their place when you return to them. If you can move to that NPC with that command, they probably are persistent. It's also possible the paradise halls are set to not refresh or respawn the cell.

[DeepBlueFrog]

Mind Control has an experimental gender change option in the menu but it is disabled by default and it should not change the gender but instead create a TG NPC (and it is not working right anyway ).