If I write something in the personal traits of a default NPC, does it completely rewrite the traits or add to the existing one?
From my own experience going full on, it rewrites the traits. You can in fact if you want make a bizzarro town where Celandine is a advocate for celibacy, Hayden bakes razors into bread and Mirel drinks only fizzy water. Or more seriously you can add trauma and drama to their backstories or related to the PC
However I haven’t tried going piecemeal yet with just a quick one line.
You can literally open your Silverpine_Data folder and open the level0 file in notepad++(or whatever you prefer) and you can see it in the sea of compressed data. It can be found easily, you just need to know where to look.
For example:
This is Aldric's personality tags: "posh, firm, confident, clever, keeps to business."
Acacia:"Impulsive, animalistic, ravenous, stealthy."
Celandine: "Lusty, outgoing, playful, doesn't like working too much."
Darian: "Forward, kind, alert, not easily tricked, upstanding citizen." Darian also has, what I call, a "hidden" personality trait that's not in his personality tags. I suspect it's in his set knowledge and private. So, I'll keep it private for him.
Gareth: "Stoic, hard worker, gruff, gentle giant." Hmm, could have sworn he also had "difficult to upset" Maybe it's one of those hidden traits now?
Hayden: "Quiet, introverted, shy, precious, hard worker."
Mirel: "Hardy, doesn't like being in one place for too long, witty, strong for her size." Huh, this part used to be private, but it isn't anymore: "high libido but tries to keep it contained." It also had "hopelessly high libido" but that part got removed it seems.
Oriana: "Cold, doesn't trust strangers, stoic, reserved, intelligent, doesn't like talking to anyone but her sister."
Orson: "Introverted but does enjoy some company sometimes, easily lost in thought, stealthy, loves winter, lighthearted."
Rosalyn: "sweet, motherly, welcoming". Hers is really short for some reason.
I imagine there are several smaller things that are hidden, but are kind of obvious if you play the game long enough, like how Oriana likes lavender. Though it's hard to tell how much of such things are hallucinations.
You can find the player character descriptions as well, though the NPC descriptions are encrypted now. Luckily, I still have 1.2.4 release I can use as reference from before the encryption. Though I can take a hint and not reveal it since dev encrypted it for a reason, I guess.
Hrm. If we are attempting to replicate a npc and only adjust a few things, then by this logic we'll need all their bells and whistles for information, yes? But the NPC at the very least keeps their home, general pathing and whatnot?
For example, if we tweak the vendors, do they still retain their stock and sales?
Semi related, could this be used so you don't get eaten in the wild by a certain NPC, or has that been fixed?
I haven't tried altering any NPCs yet, but I presume if you leave the physical and private description fields blank for the original NPCs, then they will default to the original description for that NPC.
Of course this is all new stuff, so I could be wrong, but that is the impression I am given if NPC descriptions are to be kept hidden.
Hang on let me check if the information is still floating around in the 1.7.0 level0 file. I technically revealed this before, but I didn't know it was for Darian at the time. If it's been hidden since, I'm not going to reveal it, otherwise, might as well.
Also, you can find this out if you spend any significant length of time with him. I even saw signs of it before I put the two things together.
Right, so that information isn't uncompressed anymore, so you won't see it in the files, which means I probably shouldn't share it, since it's not publicly available knowledge. I suspect it's set knowledge, so if you mod Darian it will still be a hidden part of his personality because anything new is appended to the existing knowledge pool.