I have an idea for another NPC, who is a vampire, and when the player encounters them in a cave/tomb/house/ruin I plan to add, has slain the previous occupants, who were also vampires (that I also plan to add), and are spread out on the floor all around this new NPC.

Now, I know that you can make an NPC become a perma-corpse once the player themselves has killed them, but what about making my proposed situation? Can it be done? If so, what's the level of difficulty?

Thanks in advance.

Open the NPC's reference window, set the NPC's health at zero, and check-on the Corpse Persist function.

This will make the NPCs already dead when you enter the cell. (skips the death-animation that you would otherwise see if you don't check Corpse Persist)

edit: if you cannot set their health at zero, turn off Auto-Calculate first.

Ah, of course. Yet another simple fix.

You know, not to open old wounds, but for not being a planet anymore, you sure are useful still.

There is a caveat to this, which I ran into making a morgue for a mod. Yes, setting their health to zero will (obviously) cause them to die immediately, but they will still "randomly" fall depending on placement, distance from statics, etc. Fortunately, it remains the same once you have placed them.

You may not care precisely where your NPC's "die", but in my case, I really needed them to fall such that they lined up with the table, and I ended up having to use a script that called skipanim, and then manually rotated them once they were dead.

Thanks for the tip. Unless they drop in spots that cause a problem, like right in front of a door or something, that shouldn't be an issue for me. It's something to think about when I'm designing the hideout though, I'll need to make sure there's enough room for all of them to end up in convenient spots without getting jumbled together or too close to the NPC who's to have made them dead.