Is there a way to prevent followers/companions from looting corpses for weapons during combat? It’s somewhat annoying to see a follower put his pristine Chinese assault rifle away in favor of a 3-shots-away-to-being-broken 10mm pistol he picked up from some raider corpse.

None that I know of and now it has my interest. Plus wouldn't it make more sense to have them just grab ammo or a weapon ONLY if its 35% decent and keep using the best weapon or the one assigned to them......would make a good mod in itself no?

Companion/slave weapon assignment and directions. =)

I've yet to figure out what triggers followers to pick up weapons during combat - there's nothing related to looting under combatstyles for instance; I was hoping other people had some idea. So yeah, that would indeed make a good mod.

I thought they picked up weapons based on DR, whichever has the better. In Oblivion I think it was based on value. Sometimes I go into my follower's inventory to find all this junk and he has a perfectly good Plasma Rifle with plenty of ammo. When I exit his inventory he immediately unequips that crappy .32 pistol and equips the plasma rifle :wacko:
Although I don't use vanilla followers so don't know if that makes a difference.

If I remember rightly CS&R has the option for its followers to loot, but I don't think you can pick and choose what they should be looting.

If anyone ever figures it out it'll be a mod that I'd want as well

So, anyone know of something?

I'm pretty sure that DR is the main factor, but there might be others. Looting is built into the game engine and as far as I know you can't prevent it. But with scripting on the NPC you can remove looted weapons and enforce your choice. I've done this with melee weapons on my follower mod and the next update will have an option to do it for ranged weapons. A looted weapon is removed within .5 second and thrown in her backpack.

Sweet, because Brisa is probably my second most kleptomanic follower. I'll check out the scripts on Brisa for melee weapons and see if I can reverse engineer them somehow onto my other followers, thanks.

The best way to handle this IMO is to force/lock your companions gear. Add an options to your companion for lock and unlock through dialogue or activation, whichever you prefer. The lock option accesses a remote container which you will put armor or weapons into that you want your companion to use. When the container is closed you ref walk the items and equip them on your companion using the no unequip flag. Using this method also lets you get around the problem with combat styles resetting on reloading, and just not working that great in general. If you lock a melee weapon on them they have no choice but to use it...

The unlock command is needed to unequip the items that have been locked to the companion. Same thing just ref walk the companion for equipped items and unequip them.

You may want to check the items health before forcing them to your companion 9when they are in the remote container) as you will need to add base objects for them to equip which mostly have full health. You can adjust it after the item is added if it's important to you.

Using this method also doesn't require any constantly running game mode checks. Anyway that's the method I use and it works perfectly.

Thanks for pointing this out - I already have the weapons in remote lockers, and add/equip/remove them through a script, so the no-unequip method should simplify things for me a lot. Never occured to me... Thanks!

Is that what you did for your mod Remote Control Companions Plus? There are some options in there I haven't used as I don't really know what they do exactly - although I'm sure the readme should tell me if I bother to read it

For my companion mod I'd do what you mentioned above, although I wouldn't have a clue how to, which is also why I use RCCP as it does some things I couldn't figure out :hehe:
I do know someone who could help me implement it, so I'm not completely lost.

Thanks for explaining that, though.

You should be able to stop the looting of ranged weapons by defining the follower's base definition as having a weapon, and you'll probably want that weapon to be a special one that you make
which uses a "robot ammo" ammunition, and then you also define the follower's inventory as having that necessary robot ammo. You would make your weapon as 'unplayable' and not droppable and such.

You can stop the looting of melee weapons by defining a melee weapon in the base object's inventory. Undroppable, unplayable, etc - -

If you emulate the vanilla followers' inventories, I think you will get what you want (both on melee and ranged).

You could experiment with giving followers a low-DPS weapon and see if maybe looting kicks in. I don't think you will see it happen, based upon what I've seen with the melee weapons. I've not worked with *preventing* looting of *ranged* weapons on followers in some time (it is a behavior I want the followers I work with to have). But it seems that this should solve the problem for you. It's worth a try and it's easy.

If the player in this situation passes the follower another weapon, he will evaluate based upon his personal expected DPS with the weapon and choose to use the new weapon if it seems better to him.

It is possible that something's changed since I last tested this. But this is how I recall it.

Yes the option to lock gear is in RCCP. It's a really nice feature because you can control what a companion equips regardless of what they have in their inventory. Even if they loot something better that they would normally choose over what they have equipped they won't change.

You are welcome to look through my scripts and rip anything that helps. The relevant parts are in the b3RemoteFollowerScript just after the game mode section starts. It's probably easier to start from scratch though as the scripts can be confusing since I don't normally comment sections.