Greetings all! I hope this 3rd of April finds you well. I think this is the best place for this post... it's not about any mod in particular, but it's doubtful it would be relevant outside the realm of mods. I want to briefly go over the correct procedure for resetting NPCs, primarily merchants, after installing a mod that changes something about them. How's about a scenario?

Say I have a game save that I've been working on, and in that save, I have already visited and interacted with http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Arrille and http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Syloria_Siruliulus (these are not arbitrarily picked, but we'll get to that). Then let's say I install Daggerfall Collection (adds Daggerfall books to several Morrowind merchants, including the two we're talking about... found on http://btb2.free.fr/morrowind.html). Now normally, without any extra work on my part, Arrille and Syloria will not show these books in their sellable inventories. As I understand it, this is because their inventories are "set" upon the first interaction with them... the only changes that will occur from then on will be additions/subtractions due to trading with me (I may have missed a finer point here or there, but I believe that's mostly correct).

Searching through here, I found a post talking about how you can delete records from the save file to fix this sort of thing (with the caveat being that you also lose any history with those NPCs, including Disposition gains and losses). I opened up Enchanted Editor (EE), and sure enough there is a list of records called "NPC Altered/Killed by Player". I scrolled through the list, and there was instance data for both Arrille and Syloria. I selected those two records, hit delete, saved, and then fired up Morrowind to see what effect it had. There was, of course, an error upon loading the save, but that was expected. After loading I immediately made a new save, reloaded that, and then went to see the "reset" versions of my merchants. I got mixed results.

Syloria worked as expected. I went to see her and, sure enough, she had the Daggerfall book she was supposed to have. Her Disposition was back down to it's default value +/- any modifiers, but everything else seemed fine. Looked good so far, but...

Arrille was a different story. His Disposition was back to its starting, non-Fargoth modified value, but the inventory did not reset. This was no good... I only got the bad side of the "fix". I looked closer in EE, and saw that Arrille had another record in my save. This record was in the "Non Player Characters" list just about the "Altered/Killed" one. Since I was playing around with a duplicate of my actual save, I felt safe enough just "trying things", you know? So, I deleted that record as well, and then repeated the process. This time I saw what I expected to see... a "reset" Arrille with the inventory I wanted to see, and with the Disposition back to its default value. So, I got Arrille to work as well, but the extra step was required. I even went back and tried deleting only the "Non Player Characters" record, but that didn't work either. The only successful result came from deleting both records, and then letting the engine rebuild the NPCs with the new data.

So, here'e the question(s): Is this correct? It's working, and I see no ill effects in-game, but I know darn well that there could still be issues lurking in there that I'm not aware of, and that ignorance is dangerous. A sub-question would be, why do some NPCs, like Arrille, have two records? I can think of some reasons, but they're all speculative. Is there something important about the difference in these NPCs?

OK, I think that covers it pretty thoroughly. Please let me know if more info is needed. And thanks in advance!