Just as a little experiment to try to learn to customize a companion, I started with one I already had. I went with Veronica since she was the one I had hired in my saved game.

From the looks of it, for a companion to level up with the player character, the "PC Level Mult" checkbox needed to be checked (I guess this was the "bug" that made her stuck at level 5 or whatnot).

It seems as though checking "PC Level Mult" also checks "Autocalc Stats" and it greys it out so you can't uncheck the box. The result being that any modifications I made to her attributes and skills were reverted to their default values. The attribute boxes become greyed out so they can't be modified at all.

Bethesda's GECK wiki page on this says this about skills:



However, after clicking on the skills area for about 15 minutes, I definitely concluded that I could not change them with the autocalc box checked. It would bring up an edit area for the numerical value, i'd type in a value and then the value wouldn't change. Is there a way to modify any of these values? From the looks of it, if I wanted to change Veronica into some cold-blooded sniper, she'll just end up as a sniper that can't hit her target ever since I can't modify her gun skill or perception (example).

You could just change her class to one with higher perception and guns tagged.

So there's no way to actually utilize that portion of GECK's documentation stating you can modify skills after auto calculation? How does the auto-calculation assign the stats to tagged skills? Does it simply evenly distribute it to the 3 tagged skills and ignore the rest of the skills?

Yeah, that part of the tutorial is wrong. Just like the part that talks about using Havok. :facepalm:

The NPC will spread points evenly throughout the 3 tagged skills and ignore any other skills.. You'll have to come up with some other way to boost other skills you want them to be good at. Such as making armor that boots that skill.

The tag skills just set up initial values. If you want to modify skills afterwards, you can use

 ActorRef.ModAV Skill xx

If you want to force a value on a skill, use

 ActorRef.ForceAv Skill xx   <-- don't use this on the player character though.