Anyone know what controls the essential status of companions? Seems in normal mode that using setessential baseid 0 does not work. I tried in console and through a script so I'm guessing there is something preventing them from being set non-essential in normal mode. Also tried this on a normal NPC. When set to player teammate they are auto set essential, and setting them as not player teammate makes them back to non-essential, but the function setessential still seems not to work.

hm ah.

What you are trying to do must take into account whether or not you are in hardcode mode.

In 'casual' mode, hired followers do not walk around with the essential flag on. Only upon death, when the .exe does the death intercept and makes them 'unconscious', does that essential flag get set. As they lie on the ground, during that unconscious time, they are essential. Then when they recover and get up, the flag gets pulled off by the .exe.

I believe all it takes in order to have the casual-mode death intercept work is for the NPC to have player teammate status. (CompanionREF.setplayerteammate 1).

I have no direct experience with hardcoe but I believe the death intercept is simply not done by the .exe.

Actually once you set an actor to playerteammate in normal mode, they do have the essential flag on. I have a script that checks their status (it reports actor is essential or actor is not essential) then allows you to change it, but it can't be changed in normal mode it seems on any actor. I'm going to look through the game settings as maybe there is something there...Hard mode is different as I can change it with the script just fine.

hm you know, you may be right, my game was in a funky save state when I checked. meh.

I decided to make a work around for this issue. It seems like a bug that you can't set actors essential/non-essential on the fly in normal mode, but maybe that's the way they intended it, or it was broken when they fixed the last issue concerning essential actors in the last patch.

The workaround involves adding a token to the essential companion that checks if he has been knocked out. If he has then it sets player teammate to off (which sets them non-essential) and then kills them. Seems to work pretty well, but having the function working properly would be better. Can anyone confirm if this is a bug or not? Maybe I should post it in the bugs forum to see if any devs care to comment...

I think that the script function for checking for unconscious may not work reliably. If you work with this just be aware that I've seen the check fail in NV in my travels, and, in Fallout 3 it would fail 100% if the time if the NPC was being knocked down at the time of death (such as by a behemoth strike).

Well I'm using the function GetKnockedState == 1, is that what you had problems with? So far it has been reliable, but I've only done some limited testing.

that's the one.