Hey mates,

in the last days I have tinkered with the various factions of Skyrim. Especially I am interested in the roles that actors play according to their faction ranks. More than I can count I have found actors on my way which have the rank "-1". What means that? Are these actors in the faction but hidden in the game? Is it as some friend of mine suggests a slave rank? (Not very probable, I know, but I am running low on ideas.)

Thanks in advance
Shari

i believe it means the actor is in the faction, but will not be "caught" by any associated dialogue or quests/actions that call the GetInFaction query, until ther rank goes up to at least 0.

for example merchants, i think this is used for the actors who are waiting to inherit the business when their partner is killed. once the main owner dies, the secondary increases their rank and assumes the role of the original owner, and they are able to be caught by the associated dialogue quests to give them the proper dialogue options to sell stuff..

Any negative number means that the actor is not in the faction. Anyway, when you remove an actor from a faction it will adopt the -2 rank.

-1 is a convention used by the game developers, for actors that are supposed to be added to a faction at some time. You can't use that info even to ensure that an actor will be added to any faction, as things change during development and as leaving that value to -1 didn't cause any throuble, I doubt they removed it when changing plans. In other words, it didn't mean anything.

Okay. I understand. The main data has many details of the development process still in it, has it?
Anyway, thanks for the info.

Shari