Is there a way to make a misc item invisible so that it cannot be seen in the players inventory or looted from other npcs?

I just use an armor item flagged as unplayable.

oh!
ok and this wont have issues with NPCs trying to equip it or anything like that?

Typically I set the item so it has no slots, and you can set the health to 0 also. I think that's enough to make them ignore it.

I seem to be having trouble placing this armor object on NPCs ( Robots and creatures ). It works fine on the player though. Might just be a bug in my script.

By on them you mean in their inventory right? Additem should be all you need. Are you calling pre-existing references, or getting them by refwalking?

ref walking
what is strange is that with the same code I can add a misc item to there inventory but if I change the item to the armor one it just doesn't give it to them..

How do you know it isn't giving them the item? Try putting messages in your script for debugging like one after the additem function like "Item Added" then do a check if MyRef.getitemcount... "Ref has item". Posting the scripts at this point might be best so someone can see if there is something wrong in them.

it was an error on my part I think.
it seems to work fine now.

Thanks for the help, being able to store variables on the player and NPCs can be super powerful and using armor tokens appears to be a really good way to do it.

There's a slight downside- call AddItem on them during combat, and NPCs AI tends to screw up (Creatures don't suffer this problem). If you're adding variables you plan on modifying during fights, use factions and AddToFaction/GetFactionRank instead.

The reason why I thought that the items were not transferring to creatures is because for some odd reason, base abilities for the creature class that should be shared among all of its children don't seem to reliably get added every time. So sometimes I run into super mutants that have no DT at all and others that do. Ghouls and scorpions ect. Its really random but if the creatures have zero DT then they don't get the items and it kind of breaks my script. * Shrugs *