Souls of Cities – SFSE V4.3

Whether you’re looking to select the faces, outfits, voices, height, facial animations of generic NPCs you see in every large city (selectively for male and female characters with population ratio control), or just looking for a mod that simply makes cities a bit more lifelike by replacing the worst parts of the vanilla crowd system with a new implementation which doesn’t feature funny looking/robotic moving characters but features full names (for everyone), properly aligned and fully enabled facial morphs (FaceGen), animated clothing with physics enabled; all this included with an SFSE framework to allow adding your own unique characters to the game world, then this mod may sound interesting to you.

If you’re not looking to customize the characters and fine with the default presets, then aside from some random unique characters occasionally showing up, what you’ll see is fully featured human NPCs instead of “zombies”. The unique characters I added are vanilla quest characters like Lieutenant Crisanto Torres (from Groundpounder), Estelle Vincent (Crimsom Fleet questline) and.. a bonus Mr. Howard.

If you’re looking to personalize the characters for yourself by adding them selectively to the four supported locations (New Atlantis (and The Well), Akila City, Cydonia and Neon), then the good news is that you can do so by simply editing a .txt or .ini file which doesn’t take more than a minute. Update: now that the Creation Kit 2 is released, modders can create human NPCs and make the SFSE plugin load them either as unique characters or random citizens.

The mod is made of two subsystems: the Modular People System (MPS) and the Unique Character (UC) system.

MPS: basically the custom crowd system that replaces the vanilla crowd NPCs. It randomly picks NPCs’ faces, expressions (emotions), names, voices and outfits from .txt (“database”) files. These files aren’t big and quickly editable; they contain names (EditorIDs) and formIDs. Each location has a set of .txt files to allow location-specific setups like “more happy NPCs in New Atlantis, less in Cydonia” or “more males wear business suits than females” and so on. Population ratio control is also available per location.

UC: as mentioned above, MPS only makes it possible to edit the databases it randomly picks characters and their data from. In order to provide full character-specific customization, I made the UC system. It works like this: you create a new .ini file and specify their character data like appearance, name, outfit, voice, encounter chance, encounter locations and so on then the mod ensures the presence of this unique character at the given location, locations with the specified appearance and other NPC data.

I also exported the IDs (with names, when applicable) from Starfield.esm, the game’s vanilla master file to make it easy to browse and select from a variety of vanilla faces, animations, etc. Of course, if you’re a modder who’s interested in adding many new characters to the game world, then you can decide whether to add your NPCs to a location’s “FaceNPCs” database file (like MaleFaces.txt), or to create an .ini for each of them to provide them fixed emotions, voice, outfit, appearance, etc.

Comprasion: Crowd System vs. Modular People System

Vanilla Crowd System:
– Crowd NPCs’ outfits are not animated, have no physics
– Crowd NPCs’ outfits are “dummy”, non-playable, non-usable
– Crowd NPCs’ doesn’t have facial expressions or emotions
– everyone is named “Citizen”
– Crowd NPCs’ have “robotic” (somewhat simplified) movement animations
– Crowd NPCs’ faces look weird because technically what the player sees is “masks”, not even faces..
(note: no reflex movement = emotionless face; out of sync eye (blinks, etc.) and facial reflex movements = “zombieness”)

Modular People System:
– Modular Peoples’ outfits are fully animated, have physics
– Modular Peoples wear normal playable apparel
– they can have as many facial expressions and emotions as the game has
– 1billion+ (real, full) name combinations for everyone
– they have “normal” (smooth) movement animations (the ones even used by the player character)
– they have properly applied FaceGen and morphs
(note: C++ code fixes outfit clipping, neck seam and the like)
– they have much more voice types

Compatibility:

It’s not an exhausting compatibility list. It’s based on reports and actual compatibility tests.

Verified to be compatible:

Better NPCs, Height Variation Toolkit, Starfield Community Patch (SFCP)

Verified to be incompatible:

Better Crowd Citizens

Install, Uninstall:

Use a mod manager or active the mod’s plugin manually.

If you’re currently in one of the supported cities when you first open the game with this mod installed, leave then reenter to see the Souls of Cities characters. Due to safety reasons, the mod doesn’t remove the already existing crowd NPCs but once you leave, they are automatically deleted by the vanilla game so this mod can take effect.

While offically uninstalling mods mid-playthrough is not supported, you can do so but it’s recommended to leave the supported locations first.

Requirements:
Starfield Script Extender (SFSE)
Address Library for SFSE Plugins

Credits:

LarannKiar