Companion Conversations Quests badly broken

[DayDreamer]

I'd found some very serious bugs in the Companions talking to each other, that AFAICT will stall all such Story Manager quests.

https://afktrack.afkmods.com/index.php?a=issues&i=34772

But it's worse for the Companions talking to vendors. I'd started reporting on Sarah Morgan one by one, because 5 of 7 triggers weren't setup properly.

Then found that Andreja's are all missing the flags described in 34772. Since the first one triggered will never end, none of the others for any Companions will ever run either.

https://afktrack.afkmods.com/index.php?a=issues&i=34776

As I've started to dig into the Story Manager, there are many errors there as well. Here's a quick snip showing that Sarah's Neon vendors are under New Atlantis. Barrett's and Sam Coe's _convo_Neon and _convo_NewAtlantis are missing entirely!

These records weren't even visible to us until the most recent CK.

Meanwhile, most of my previous reports to Bethesda disappeared last week, no longer shown in my support summary. Only two very old Skyrim reports are visible to me. Seems like we're on our own again.

Do we have anybody to talk with directly at Bethesda?

Contrary to reports that Starfield was relatively bug free, this is worse than Skyrim....

[DayDreamer]

Google search reports that somebody else noticed these as well, and expressed a wish:

Quote

I hope that the creators of the game or the developers of unofficial patches will fix these conversations and there will be no need for this mod.

https://www.nexusmods.com/starfield/mods/12617

 

[DayDreamer]

Since I don't have a working SF1Edit yet to see what others have done, I've been re-doing these from scratch.

I've found several more general causes. But these triggers are flagged as persistent, so I'm not sure how well this works for a saved game.

As I'd speculated in the bug reports, more than half of Sarah's used the wrong trigger. The story manager is checking for Settlement_Convo_SendStoryEventTrigger, not the generic SendStoryEventTrigger. A control-F fixes that.

Four of Sarah Morgan's are in the wrong worldspace. It seems that earlier development had some of the places in exteriors, and were moved to loading door interiors, leaving behind a number of boxes of various sorts. The only hope is to move the trigger as closely as possible to the entry doors, so that Sarah is triggered to go inside at around the same time as the player.

Interior triggers are sometimes too close to the door marker. As we learned long ago (in Skyrim), entering a trigger via a door marker won't always run the trigger. Easily fixed by using the '2' tool to move the edge.

Many of them are simply too big. They extend under the floor into shops below. They extend into nearby walkways and shrubbery. Those that were working well are smaller and focused around the vendor's counter or chair.

[DayDreamer]

On 1/20/2025 at 2:46 AM, DayDreamer said:

Barrett's and Sam Coe's _convo_Neon and _convo_NewAtlantis are missing entirely!

Sure enough EditorWarnings.txt has been telling every Bethesda developer every time they load their CK:

QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_NewAtlantis01' (000DF311)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_NewAtlantis01 (000DF311) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity05' (000DF312)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity05 (000DF312) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity04' (000DF313)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity04 (000DF313) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity03' (000DF314)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity03 (000DF314) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity02' (000DF315)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity02 (000DF315) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity01' (000DF316)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_AkilaCity01 (000DF316) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_NewAtlantis02' (000DF31F)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_NewAtlantis02 (000DF31F) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_Neon01' (000DF320)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_Neon01 (000DF320) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_Neon02' (000DF321)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_Neon02 (000DF321) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_EleosRetreat' (000DF45A)    Quest COM_Companion_SamCoe_Convo_EleosRetreat (000DF45A) has not been added to the story manager.

 

QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Neon02' (0033E8EB)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Neon02 (0033E8EB) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Neon01' (0033E8EC)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Neon01 (0033E8EC) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Paradiso01' (0033E8ED)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Paradiso01 (0033E8ED) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_RedMile01' (0033E8F2)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_RedMile01 (0033E8F2) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Cydonia01' (0033E8F7)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Cydonia01 (0033E8F7) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_ECSConstant01' (0033E8F8)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_ECSConstant01 (0033E8F8) has not been added to the story manager.
QUESTS:            QUST 'COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Paradiso02' (0033E8F9)    Quest COM_Companion_Barrett_Convo_Paradiso02 (0033E8F9) has not been added to the story manager.

 

While I was a bit surprised that it reports 1606 warnings every time CK loads, I'd expected these things were beyond my ability to fix, as they were in Skyrim.

But no! There are warnings about names ending in blank spaces. And newlines in the middle of names. And suspicious bounds of zero. Should have been fixed by developers the instant they saved. Should have been fixed by developers who worked the very next day, or the next week, or the next month....

Worse than Skyrim!

 

[DayDreamer]

Testing New Atlantis, found that Sarah works well, but nobody else. After much poking, it appears that even when a companion isn't present, the trigger starts the scene. As the first phase is always for the missing companion to travel there, and they cannot, it doesn't actually happen. Although these triggers do not disable, most of the quests are flagged Run Once, so they never try again for later triggers.

I'm prophylactically checking the companion (ref) is in the same cell. It doesn't seem to hurt, but I'm not able to test again without New Game.

This also allows a minor trick to reuse the same trigger for multiple companions. There are a few places where different companions have conversations with the same NPC.

I've removed some of the Run Once flags, where the scene says they do it again or every time.

They all used the DefaultTraveltoScenePrimaryActorPkg default distance to the NPC: radius 1.5. Many of them were taking a long time wandering around a counter. There was another base package RM_TraveltoScenePrimaryActorPkg (used only twice) that has radius 4.0. This works much better in many cases.

There are a few places where the conversation is frequently interrupted by another NPC. This is fixed by removing the Interruptible flag. At least half of the scenes already didn't have that flag, so it's probably not really necessary.

About half done now. This takes a lot of effort, guesswork, and testing....

[DayDreamer]

Completed testing at readily available locations.

https://afktrack.afkmods.com/index.php?a=issues&i=34800

 

[DayDreamer]

The previously posted file was built incrementally, so it had as masters some previous variants. SF1Edit is recently able to clean masters, so I've updated the attachment at the tracker. It now has only Starfield.esm, although it incorporates related changes from USFP. Started a new game and currently testing with latest USFP.

[DayDreamer]

Relatedly, nearly every NPC also has conversation scenes. I've been checking New Atlantis, and found many of the same problems. Missing start flags, wrong story manager node, etc.

https://afktrack.afkmods.com/index.php?a=issues&i=36147