dialogue code a hot mess?

[dragonalumni]

Seriously, I just want to copy/replace an NPC, NPC stats and NPC dialogue it's not rocket science but it's also not working, replacing the stats breaks it, and copying the dialogue doesn't seem to be an option.

I wanted to make a unique recruit in the hub. This really shouldn't be that difficult for me as I've already learned quite a bit about how the construction set works. My plan was simple, I would copy a current generic hireable recruit and modify them until it was unique.

Here is where it all went wrong.

I copied and replaced a hireable NPC, and it's stats and edited them.

Editing the NPC was no problem, but when I copied and replaced the stats, this one change alone made the NPC unable to have a conversation. Copied/replaced "hire me gunner" stats with "generic veteran recruit" and edited them. Loaded up the mod and this one change alone caused the npc to be unable to communicate. (IF I added back the hire me gunner stats the dialogue worked fine. -------What's the &*&*()%%&*R# relationship???? The only thing I can see is that this stat pool comes from the dialogue.mod and obviously the copy did not. Still WTF? (I reverted to a backup several times to make this change and always had the same result) (I also tried other hireable npcs with the same results, this thing has a bunch of my time)

Second, I really hoped the dialogue worked like everything else, and that the option to copy/replace a dialogue would work, so didn't have to do everything from scratch. Apparently though all dialogues have be written from zip? Is that for for real?

Kenshi should have always had a lot more conversation in it, but I'm starting to see why it doesn't. Hopefully someone knows more about this and I've simply made a mistake, but it's not looking like it.

edit: I found a tutorial that suggested that if you give an NPC too high stats (in this case 20-25s) that it breaks the recruit flag, are you ^&^&^&@!# kidding me?

[Hatsune_Neko]

there is no way to copy it
you have to do it all from scratch.

this might change in Kenshi 2 though.

there are mods that go over the recruitment level limits.

[Shidan]

The recruitment flag will indeed flip false if the stats go too high, but disabling that flag is extremely simple since it is just a dialog condition. All you have to do is remove it, and then they can have whatever stats you want.

And yes, dialog copies must be done by hand. This is because of the way they are setup in the backend. If you were to be able to copy them, you would still be editing the original when you edited the copy. (Think of it this way. When you copy a character, all their equipment and such is still the original items, not copies. If you try to edit that item, you will still be editing the original item unless you make a copy. Dialog lines work the same way. When you copy the dialog, all the original line entries are still used.)