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Crowded Streets

Crowded Streets dynamically generates background NPCs in cities, towns and inns to make them feel more populated. It does so without making any cell edits, making it compatible with mods that change or add new locations to the game. These NPCs are meant to be as cheap on performance as possible. They have no custom dialogue or complicated schedules, they just exist to add more life to a city.


Random Generation: Randomly generates a variety of background NPCs such as; peasants, hunters, mercenaries, priests, merchants, beggars, miners and mages, with peasants being the most common. These NPCs will wander around, interact with furniture, workbenches, idle markers, and so on.

Custom Population: By default the mod generates 15-25 random NPCs in cities and 5-10 in towns and inns, however you can use the MCM to increase these populations to make them denser, or decrease them if you run into performance issues.

Automatic Cleanup: Randomly generated NPCs disappear at night and reappear in the morning, and you can customize the crowd time in the MCM if you want them to stay around longer or disappear earlier. Randomly generated NPCs are deleted from the game when you leave the spawn location to prevent save bloat and peformance issues.

An MCM is included that allows you to customize all features added by this mod.

For the MCM you will need SKSE[skse.silverlock.org] and SkyUI[www.nexusmods.com].

Q. What patch level is required?
A. None.

Q. Do I need Dawnguard, Hearthfire or Dragonborn or additional plugins like SKSE?
A. SKSE and SkyUI will be required if you want to change any settings via the MCM, but this mod will function perfectly fine without them and all settings can be changed with console commands as documented in this readme file.

Q. Aren't there already mods out there that do this kind of thing?
A. Yes, and they usually place new NPCs by making cell edits which may lead to compatibility issues and don't do anything for new locations added by other mods without a compatibility patch. Those kinds of NPCs also persist in your save and may cost CPU time even when off- screen, whereas the NPCs that are generated by Crowded Streets are deleted completely when you leave the spawn location.

Q. Is this mod stable? / compatible with ### / affect performance?
A. I've tried to make this mod as lightweight as possible. The only time you may possibly notice a dip in performance is when NPCs are being spawned in or culled, which usually only takes a brief second, only happens once per day per crowd generation event, and can be mitigated further by reducing the spawn populations in the MCM.

If you think this mod is causing a crash, try reducing the spawn populations.

As far as compatibility is concerned, as long as a city/town/inn has the LocTypeCity/LocTypeTown/LocTypeInn keywords, Crowded Streets should be able to generate NPCs for that location without a problem, otherwise Crowded Streets simply won't do anything at that location. This mod makes zero cell edits and changes no existing records so there should be very little out there that it could be incompatible with.

Q. Will this bloat my save?
A. That shouldn't be possible. A random crowd is generated when you enter a city/town/inn and they are deleted outright when you leave that location. Internally it's set up like a random encounter.

Q. Some randomly generated NPCs aren't disappearing for the night.
A. If you're too close or have line-of-sight to a randomly generated NPC, they won't disappear immediately. This is to prevent NPCs from popping out of existence in front of your eyes. The mod will check and try again in an hour. The same check happens when re-enabling these NPCs in the morning to prevent them from popping into existence in front of your eyes. If you are still noticing pop-in/pop-out let me know so I can tweak the conditions.

Q. Do I need to start a new game to use this mod?
A. No.

Q. Can I modify this mod or re-use any parts of the script files?
A. You can do what ever you want with this mod, with attribution.

Refer to the Readme File[pastebin.com] for more information.