One of my favorite things about Bethesda RPGs like Oblivion and Skyrim is that NPCs have lives of their own. Yes, technically, merchants have been brought into existence specifically to stand behind store counters and buy whatever garbage you've collected on your last quest, but these shopkeepers also close their stores at a certain time each night, go to the tavern, eat meals, talk with other characters, and sleep in their beds at night.
These NPC routines typically aren't all that deep but still do a lot to make the world feel like it's not there just to cater to your needs. That's been one of the big complaints about Starfield: it just doesn't feel alive the way Oblivion and Skyrim do, and part of that is because minor NPCs have no routines, no schedules, and no hint of inner lives.
As always, it's up to modders to pick up the slack. Modder FlippingEggs has created a mod called NPCs Have Routines and Stores Have Schedules which gives 40 NPCs things to do besides simply waiting for you to enter their shops. Now they'll actually close their stores at night and go do other stuff like real people. You can even snoop around in these NPC's lives a bit: in their shops or their homes, you can find datapads with information about them and their new schedules.
You may see the downside to shopkeepers not being in their stores 24/7, especially since you're dropping in from space and aren't really paying attention to the local clock. No worries: the mod knows this is the sci-fi future and if you want to do some buying and selling in the middle of the night, helpful robots will be manning the front desk instead of human clerks.
Here's a quick rundown of what the mod does:
- 40 named characters now have daily schedules
- 4 unnamed but unique characters now have daily schedules
- 12 new robots work in various stores, so you can buy stuff when the store owner isn't there (Styx included)
- 61 data slates added to various store countertops and NPCs' personal spaces. Some of these slates are simple notifications of business hours, while others offer you a window into the lives of characters and where you can find them when they aren't working.
FlippingEggs has also taken pains not to screw you over, by the way:
"I have been very careful not to interfere with vanilla quest progression. Before adding a schedule to an NPC, I looked up every single dialogue scene they were involved in. If someone was required to be in an exact location for a scene, I have either not touched them, or added conditions to ensure their custom packages will not run until the scene is done."
You'll find the mod here at Nexus Mods, and hopefully it's just the beginning of more NPC overhauls dedicated to giving more minor characters stuff to do with their lives besides ringing up your order of Chunks.
