Simple NPC clothing management program

The simple NPC Outfit Manager gives you direct control over what Skyrim NPCs wear. Create custom outfits and equip them to any Skyrim NPC. Powerful, powerful and lightweight.

Simple NPC Outfit Manager has been updated to version 1.1! Check out the change log under the Log tab!

motivation

Ever since I started playing Skyrim, I've been frustrated with the options we're given to manage what our NPCs wear. The only option in the base game is to give something to a follower, and even then, once you dismiss them, they unlock the equipment! What if you want to change the costume of a character who is not a follower? You're out of luck. A few mods have tried to solve this problem over the years, but (with all due respect to the authors and their hard work), I personally find them all very heavy-handed, or unnecessarily complicated.

Simple NPC Outfit Manager (my first mod release!) solves all these problems. It does exactly what the title says: it allows full customization of Skyrim NPC clothing. It's simple and completely conflict-free. It's very lightweight, has only a handful of one-liners, and has little impact on performance. Best of all, it actually works. All the weird bugs you find in other costume managers don't happen here. Equipment changes are done at the engine level so they are seamless and 100% reliable. This is all done locally; you don't need to install SKSE. Yes, this means it works perfectly with SSE out of the box.

How to use

This mode takes place entirely through dialogue. All you need to do is talk to any NPC, look for the "Let's talk about costumes..." option, and you'll be able to fully customize 15 different costumes at once. (Note that you can equip these 15 outfits as needed.) If you got the "Utility" version of the mod, you'll also have the option to browse the various generic vanilla Skyrim outfits.

That’s all. Simple as pie.

I made a video demonstrating the functionality of the mod, you can check it out here. I've included some text comments in the subtitles, so be sure to turn them on. This video was made for version 1.0, so some things may look a little different, but it should get the emphasis.

Version

As of version 1.1, the mod now has two different versions, limited only by restrictions on equipment dialogue.

The "immersive" version will limit gear dialogue to allies and above, and won't offer a universal gear selector. Best for role players who need a sense of immersion.

The "utility" version will make dialogue available to all unique NPCs, and a universal gear selector will be available by default. Useful for those who want to adjust everyone's outfits in the game, or want to use it as a debugging utility.

Both versions can lift all restrictions (including restrictions on changing non-unique NPC outfits - do this at your own risk!) by entering the console command set CCORestrictOutfitDialogue to 0. You can return the limit to 1 by running set CCORestrictOutfitDialogue.

Install

The only requirement for this mod is a fully updated version of Skyrim. Installation is just like any other mod. Download your favorite mod manager, install it, and play. If installing manually, just unzip .7z and make sure to put both .esp and .bsa into the Skyrim/Data folder. Loading order doesn't matter at all.

uninstall

Bad news: I don't recommend uninstalling the mod after you start using it. Doing this won't break your save or leave behind script files or make your game unstable, but it will leave any NPCs whose outfits are changed to custom outfits physically using the mod after a while. This is the only real drawback of this mod: there's no easy way to uninstall it without these adverse effects on your game.

Good news: Fortunately, there is a solution. Universal outfits included in the mod (i.e. the vanilla outfits you select from the list in "Equip Universal Outfits") avoid this problem; any NPCs wearing universal outfits will continue to wear those outfits after uninstalling. (In fact, the nudity issu …