why do some enemies corpses turn red?

[J]

I was at a point where I had to kill a bunch of enemies in the city that turned hostile. I killed them all but for some reason all there corpses are red and considered stealing. Why? They attacked me first so shouldn't I get to loot their bodies? Its the dumb buggy fireworks quest.

[DawnCry]

It's probably a bug. Unfortunately there is a reason why we get such big patch notes with each update.

[orthostatic]

Yeah it's bugtastic. Just sneak-loot them until it's resolved.

[EricHVela]

After each patch/hotfix, different corpses and containers end up stealing/free-for-all. In the Goblin camp, some items become thieving after giving everyone there a bad day while others go from stealing to open loot, some stay open loot, some stay forbidden. Which was which changed last patch and again following hotfix.

Dunno what system that's using, but from an observer's view, something's crossing between containers to determine which are lootable and which are not—fixing it somewhere breaks it elsewhere. Again, this is a guess based on symptoms. There's no way to know if this guess is remotely close to the mark.

(Wonder if the container IDs are rolling over for the ID being an integer too large for some process, causing overlap by using say INT16 for an ID that's INT64 or something.)

[FoxFox]

Seems like sometimes there are different opinions among NPCs on what can be looted. I killed some duergar and looted their red corpses right next to some other duergar and they were fine with it. But this happened in a place where killing duergar was generally frowned upon. So looting was generally considered stealing there, but nobody who was still around minded.

[J]

It happened again! ! Killed some fish monsters that popped out of the water and all their corpses are red!
And thats not all! Nearby there was one of those buried chests you could dig up. I had sneak to dig it up! and loot it! And when I tried looting it and got caught, one random npc just straight up picked up and stole the whole chest and walked away with it!