The game would act as if Tengu is dead, but an import without importing dead NPCs wouldn't reset the world state for the United Cities. He will always be viewed as "Dead" for the purposes of world states.

If you had a recruiting mod that didn't require that you take him prisoner to recruit, you'd similarly get a frozen UC world state that presumes he's still alive. I *think* you might be able to reset that by turning him into the sheks or HN.

Thanks for the reply! I've done some testing running this mod alongside the reactive world mod. Only as far as the Dust King and Black Dragon Ninjas though. When I had Dust King recruited the world state tracker provided by the mod said he was still alive, so the Dust Bandit civil war didn't kick off. So I went and turned him in to the HN to see what would happen, two of the Dust Bandit factions appeared, but not the third. Tracker said Dust King is "not safe." So I had him break out of prison and run off, tracker said Dust King is safe. So I took him to the plastic surgeon, changing his name didn't work. I exported his look, went and got him killed, Dust Bandit civil war started, I was able to go kill the leaders and the Dust Bandits are no more. I recruited a new character, imported Dust King onto him via plastic surgeon, now I have a Dust King clone running my bar.

With the Black Dragons I have both leaders recruited, world state says they are still fine, so reading as alive. However, all of those world states are modded so I'll have to do more testing with an Inquisitor or a Noble to see if the vanilla world states count a recruited character as dead or not.

The author of reactive world confirmed the dust king thing in the discussions area of his mod. He has to die in order for the reactive world dust bandit civil war thing to properly work due to the way the engine works. He can't do anything about it. Imprisoning isn't enough.

As a side question regarding this, do imports restore named NPCs if you recruit them and then dismiss them from your squad?

I suspect it won't work without an import, but does an import reset the character? If you, for example, recruit and subsequently dismiss the Dust King, the Dust King becomes a Tech Hunter character faction or a Drifter character faction (I don't remember which). Does an import wipe out that iteration of him and reset him to the Dust King in his tower?

I'm actually not sure what the game would do at that point. Basically it seems that each important NPC has a unique identifier. That ID persists through imports. So even when I did the reset NPC's option, the game still considered Dust King alive, but he wasn't at his tower. It was the Dust King in my squad the game was reading. I tested and confirmed that by feeding him to some blood spiders. So if you were to dismiss him, I'm not sure what the game would do with him at that point. It would probably still read him as alive, but you would never be able to find him again if I had to make a guess.

I am fairly sure recruiting world state NPCs into your squad will keep their alive status. Thus any world states requiring them not to be alive will not be able to trigger.

In a nutshell yes, and it will persist through imports. What he is asking though is, let's say you recruit the Dust King. then you dismiss him from your squad. What happens to him?

Originally posted by Agent 53:

In a nutshell yes, and it will persist through imports. What he is asking though is, let's say you recruit the Dust King. then you dismiss him from your squad. What happens to him?

Exactly. My belief is that if you recruit the Dust King and then dismiss him from your squad, he won't go back to being the Dust King hanging out at his tower. But what I'm wondering is if you import that save after dismissing him, whether that resets him to the Dust King or not.

My suspicion is yes, but I'm curious if he hasn't despawned in your save game (ie, you dismiss him and he goes and hangs out at a bar that never reloads because it's close enough to your base), if he wouldn't be restored as the Dust King, or even if he becomes a named character that sticks around (ie. he maintains his independence from the Dust Bandits through an import no matter what).