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The Welcome Home feature has been introduced in 1.4.0. By default, it will work quietly in the background for you, with your spouse and children sometimes forcegreeting you with a hug when you see them again.
That said, this feature is highly configurable, but the MCM layout may not be intuitive. This article is a walkthrough to help you manage your settings.
Where are the settings?
Open the MCM, and navigate to the Family Settings tab. The spouse settings are in the bottom left pane. Children settings are in the right pane.
Allow welcome home forcegreets: Enables or disables the entire feature for spouses.
Disabling the feature also hard resets all internal variables and previously established lists.
Exit dialogue: Whether the spouse should automatically exit from dialogue after the hug forcegreet, or should stay in the dialogue menu.
Days to pass: This is how many in-game days must pass after the last time you have seen your spouse for the forcegreet to trigger.
What counts as "seeing your spouse"? It means the last time the two of you were in the same game cell.
Yes, this means your spouse can and will forcegreet you anywhere, it doesn't have to be your player home, and doesn't have to be in the same place.
Stack days: When enabled, time-counters do not reset when meeting the spouse "early". This is an important key to how frequently in reality you'll get forcegreets. It's probably best understood with an example:
Let's say you have a spouse in cell A, and "days to pass" is set to 3 days. You leave cell A, wait 1 in-game days and return to cell A to the spouse. Nothing happens yet because you are early, 3 days have not yet passed, but:
- If stack days is enabled, the timestamp of the last meeting is not updated. This means, you can leave cell A, wait just 2 days, go back, and 1+2 days have passed, so your spouse will now forcegreet you.
- If stack days is disabled, the last meeting point is updated to 'right now'. This means, you once again have to wait full 3 days for the forcegreet. The previous day is discarded from counting, because you have met the spouse in-between.
Rule of thumb: If you want frequent and reliable forcegreets, enable stack days. If you want rather incidental forcegreets, disable stack days.
"Pro tip": If your spouse is also your follower, leaving stack days enabled will mean they will hug you every X days, acting as if you have just returned to them. Disabling stack days will mean that they will almost never forcegreet-hug you while they are following.
The lists:
Tracked spouses: NPCs on this list are tracked for the feature.
How to get NPCs on this list? Simple. A spouse will get added to a tracking list if you hug them first. That's all you need to do - use the mod's "I love you, you know" dialogue to hug your spouse.
You can already see how the mod is compatible with multiple spouses. Each NPC on the list is tracked individually, and has their own timer.
A note about polygamy and performance: The hardwired limit for spouses in this list is 30 (above which the mod will warn you that you reached the limit and it refuses record past this), however, I do not recommend to have that many spouses. Keep this in mind: every time a new cell loads, the mod will scan for the presence of the spouse, to see if you're meeting again.
Having to scan for ~30 NPCs in each cell change is definitely not friendly to your performance!
So if you have so many spouses that could play a match of football together and you're experiencing performance drops on your cell loads, it means you're nearing the limit where the scripts are getting really busy. Use the later steps in the article to remove a few spouses from the tracking system.
Click the list to see the NPCs on it.
For this example, I recorded two NPCs, Lydia, and a modded follower, Moniko.
Very important: this list serves two functions.
1) It shows you who's being tracked by the system at the moment.
2) It allows you to remove them from the list and add them to the Blacklist.
If you just wanted to check the list, then escape by selecting "Back", and then exiting.
If you want to remove an NPC from the list, select their name before exiting.
Removing an NPC will of course cease their tracking and they won't forcegreet anymore. But it will also put them on the blacklist. In this example I removed Moniko, which has put her on the blacklist:
NPCs on the blacklist are completely blocked from the feature. This means that even if you hug them yourself in the game, they won't get re-added to the tracking list while they are on the blacklist.
If you change your mind and want to reset the NPC, you can remove them from the Blacklist the same way. Exiting with "Back" does nothing, exiting after selecting their name removes them from the blacklist.
If you want to then register the NPC again for tracking, just hug them with the in-game dialogues!
Since version 3.1.0, the NPC Debugger (accessible via hotkey from the general MCM page) can directly edit NPCs in-and-out of these lists. It has a guided UI.
Children group:
The settings for children are on the right pane:
Allow welcome home forcegreets: Enables or disables the entire feature for children.
Chance (1-100%): Children already forcegreet the player in the vanilla game with various things. Therefore the hug forcegreet has been integrated into this system. When the vanilla children forcegreet is activated, the mod has this % chance to override it with the hug event.
This is a global percentage, so the hug really does happen with this probability. Then the vanilla events come after with the vanilla probabilities.
Since there are 4 vanilla forcegreet types, it is recommended to set this to 20%, which gives the most uniform distribution.
Setting it to 100% means children will only hug when forcegreeting, the other vanilla events are blocked.
Exit dialogue: Whether the child should automatically exit from dialogue after the hug forcegreet, or should stay in the dialogue menu.
That's all there is to this feature, feel free to ask in the comments if something is unclear.
3 comments
Allow welcome home forcegreets --> Allow welcome home hugs
Exit dialogue --> Exit dialogue after hug
Days away --> Days away for hug
Stack days --> Accumulate days away
So the rule of thumb is to be as succinct as possible with keywords, and you can be verbose in the tooltips below.