Sadly I had to remove the fantastic Wet and Cold mod from my load order due to some performance concerns, but I ended up really missing the NPC gear feature in particular, so I ended up editing the mod for personal use in order to limit the features to the core functionality I cared the most about. In the process I also tried to optimize some parts of the scripts and how they distrubute gear to NPCs. This uses Spell Perk Item Distributor (SPID) to add keywords to NPCs based on filters (and in some cases; chance) that exclude NPCs from being considered for Cold, Rain, or Survival gear. I find this also adds a bit of variety so that not every single NPC ends up with every kind of gear. The exclusions and chances are easily tweakable in the included ini file.

The mod requires the original Wet and Cold SE to function.

Features

New features

• An option in the MCM to set the chance for NPCs to not equip hoods in rain. I find this adds a little bit of variety instead of only having a hard toggle.
• SPID based exclusion config to easily disable certain kinds of gear for different types or individual NPCs. See the description of the SPID mod page for instructions on how to further tweak this yourselves.
  

Features kept from the original mod

• Cold gear for NPCs
• Rain gear for NPCs
• Ash gear for NPCs
• Survival gear for NPCs
• All armors/equipment and the option to add them to leveled lists
  

Removed features from the original mod

• All visual effects like water drip, wet/frost/dusty shaders on characters, breath effects, watery eyes, soggy feet. R.A.S.S mod is compatible if you want an alternative which adds most of these kinds of effects back.
• Gear for NPC chidren (hoods), didn't feel this was worth it personally, as I tried to limit the amount of polling quests on NPCs as much as possible.
• "Go Home" functionality
  

Tweaks/optimizations

• NPCs no longer use RegisterForSingleLOSLost when trying to equip gear but is close and visible to the player. This is a somewhat expensive
• In the few polling quests that remain, the actors are first checked if they already have the relevant effect and if they have the excluded keyword added from the SPID config, preventing a lot of additional checks and in some cases scripts being needlessly run on the actors.
  

SPID ini config  (WetAndCold_Gear_DISTR.ini)
The included ini file should work pretty well out of the box, In addition to the regular checks from W&C at the bottom of the file, I also added some entries for flavor. These are commented in the ini file, and can safely be removed if you dislike any of the additions. A few of them are lower chances for blacksmith and miners to wear cold and rain gear, a small chance for females and males (different chances) to not wear certain kinds of gear, very low chance for drunks to wear cold gear and even lower to wear rain gear.

If you want to exlude specific NPCs from certain kinds of gear, you could add something like this (in this example I use names as the filter, but keywords or other forms can also be used)
Keyword = _WetExcludeRainGear | Cicero , Grelod the Kind
The three relevant keywords you can add to NPCs are: _WetExcludeColdGear , _WetExcludeRainGear , and _WetExcludeSurvivalGear
You can use names and keywords of NPCs added by mods as well. And all keywords are applied to NPCs added by mods if they match the filter.

Because of how SPID works, entries that have a chance to be applied will be randomly added to NPCs every time you start the game, so you might see some characters not wearing certain gear on some of your sessions while having them in others.

Installation

• Install Wet and Cold SE .
• Install Spell Perk Item Distributor (SPID) if you don't already have it.
• Install this mod and let it overwrite anything from Wet and Cold SE (overwrites the ESP file and some of the scripts). You can install this mid-playthrough, as long as you haven't been using Wet and Cold SE in the same save already.
• ???
• Consider endorsing the two mods mentioned above :) , they did most of the work
  

Compatibility

• R.A.S.S. Rain Ash And Snow Shaders - Wet Frost Cold Dust fully compatible! With this you get most of the functionality of the full W&C back with less performance impact.
  
• Wet and Cold - Fur Hoods Fix compatible
• Wet and Cold - HD textures SE compatible
• Cathedral Weathers - use the compatibility patch from W&C SE's downloads