[Solution] Naked guards, bandits etc. (i.e. naked leveled NPCs)

[bjornk]

Here's a solution to an issue I've encountered where some of the Markarth City Guards (could be bandits, the Forsworn or any other leveled NPCs) were completely naked and had no armor in their inventory.

They had their weapons but had no body armor, gauntlets, boots, helmets or any kind of clothes. Interestingly, running console commands such as resetinventory and recycleactor did not fix the problem. No matter what I do, their 'outfits' somehow remained empty. So I investigated the issue for a while and figured that they were all based on the same template (base actor) and realized the inventory of the base actor, which the leveled NPCs inherit, were somehow emptied (most likely by an idiotic script in a mod that fiddles with the base actor for no good reason, e.g. Defeat) and since the issue was buried in the save, the only solution was to edit the save game...

STEP BY STEP THE SOLUTION:

1. Find the ID of the base actor the NPCs are based on, which was 0008B319 in my case
2. Run the save editor (e.g. Save Tool) and enable 'Inc. refs' and load the save game
3. Search for an 'Actor Base' record for the ID (e.g. 0008B319)
4. Delete the 'Actor Base' record from the save game (it will be recreated by the game) and save it
5. Load the modified save in the game
6. Use 'resetinventory' on the NPCs who are still naked