Unused Prefabs for creating Sidekicks/Companions?

This is a sequel/continuation of a sort to the Turning an Adventurer into a Sidekick? thread.

This time we are looking at modification of the unused prefabs in characters.unity3d to create a new custom party member. This method potentially allows for something more feature than the Hired Adventurer with a conversation item I described in the other thread.

However it does require a great deal more patience to get a functional character in game. There are some compatibility and logistical caveats that should really be solved before it would really be easy to share characters with others.

That said here's a quick example of what can be achieved.

What I want to highlight in the above video is:

• A specified conversation can be initiated by clicking on the character. When in the party the "Talk To " button appears on the UI that triggers the conversation.

• Adjusted appearance. The character's hair/skin/eye, and primary/secondary cloth colour can be any combination of RGBa.
  The head, facial hair, and hair models are restricted to the existing Player and NPC assets though.

• Scripts can be triggered on events like the party resting. In this example it's another conversation but could be anything listed in the documentation.

What is needed?

A tool for modifying the contents of assetbundles. UABEA is what I used for the above example. Then it is just a case of pretty much finding any prefab that contains the components: CharacterStatsMutable, CompanionInstanceID, Equipment, NPCAppearance, NPCInteraction, Portrait, and ScriptEvent.

There are 13 such prefabs that are unused in the game:

• companion_caroc

• companion_ggp

• companion_gm

• companion_hiravias

• companion_sagani

• companion_test_barbarian

• companion_test_chanter

• companion_test_cipher

• companion_test_druid

• companion_test_monk

• companion_vspriest

• companion_vsranger

• companion_zahua

and an additional 4 that are used only in the Backer Beta mode:

• companion_generic_fighter

• companion_generic_preist

• companion_generic_rogue

• companion_generic_wizard

A couple of them are familiar names from PoE1. However their presence does not constitute any form of cut content. More likely these are remanets from various stages of prototyping or testing.

By filling in various components with the values and GUIDs pointing to certain gamedata (CharacterStats, CompanionData, and others) and a conversation you can get a custom party member!

They can then be spawned into the game with a console command such as SpawnPrefabAtMouse,
or as part of an encounter for a less intrusive ways. Though interestingly encounters seem to force the character into attacking so there is some jank in need of solving there.

Would that this were only problem to solve...

There's a catch.

Currently the only way to achieve this is manually making adjustments to the prefabs components inside of the characters.unity3d assetbundle.
Needless to say it's a very finicky process. Best worst case, the change you make doesn't take. Worst worst case, the game no longer works. And that is just summary of my past experience attempting assetbudle modding.
I'm as shocked as anyone that I got anything to work!

And if doing it yourself weren't tricky enough, you would need to explain how to import changes to others

Does that make sharing the modified characters.unity3d file the best option? It is on the lower side of 2gb. Which is not massive by modern game filesharing standards sure, but given the changes made to it only account for something like a couple of kilobytes, it does seem a bit ridiculous to me. And we're back to square one when 2 independently created custom character mods want to be installed together!

So, there are certainly some fairly tricky problems that need to be solved to make this viable in my opinion.

Edited 1 hour ago1 hr by Kvellen