"Meet me at the Western Watchtower at sunset." She agrees. Hours pass. The sun dips. You arrive — and she's already there.

IntelEngine has two parts that work together to make Skyrim's NPCs feel alive.

Part 1 — Player-Driven Actions: You tell NPCs what to do through natural conversation and they follow through physically across the entire game world. Scheduling is the core — meetings, fetches, and deliveries all support future time expressions.

Part 2 — Dungeon Master (AI-Driven Stories): An LLM Dungeon Master observes the world state and decides when NPCs should act on their own — seeking you out, ambushing you, spreading gossip, delivering messages, offering quests, and interacting with each other.

You step out of Breezehome at dawn with more to do than one Dragonborn can handle.

Farengar needs to warn the Jarl. You turn to him: "Tell Jarl Balgruuf there's been a dragon sighting near the Western Watchtower. Tell him to meet me at the Bannered Mare tonight." He nods and departs — delivering your message on foot through the keep. Balgruuf will hear it, remember who sent it, and the meeting request schedules him to travel to the inn that evening.

You need backup at the watchtower, so you find Jenassa at the Drunken Huntsman. "Meet me at the Western Watchtower at sunset." She agrees. The meeting is scheduled. She doesn't leave now — she knows when to depart, calculates the distance, and leaves early enough to arrive on time. You go about your day.

Before heading out, you need Adrianne. "Lydia, go get Adrianne. The blacksmith. Bring her here." Lydia walks to Warmaiden's, finds Adrianne at the forge, and escorts her back on foot. Adrianne lingers nearby — leaning on a post, sitting on a bench — until you've spoken and walk away. She drifts back to the forge on her own.

You tell Lydia to go to the Bannered Mare and wait. She descends the steps, crosses the market, pushes through the inn door, and settles into a seat by the fire. But you change your mind halfway — "Actually, stop. Come back." She cancels the task and turns around. "Forget that. Run to the stables instead." She takes off at full sprint.

Hours later, the sun touches the mountains. You reach the Western Watchtower. Jenassa is already there — sitting by the wall, calm. She arrived early. The meeting is live. You discuss the plan, scout the area, and when you're done, you walk away. The meeting ends naturally — no timer, no script, just proximity. She heads off on her own.

That evening, you push through the door of the Bannered Mare. Balgruuf is there — the message reached him, and he kept his scheduled appointment. He remembers the dragon warning. He knows Farengar carried it.

But something else happened while you were at the watchtower. On the road back, you crossed paths with Adrianne — she was heading to Falkreath to sell swords, minding her own business. You stopped and chatted. She had no idea you'd be there. Neither did you. The Dungeon Master placed that encounter because it fit the moment.

And later that night, sitting in the inn, a warrior you'd wronged three days ago tracked you down. He snuck through the door, drew his blade, and attacked. You beat him — he yielded, dropped to his knees, and begged for mercy. He told you someone sent him. Someone you thought was a friend. That fact is now in his bio. And in yours.

Tomorrow, things get more complex. You tell a guard: "Go get Ysolda after sunrise." The fetch is scheduled for morning — the guard stays at his post until dawn, then departs. Meanwhile, two NPCs at the market start arguing about something that happened yesterday — the Dungeon Master decided it was time. You overhear it. Both of them remember it differently.

Five NPCs are acting simultaneously. Ten more tasks are queued for the future. Stories are unfolding that you didn't start. The world doesn't wait for you to do everything yourself.

This is IntelEngine.

IntelEngine is an NPC autonomy framework for SkyrimNet. Where SkyrimNet gives NPCs the ability to think and speak through AI, IntelEngine gives them the ability to act — physically, across the game world, on their own two feet. Both on your command and on their own initiative.

Through natural conversation, any NPC can:

• Schedule meetings, fetches, and deliveries for any future time — "at sunset", "tomorrow morning", "in three hours"
• Travel to named locations, relative directions, or anywhere the game world has a door
• Fetch people and escort them back to you on foot
• Deliver messages to anyone — with optional meeting requests that schedule the recipient to travel
• Search for someone alongside you, traveling together

Without any player input, NPCs autonomously:

• Seek you out over unfinished business, old friendships, or something they overheard
• Share gossip traced to real events, spreading through chains of up to 10 people
• Ambush you for real grudges — with stealth approach, combat, and a yield system
• Secretly follow you out of obsession until caught
• Deliver messages from NPCs who can't come themselves
• Offer quests — bounty hunts, rescue missions, item retrieval, and faction war battles
• Interact with each other independently — arguments, deals, whispered conspiracies

A living political system where 9 factions (configurable) scheme, trade, and wage war:

• Political DM generates events every 6 game hours — trade deals, espionage, border skirmishes, assassinations, war declarations, and surrenders
• Player standing with each faction rises and falls based on your actions — fight for a faction, betray them, commit crimes in their territory
• Faction wars with morale, army strength, off-screen battles, and player-present battles with 5 waves of spawned soldiers (22 per side)
• Faction quests — when your standing is 20+ with a faction, they call on you for combat missions, rescue operations, and full-scale battles that affect war outcomes
• Political awareness — NPCs know about recent political events and react to them in conversation
• Prisma UI dashboard with a Politics tab showing all faction relations, active wars, and player standings

No teleportation. No console commands. No hardcoded location lists. IntelEngine dynamically indexes every actor and location across every cell in the game — every inn, every home, every NPC is discoverable because the index is built from your actual load order.

The ability to coordinate NPCs across time is what sets IntelEngine apart. You don't just dispatch NPCs on errands right now — you plan ahead, and the world follows through.

"Meet me at the Bannered Mare at sunset." "See you at Dragonsreach tomorrow morning." "Let's meet at the Western Watchtower in three hours."

NPCs understand natural time expressions:

Early departure — NPCs calculate travel time based on distance and depart early enough to arrive before the scheduled hour. A meeting at the Western Watchtower means leaving Whiterun well before sunset — the system estimates the walk and builds in a buffer.

Natural arrival — The NPC waits at the meeting point, idling naturally — sitting, leaning, looking around. When you arrive, the meeting is live. Walk away, and it ends. No arbitrary timer. No "press E to end meeting." Just proximity.

No-shows are remembered. If you never arrive, the NPC waits until their patience runs out (configurable, default 3 game hours), then leaves. They remember you didn't show — and it colors future interactions differently than a meeting that went well.

Lateness is tracked. The NPC knows if they arrived late (pathfinding trouble, long distance). You know if the player was late. The meeting outcome — success, late arrival, or no-show — persists in the NPC's memory.

"Go get Ysolda after sunset." "Bring me Nazeem tomorrow morning."

The NPC stays where they are now. When the departure window arrives, they travel to the target, escort them back to you on foot, and the fetched person lingers nearby until you walk away.

"Tell Adrianne after sunset that the shipment is ready." "Send word to Jarl Balgruuf tomorrow morning."

A message delivered at the right time. If the message includes a meeting request — "tell him to meet me at Dragonsreach tonight" — the recipient is also scheduled to travel there.

Up to 10 tasks can be scheduled simultaneously across all NPCs.

"Go to the Bannered Mare." "Head upstairs." "Wait outside." "Leave."

Send any NPC to a destination right now. The location resolver understands:

• Named places — Whiterun, Dragonsreach, Bannered Mare, the Drunken Huntsman
• Relative directions — upstairs, downstairs, outside, inside, the back room
• Fuzzy matching — typos and partial names still resolve ("Bannred Mare" finds the Bannered Mare)
• Contextual resolution — "go upstairs" scans doors by Z-axis, "go outside" identifies exterior doors

Three travel speeds — walk, jog, or run — chosen based on urgency. New tasks automatically replace the current one — you don't need to cancel before redirecting, just speak and the NPC adapts.

"Go get Adrianne and bring her here." "Fetch Nazeem."

The NPC walks to the target — anywhere in Skyrim — has a brief exchange, and escorts them back on foot. Ask someone in Whiterun to fetch an NPC living in Riverwood, and they'll walk the road, find them, and walk back together. The target doesn't need to be nearby, loaded, or even in the same hold. IntelEngine's C++ NPC index locates actors across the entire game world, including unloaded cells.

When they arrive, the fetched person lingers naturally — sitting on furniture, leaning against walls, idling in place. They behave like someone who was asked to come over, not a mannequin planted in front of you. They stay as long as you're nearby. Walk away, and they return to their routine.

NPC names are matched with typo tolerance — Levenshtein distance matching means "Adiranne" still finds Adrianne. Failed searches return suggestions.

"Tell Jarl Balgruuf about the dragon sighting." "Warn Adrianne that trouble is coming." "Go tell Alvor to meet me at the Bannered Mare in two hours."

The NPC carries your words to the recipient face-to-face — across any distance. Send a messenger from Solitude to Riften, and they'll make the journey. The recipient remembers what was said, who sent it, and who carried it — information that persists in their character context for future conversations.

If the message includes a meeting request, the recipient is automatically scheduled to travel there at the specified time. One command chains a delivery into a meeting.

Messengers optionally report back to you after delivery (configurable via MCM).

"Take me to Ysolda." "Help me find Nazeem."

Unlike Fetch — where the NPC goes alone — Search means you travel together. The NPC leads, you follow. If you fall behind, they pause and wait for you to catch up before continuing.

"Hurry up." / "Run!" / "Pick up the pace." "Slow down." / "Walk." / "No rush."

Adjust an NPC's travel pace on the fly — walk, jog, or run — without interrupting their current task.

"Stop." / "Wait." / "Hold on." / "Come back."

Immediately halts the NPC's current active task. Scheduled tasks are unaffected — those still fire at their appointed time.

IntelEngine does not use static location lists or hardcoded cell names. On game load, the native C++ SKSE plugin dynamically indexes every actor and every location across all loaded cells in your game — including mod-added content. Every inn, home, dungeon, shop, and NPC is discoverable because the index is built from your actual load order at runtime. If a mod adds a new tavern to Whiterun, IntelEngine can dispatch NPCs there.

Every task in IntelEngine works across the entire game world. Send an NPC from Riverwood to Riften. Schedule a meeting in Solitude while you're standing in Windhelm. Dispatch a messenger from Whiterun to deliver words to someone in Markarth. NPCs navigate using Skyrim's native AI pathfinding — they walk through doors, cross cell boundaries, traverse the open world between holds, and arrive at their destination on foot. The game engine handles the routing. IntelEngine provides the destination and the intent. There is no range limit.

The destination resolver processes spatial language beyond named locations:

Note: Upstairs/downstairs resolution relies on door Z-axis positions, which Skyrim's cell design doesn't always make reliable — some interiors place doors at unexpected heights or use single-level layouts with misleading geometry. Named locations and exterior/interior directions are consistently accurate.

Skyrim's pathfinding sometimes fails — doors won't open, navmesh gaps block the path, or geometry traps an NPC. IntelEngine monitors positions continuously through native C++ polling and responds with escalating recovery:

1. Soft recovery — re-evaluates AI packages, giving the engine another chance
2. Progressive teleport — nudges the NPC incrementally toward their destination, with decreasing distances on each attempt
3. Safety timeout — force-completes the task after extended time to prevent permanent soft-locks in unloaded cells

Locked doors are a common edge case — an NPC dispatched to fetch someone at night may find their target behind a locked home door. When the NPC can't reach the target and gets stuck at the entrance, the stuck detection system catches the stall, escalates through recovery, and if all else fails, narrates the failure so the NPC doesn't silently hang forever.

When an NPC is supposed to leave a location, IntelEngine verifies they actually moved from their starting position. If they're immobilized — locked door, blocked path, obstructed AI — recovery escalates before the task is abandoned.

IntelEngine injects six SkyrimNet awareness prompts into every NPC's character bio. These render live game state as natural-language context the AI sees on every dialogue cycle. NPCs don't just execute tasks — they know what they've done, what they're doing, and what they've committed to.

NPCs know their current task — "traveling to Dragonsreach", "delivering a message to Nazeem", "returning with Adrianne" — and maintain a timestamped history of completed tasks. "I fetched Ysolda earlier today. Delivered a message to the Jarl yesterday."

NPCs know their commitments — "I'm meeting someone at the Bannered Mare this evening" — and how long until departure. Active meetings, pending schedules, and en-route status are all visible to the NPC's AI.

NPCs remember how meetings went. Did the player show up on time? Late? Not at all? Was the NPC themselves delayed? These outcomes persist — a no-show is a different memory than a successful rendezvous, and NPCs can reference either in future conversations.

When a message is delivered, the recipient retains who sent it, who carried it, what it said, and when it arrived. This information stays in their character context so they can react naturally — "Farengar told me about the dragon sighting. That was your warning?"

Everything the NPC learned through story events — gossip heard, ambush outcomes, stalker catches, quest results. Displayed with natural time references: "just now", "earlier today", "a few days ago." Facts expire over time, so recent events feel vivid while old news fades.

Both rumors the NPC has heard (and from whom) and rumors they've shared (and to whom). Creates a visible web of social information — "Ysolda told me that Nazeem was seen lurking near the warehouse."

• 5 simultaneous active tasks — five NPCs traveling, fetching, or delivering at the same time, each tracked independently
• 10 scheduled tasks — queued for future execution across all NPCs
• Save/load safe — active and scheduled tasks survive saving and reloading; AI packages are reconstructed on game load
• Independent recovery — each task slot has its own stuck detection, departure verification, and deadline tracking
• Follower-aware — follower NPCs are temporarily released for task execution and restored to your service when they return

Three pages in the SkyUI Mod Configuration Menu:

Real-time view of all 5 task slots — what each NPC is doing, where, and current status. Clear individual tasks or reset everything.

View all pending scheduled tasks with times and targets. Cancel individually or clear all.

When the optional PrismaUI SKSE plugin is installed, IntelEngine provides a real-time overlay dashboard accessible via hotkey (default: Shift+7). The dashboard is a React web UI rendered in-game with full mouse/keyboard interaction.

Tasks — Live view of all active and scheduled tasks. Cancel individual tasks, see agent names, destinations, task types, speeds, and scheduled meeting timing ("in ~3h", "very soon", "overdue").

Story Engine — Toggle the Story Engine and individual story types on/off. See the active dispatch, next DM check-in timer, NPC social activity, active quests, and a log of recent NPC-to-NPC interactions.

Director — Manual Dungeon Master controls. Dispatch any story type to any NPC with full parameter fields (informant gossip, quest locations, message content, etc.). Execute any of the 10 player-driven actions directly on loaded NPCs with guided field hints and required-field validation.

Active Packages — See which NPCs are currently running IntelEngine AI packages (travel, sandbox, stalk). Remove packages from stuck NPCs directly.

Settings — Full parity with the MCM. Every setting has a description hint. Includes plugin configuration (blocklists, LLM overrides, dashboard hotkey) read from settings.yaml.

The dashboard communicates through a C++ bridge: JavaScript events are routed to Papyrus via pendingParams (thread-safe std::unordered_map with mutex) and ModEvents. All JSON is built in C++ using nlohmann::json for proper escaping. Papyrus reads the dashboard state from live quest properties and pushes comprehensive JSON snapshots to the frontend.

PrismaUI is entirely optional — IntelEngine works identically without it. The MCM provides the same configuration capabilities.

IntelEngine operates as two tightly integrated layers, with a third connecting it to SkyrimNet's AI:

SKSE Native Plugin (C++) — high-performance backend that runs outside Papyrus:

• Dynamic world indexing — scans all cells and actors on game load, building searchable indexes from your actual load order rather than static lists
• Location resolution — unified resolver handling named locations, semantic terms, fuzzy matching, and spatial analysis (door scanning, Z-axis direction, furniture detection)
• NPC search — name matching with Levenshtein distance tolerance, partial matching, and suggestion fallback
• Time parsing — natural language to game-hour conversion for scheduling
• Stuck & departure detection — native position polling at engine speed, independent per task slot
• Cell analysis — door enumeration, exterior/interior classification, directional scanning
• Dashboard bridge — PrismaUI integration with thread-safe C++/Papyrus event routing and JSON state serialization

Papyrus Scripts — game engine integration:

• AI package management (travel, sandbox, and escort packages at three speed tiers)
• Slot-based task state machine with dual persistence (runtime arrays + StorageUtil)
• Schedule monitoring with distance-based early departure calculation
• Save/load recovery with full package and linked-ref reconstruction
• MCM management interface

SkyrimNet External Bundle — IntelEngine's 11 AI-selectable actions, three category containers, four custom LLM prompts, and seven character-bio submodules ship under SKSE/Plugins/SkyrimNet/external/galanx.intelengine/. Action identities and Papyrus entry points remain unchanged.

SkyrimNet Plugin Configuration — IntelEngine's LLM variant, settings schema, generated settings.yaml, and user-editable factions.yaml remain under SKSE/Plugins/SkyrimNet/config/plugins/IntelEngine/. This configuration path is separate from the Beta 25 external content bundle.

The Story Engine is Part 2 of IntelEngine. Every few in-game hours, an LLM Dungeon Master observes the full world state — your location, time of day, NPC memories and relationships — and decides if something should happen. No random dice rolls. Every event is grounded in the actual history of your playthrough.

Nine story types, each individually toggleable via MCM:

• Seek Player — NPCs travel to find you because of unfinished business, old friendships, or something they overheard. Forgotten friends don't stay forgotten — NPCs you haven't seen in a while are more likely to come looking.
• Informant — NPCs approach with real gossip traced to actual game events. The chain of who told whom is tracked.
• Road Encounter — You cross paths with NPCs traveling on their own business. Exterior only. They have their own destination.
• Ambush — Hostile NPCs with real grudges stalk and attack you. Stealth or charge variants. Beat them and they yield — talk, kill, or walk away.
• Stalker — Romantically obsessed NPCs secretly follow you until caught. No combat — the emotional confrontation is the payoff.
• Message — Couriers deliver verbal messages from NPCs who can't come themselves, with optional meeting invitations that schedule the sender.
• Quest: Combat — NPCs ask you to clear enemies from a location. Guide option (they jog with you) or go alone with a map marker. Bandits, draugr, or dragons.
• Quest: Rescue — NPCs plead for help rescuing someone who's been taken. The victim is pre-placed deep inside the dungeon before you enter — restrained in prisoner furniture when available, or found injured in the boss room. The compass guides you through the dungeon to them.
• Quest: Find Item — NPCs send you to retrieve a specific item from a dungeon. A quest chest is placed at the boss room with a guardian enemy. The compass points directly at the chest.
• NPC Interaction — Two NPCs interact independently of you. Arguments, deals, training, whispered conspiracies. Happens whether you're watching or not.
• NPC Gossip — Rumors spread through chains of up to 10 people. Information travels realistically through the world.

Every event injects facts into NPC bios that persist and influence all future dialogue. The Dungeon Master uses anti-repetition, type balancing, and per-NPC cooldowns to keep stories varied and meaningful.

IntelEngine is under active development. The following features are planned for future releases:

• Eliminate Target — dispatch an NPC to kill a specific person. Assassinations, bounty hunting, or settling grudges — carried out autonomously across the world.
• Lockpick Door — send an NPC to pick a locked door, gaining access to restricted areas without doing the dirty work yourself.
• Steal Item — task an NPC with stealing something from someone's inventory or home. Risk and reward — their skill determines success.

Warning: Overlapping SkyrimNet actions from other mods will cause conflicts.

SkyrimNet presents ALL registered actions to its AI when choosing what an NPC should do. If another mod provides its own travel, fetch, or cancel actions, the AI will see duplicate options — for example, two different "go to location" actions. It may pick IntelEngine's travel but the other mod's cancel, which won't work because each mod's cancel only affects its own tasks.

If you use another SkyrimNet mod that provides similar actions (travel, fetch, deliver, cancel, etc.), you must disable the overlapping actions in either IntelEngine or the other mod. Each action YAML has an enabled: true/false flag — set conflicting actions to enabled: false in whichever mod you want to defer.

SkyrimNet Beta 25 / IntelEngine 3.5.1 migration: IntelEngine content now loads from external plugin id galanx.intelengine. After upgrading, review its enablement and priority in SkyrimNet. Existing action names are unchanged, so per-action settings retain their keys, but should still be reviewed after the content-layer migration. Do not move or delete config/plugins/IntelEngine; it continues to own IntelEngine settings and faction configuration.

• Skyrim Special Edition / Skyrim VR
• SKSE
• SkyrimNet Beta 25 or newer
• SkyUI (MCM)
• PapyrusUtil (persistent storage)
• powerofthree's Papyrus Extender (package management, linked refs)
• Papyrus MessageBox (confirmation prompts)

• PrismaUI — in-game overlay framework. Enables the real-time dashboard with task monitoring, story engine controls, director mode, and full settings management. IntelEngine works without it — you just won't have the overlay.

IntelEngine turns Skyrim's people from scenery into agents — NPCs who keep appointments, carry your words, fetch who you need, and remember what happened. And with the Dungeon Master, they also act on their own — seeking you out, settling grudges, spreading gossip, sending you on rescue missions deep into dungeons, and living their own lives whether you're watching or not. The world doesn't wait for you anymore.