Resident schedules

The game's people keep hours. A resident stands at one spot in the day and another at night, and some are seen only at one time. The dialogue page's residents are placed in a region's data with a day spot, a night spot, or one of the two, and this page is the rule that picks the spot the world shows at the clock's minute.

How it works

flowchart TD
  CLOCK["The world's clock, in minutes past midnight"] --> PERIOD{"From six to seven?"}
  PERIOD -->|"yes"| DAY["The day spot"]
  PERIOD -->|"no"| NIGHT["The night spot, or the day spot when none is kept"]
  PERIOD -->|"no, absent at night"| ABSENT["Absent"]
  DAY --> TARGET["The spot the clock gives, or absent"]
  NIGHT --> TARGET
  ABSENT --> TARGET
  TARGET --> SHOWN{"Different from the spot shown, and in view?"}
  SHOWN -->|"yes"| HELD["The spot shown holds"]
  SHOWN -->|"no"| MOVED["The spot the clock gives is shown"]

• Two spots by the hour. computeResidentSpot returns the day spot from six in the morning until seven at night and the night spot the rest of the day. A resident with no night spot keeps their day spot through the night, and is absent at night only when the data sets absentAtNight. A resident with no day spot is absent in the day, so is neither drawn nor offered as a talk then.
• Held while in view. computeShownResidentSpot keeps the spot a resident stands at while the spot the clock now gives differs and the resident is in view, and moves them once they are out of view. An absence is treated as a spot, so a resident who appears or disappears at the turn does so out of view too.
• Read each frame. useResidentSpots runs each frame in the world: it reads the clock's minute, tests each resident's ground point against the camera's frustum in world coordinates, and replaces its map of shown spots only when one changed. A resident is placed the first frame they are in the data, and one whose region leaves reach is dropped, so they are placed afresh on return.
• Consumers read the shown spot. The world screen's prompts list a resident at their shown spot, and the quest's navigation marker points at it, so a resident absent at this hour is neither a prompt nor a marker.

Where the residents come from

pnpm -C scripts genshin:assets residents writes the residents of each region the official map fitted to the scene into its region data, from the scene's NPC birth records. Each record is placed in the region of the nearest mapped point, carried into the region's own axes round Windrise's oak, and filed under the area of the nearest landmark. The NPC's name is the text id of its row in the game's NPC table, and its talk is the lowest-numbered talk the dialog table has it speak in. An NPC with no talk is left out, since the schema needs one.

flowchart TD
  BIRTH["The scene's NPC birth records"] --> REGION{"Within reach of a mapped point of a fitted region?"}
  REGION -->|"no"| OUT["Left out, counted"]
  REGION -->|"yes"| FIRST{"First record of this NPC in the region?"}
  FIRST -->|"no"| REPEAT["Left out, counted"]
  FIRST -->|"yes"| TALK{"The NPC has a name and a talk?"}
  TALK -->|"no"| SKIP["Left out, counted"]
  TALK -->|"yes"| DAY["A resident, its place the day spot"]
  DAY --> DATA["The region's residents in its data"]

The records give one place for most residents, so most have a day spot and no night spot, and stand at their day spot through the night. Most of the game's people stand in one place day and night, so absence is recorded only where the data says so, as absentAtNight. A resident the records place more than once in a region is the same NPC at nearly the same spot rather than a day and a night, so only its first place is kept. The wiki gives a resident's daytime and nighttime location as gallery pictures captioned by the hour, not as text naming a place, so no record is matched to a night spot from it.

Key files

Sources

• NPC, Genshin Impact Wiki: open-world residents with their daytime and nighttime locations.