A few thoughts

[Gangrenous]

Designing custom goes pretty slow. Once issue I am seeing today, unless I am missing a design tool, is appearance. Sure you can do a /spawn set and increment something like hair but it takes forever, plus, we have no real recording of possibilities. It would be nice to have something like /spawn appearance hair_style up / down

Doing it like an up/down would allow someone to set a social and click through possibilities. Is there some flaw in this approach?

[Gangrenous]

And it could be way too much to tackle at this point. Another approach would be able to randomize and NPC and have those features saved. I know there is a way to randomize an NPC on spawn, but those features do not survive a reboot do they?

I am just thinking of ways to speed up world building. Doing zones with hundreds of NPC's would take forever with the lack of tools we have, but if the command line were more robust we could just use tons of socials on world building. I would imagine if we could randomize an NPC's with a single click and then maybe cycle through things like hair color and do a /spawn save that would be damn near perfect.

I know that because of the appearances table this could be hard to accomplish, more than one row.

[Jabantiz]

There is NPC randomization but you are correct that every time the spawn respawns it could be different, you should be able to do /spawn details to get the current and copy that info if you wanted though. I have no clue how spawn random works as I have never used it and have never even looked at the code for it so I can't be to much help on that subject.

The problem with hair is that not all races can use all the hair options so a list would need to be generated for every possible combination, not to mention that the aerakyn race has different bodies/heads based on the hair and horns, that race alone would cause the list to explode. There is the barber shop window in game that would probably make every thing easier as the client should already limit every think and it should also give you a randomize all button, in theory we might be able to hook it up to use on NPC's that are a playable race and save their info, I would think a visual editor would be better then commands any way. As far as I know no one has actually worked with that packet yet though.

[Gangrenous]

Well for the time being I am doing screenshots for the hair styles on my wiki, it is a start. I have no idea how to handle something like this, as you said the combinations vary greatly for each race.