How do I do the Khajiit Dawnstar chest loop if the two Khajiits from the trading caravan are dead?

Question

I'm playing Skyrim on PC, and am trying to do the Khajiit Dawnstar chest loop. This can be done by heading to Dawnstar. Go over by the mine and look for some rocks to the left of it. Go by those rocks and crouch until you see "search chest"—the chest is invisible. It contains the complete inventory of the Khajiit vendors outside of Dawnstar.

If you take everything, you can head over to the vendor, save (or quicksave), hit her, then instantly reload your save and head over to the chest. Everything should refill, and you can do this over and over.

But for the Dark Brotherhood's quest line, I've already killed the two Khajiits from the trading caravan in Dawnstar. Now they don't spawn in Dawnstar anymore; their bodies are still on the floor.

Is there some way to still do the chest loop?

Answer 1

Since my suggestions in the comments seemed to have fixed the problem, I'll make it an answer.

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Using the resurrect command from the console on PC can fix this. A full list of console commands can be found on The Elder Scrolls Wiki.

To summarize the needed info though, to resurrect them:

• use the ` key to open the console,
• then type resurrect <idnumber>, where the <idnumber> is the ID number of the NPC you are trying to resurrect.

Alternatively, you can just click on the body with the mouse when the console is open (make sure the body is selected and not something else), then just type resurrect and push Enter.

Answer 2

If you cannot use resurrect or do not want to risk it, you can wait two (in-game) days with the wait command, and the chest will respawn. Merchant chests are operated by factions, not individuals, so the death of all the traders will not prevent the chest from respawning normally.

This also means that you can give other NPCs the ability to buy and sell items from this chest, if they have a compatible voice type (i.e. if they have voiced dialog for buying and selling things in general), just by adding them to the faction which works the chest (plus the faction JobMerchantFaction, if they are not already a merchant) and bringing them to the same general area as the vanilla vendors hang out in. The game will automagically figure it out from there. This is normally done through the Creation Kit, but in principle, all of the required steps can be done with the console. That's probably not a great idea for game stability, of course, but it's a neat trick.