Halfling woman in Tarant station breaks the game

There is a weird behavior, most probably a bug, with the pickpocketing halfling woman in the Tarant railroad station. As you know, when you pass through the station or in front of it at a close distance, she will rush to you to pickpocket. Usually I run away from her and at some distance she will stop following you.
What I've seen happening are two illogical things:
She may turn hostile out of the blue.
The guards near the station may turn hostile while I am running away from her.

Have you encountered this? And what can be done to avoid this, because this can ruin an ironman run (the guards are very tough for a low level character)

 

I've never encountered it. In terms of avoiding it, I'd just let her rob you. She only does it once and I've never noticed her take anything valuable (I think it's just a small amount of money she takes).

 

Another strange thing I have came across, attacking zombies from a distance in Ashbury cemetery (before they attack you) may turn a love light, who is also inside the cemetry, hostile

 

They're probably just classed as the same faction. Are you using the high res patch? If so that's maybe why you can attack from a distance the devs never intended someone to shoot from and so get hostility off the love light.

 

Yes, I'm using the high resolution patch, but only to fill the black areas on the sides of my wide screen display, keeping the vertical resolution original (600 pixels)

 

She can pickpocket you multiple times and each time she takes 100 gold. If you use the train regularly this is not to be ignored.

 

Money is easy enough to make in Arcanum, just traveling in the wilderness usually gives you at least one fight with a ruffian/dark individual who's stuff sells for several hundred gold - more than enough to offset this (going from Shrouded Hills to Tarant I've easily had 5+ encounters of this type in one trip on several occasions during recent playthroughs). If you complete the BMC mines and sell all of the scrolls of Sense Invisible to a magick vendor then you have 10000+ gold right there. Dungeon delving is another very easy way to make money (the Tarant old sewer has a lot of decent stuff and you don't have to make a particularly hard effort to get there), and a bunch of tech items sell for far more than the worth of their components. Knowing the right vendor for certain equipment is also worth consideration, for example the tech dwarf smith in Tarant will buy most hexed magick items while the magick smith will not and you can sell things like the grenades you find at the crash site to the firearms store for a lot of money - all a lot more profitable than selling them to a junk dealer.

With all this in mind, yes I think you can completely ignore her and in real terms it is a small amount of money. Further, I think for a good portion of the game you can use the ships to get around for only 25 gold extra (mid-game they say the train is ruining their customer base, but early game it's fine, and late game something often happens to open them up again) - and I strongly suspect that your level determines whether or not the halfling pickpockets you, as I very rarely am pickpocketed more than once. In terms of things that are a big deal within the game, this isn't one of them, even whilst ironmanning as you say. If you can't do a lot of the combat mentioned, then you probably need to rethink your character as the BMC mines are a lot harder than these wilderness encounters or minor dungeon delving.

 

I agree in long term money is not an issue, just in the beginning, up to BMC. Given the difficulty of BMC, I try not to get there until I am level 25-30.

 

Personally, I would find the thought of this halfling getting away with taking my money maddening enough to find a way to put an end to it. I've never heard of this bug either, sadly. Outside of making sure you're running the patched version of the game I don't know what to tell you.

 

The Vermillion station halfling woman struck again today. I was returning from Ashbury by train, equipped with the machined plate looted from Willenbecker, and when passing through the station the woman ran towards me, then suddenly ran away from me screaming while the two guards in front of the station charged me. I escaped by running.

 

Yeah that halfling is a pain. I always join the theives guild for the sole purpose of stopping her antics.