A lot of times up to now, a random party member will completely disappear, suddenly, without any warning or even event (like speech). It has occured to me many times, at completely random areas and times. Even during battle, sometimes. I was thinking that they maybe died very quickly, but this is not the case, since i am playing in normal (no permanent death). Also, saving game is not very accurate, because the party member portraits are not in the order i arranged them, just 1 second before saving. Problem is, those npcs disappear completely and entirely without any apparent reason!

I am aware that this game is both old and pretty buggy; i encountered the solaufein bug before, which was a potential gamestopper, but thankfully found the console command to trigger his dialogue properly. But i cannot aford to loose party members, especially those that are npcs and not of my own creation.

Does anyone know what causes the disappearance of npcs from party, if and how you can retrieve them?

Are you playing multiplayer with someone else or just creating your own party members and playing solo? If the latter, save the game, then copy the save file from 'mpsave' into your 'save' folder and fire it up as a single player game. I don't know if this will fix your issue, but this is what I've always done and never had this problem that you're having.

As well, are you using any mods? If so, which ones? If it's TUTU or BGT, post your Weidu log and someone may be able to see something in there.

No mods. Never. I play multi with half the group of my own creation, solo. Copying the save from multi to single, and after arrangement sending it back to multi, solved my little problem though. At least for the time being. Thanks!