Side quests, a la Orc expansion

I've pretty much got these figured out, but how do I save the location of every little critter and item? Do I really need to make a variable for everything there (like quests and triggers) and then simply save each possible change? Because that seems like it's too much work, and there should be a better/faster way.

You can make use of an array variable.

then make a loop or something to store every critter/item in the variable.

Yeah, that's what I've been using. But it still takes a lot of time, and it slows loading.