Force Notepad++ to always encode with UTF-8 by default while explicitely NOT using BOM?

[John Bilicki III]

Many higher ranged UTF-8 characters are not being displayed correctly in spite of the global font override because Notepad++ uses ANSI encoding by default.

How do I force Notepad++'s preference for ANSI to UTF-8?

NO - Absolutely no BOM (Bye Order Mark).

If I have to I’d be happy to use an extension. I found nothing in the options except what to save a file as.