David Brasher

That is quite a long list of things to edit. I suggest that you do something simple for your first mod. I have built and uploaded a fair number of mods and I even now I don't know if I would dare attempt a project like you are thinking of. Maybe you should try building a small dungeon full of zombies. Or make a small army of zombies attack a village. Or build a house mod with zombies in the basement. Or build a perk mod with perks to help you fight the undead. Any little project like that would help you gain experience and figure out what is doable and what is easy and what kind of things you have the time, skill, and patience for.

Topic necromancy FTW! (I have learned a few things in the four months since this thread died.) In order to make certain types of edits to faces show up in the game, you have to perform a procedure somewhat like this one: (1) You .esmify the .esp in Wrye Bash and then load it in the CK. (2) You select all the actors added by the mod. (3) You press CTRL + F4 to export facegen data. (It takes awhile.) (4) You .espify the mod again using Wrye Bash.

It sounds like the distant LOD for the ground in those provinces is present. but the ground is not. (Perhaps they molded this ground, generated the distant LOD for it, and then deleted the ground to reduce file size?) It would be possible to rebuild the ground to cover up the distant LOD meshes. (Alternately, it would be possible to build ground the way you wanted it and then generate new distant LOD meshes to match more accurately.) It would be a very large job, but the land could be contoured and textured, and cluttered. Then things like critters and dungeons and villages and quests could be built. It would be a very large job, but I think some mod teams are already working on some projects like this.

Follower quest-coding dialog is only available for certain voice types. Examine the existing vanilla Skyrim housecarls, hirelings, and followers to see which ones are available. I think the only creature follower available is a dog. (You could have your mudcrab bark like a dog!) If the voicetype you want is not available, you could write a new quest and dialog infos and scripting and record new dialog or copy existing dialog that is being used for different functions. Just look at and manually rebuild another setup like the existing ones. To make a new race and not have it be invisible, after you save your new race, you have to go back and set which armor race it uses. (If you made a new mudcrab race, then you will have it copy the mudcrab armor race after you have saved and exited and reentered.)

I haven't really worked with Skyrim dungeons yet, and don't know the terminology and the specifics, but there are these zones that are loaded up so that other zones are are not loaded up at the same time and performance is thereby increased. These are large cubes. I think they are blue. If you copy a dungeon and then don't move or replace these zones so that they are in the right places, then you will have invisible objects because the computer thinks they are unneeded at the moment.

The biggest trap I have found in quest building is that if you mess up one single alias, then the whole quest is broken -- there will be no quest dialog available ever. Rather than rebuilding your whole quest, with or without the old copy to refer to, just set some of your aliases to optional, or delete them. repeat as necessary. When you find the bad alias and make it optional or delete it, the dialog in the quest will work just fine again. You can then figure out how to rebuild this small portion of your quest rather than the whole thing.

To make new armor that is shaped differently then that in the game, you don't actually use the CK until the very end of the process after the hard work is done. To make new armor models, you use a tool like Blender. You make new textures with a tool like Gimp. You set up your models and textures for Skyrim with NifSkope.

If you always play in offline mod to save processor power and reduce spam, you will need to log on to Steam long enough for the download to occur before going back to offline mode.

The way the Oblivion mods worked was that the summoned creatures would be resurrected and moved from their holding cell to the player's position. The same creatures would be reused over and over so that if the mod let you summon eight creatures at once, there would be eight persistent references added to the savegame bloat rather than an additional eight persistent references added each and every time the spell was cast. ( 8 < 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + ...)

I don't like seeing bandits in glass armor. That is one aspect of Skyrim that they did right.

I would say that this is not really possible with the current way that CK is set up. It would be really nice if you could make multiple edits in one fell swoop, but that is not the way they built it. This is not really a modding request. It is more of a programming request. If the task was possible, it would probably be done by writing a new program that can act on .esp files. Kind of like writing a program like Wrye Bash or TESVEdit.

How does Skyrim handle PlaceAtMe and potential savegame bloat? In Oblivion, multiple summon spells used MoveTo Player instead of PlaceAtMe because of this issue. But it may be that the architecture of Skyrim is better in this respect and does not have this problem.

Connect your door from the outside world to your interior. Then Navmesh the inside of your house and finalize it. Then Navmesh the exterior cell your house resides in and finalize it. (Watch for those green triangles.) Elsewise thy companions will follow thee not and there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Morrowind was awesome! I just loved levitating. It was sort of unfair, because the enemies didn't levitate, and very few of them could fly, but oh it was fun! The spell "Jump" was great fun too. I once got a grand soul gem with a Golden Saint soul and enchanted a ring so that I could jump halfway across Vvardenfell in five jumps. (It took a lot of experimentation to get it right.)

It sounds like you have been playing Fallout 3 an awful lot. In that game, if you shoot someone in the chest or head and kill them, an arm or leg is likely to fly off. I am not really sure if this idea is lore friendly or realistic. I do not know if anyone in history has been decapitated by an arrow. Often a headsman with an aimed blow and a heavy axe had to hit two or three times to get the head separated from the body. This was rather unpleasant. Noble or royal people who were being executed sometimes had the privilege of being executed by a highly-skilled swordsman who would sharpen his sword before each execution and who could always strike the head off in one blow. The guillotine was such a remarkable and humane invention because it could always provide a swift and sure decapitation in a single strike. In the days of sailing ships, there was a type of arrow which was a rigging cutter. Its tip could straddle and sever a rope holding a sail if aimed well. But in order to use such a tip to sever a human head, you would need a massive tip on a massive bolt on a siege engine the size of a ballista.

There is a problem with Skyrim where voiced dialog in the form of .wav and .lip files will sometimes not play on random computers. It is not known how to predict which computers these will be. The solution is to convert the .wav and .lip files into .fuz files like vanilla Skyrim uses. Download and use this utility: Unfuzer

The alchemy system is totally different than the crafting system. The alchemy system is very old and has been around at least since Morrowind. Potion effects result from using two ingredients that have the same effect, and the strength varies according to your skill at alchemy. The crafting system is brand new for Skyrim and was not in Oblivion or earlier games. With this system, you make a recipe with whatever ingredients you please, and specify whether you use a cook pot or or forge or whatever. For the potions like you describe which come in a predetermined strength, you could make a crafting recipe and brew your potion in a cookpot or on an enchanting table, but that would look funny. Maybe you could make a custom object in the CK that is cook pot which uses an alchemy station model.

Some meshes have a shorter viewing distance than others. The designers did not expect that people would view interior meshes from any great distance, because in the base game that would be impossible. So if the meshes pop in and out in your large interior space, here are some options: (1) Increase fog and darkness. (2) Use different meshes than the ones that pop in and out. (3) Change the floorplan so that things obstruct the long views you are having issues with. (So that you can't see beyond the draw distance of these objects.)

I wish that Oblivion and Skyrim had been mainly unvoiced like Morrowind. The existence of voiced dialog and the expectation that people will use it really sort of ruins quest-modding for Skyrim.

If a particular mod won't install and work with the mod manager, you might try installing it manually.

Disable is a very good console command to use. It really does not matter if the object is still there. If an item is invisible and untouchable, then for all intents and purposes, it is destroyed and will never bother you again.

The objects get placed in random and nonsensical directories in the object window according to what the directory structure with your .nif files in it is set up like. If you want the directories to make sense, you will need to put your new meshes very close to the old and similar ones. Like if you make an armor mod, you will want to put your meshes into the Skyrim "armor" folder. At a certain level you will be able to have your own folder within their folders without ill effects. It may take you several attempts by trial and error to get your object in the lists where you want it and where it looks good. (Not sure if I answered the right question. I could not understand exactly what you were asking.)

After having played Skyrim for awhile and seen its good points as well as its other points, do you want to buy Dawnguard when it comes out?

This sounds very difficult and the slightest error ruins the whole quest. Is there any documentation anywhere explaining exactly how to set the load order of a long list of aliases?

Some other parts of the CK do not provide arrow buttons for adjusting position of items on a list. I would dearly love to see arrows for adjusting the order of dialog infos within quests and for adjusting the order of items on a leveled list. So why is the alias list blessed with arrow buttons? Does this mean that the order the aliases come in is important and needs to be set up a certain way?