kevkiev

Does that make the settler count go up? No, the created NPCs aren't settlers and have no effect on any settlement stats. They work just like a (non settlement-assigned) follower would but they, in essence, follow their associated settler beacon i.e. whoever/whatever is equipped with it. So if the beacon's in a container, they'll just stay close to that (again, ensure the container is non-respawning, like a container built in workshop mode). Or, you could equip the beacon on a settler via trade dialogue and they'll follow that NPC around.(e.g. a settler you've assigned to guard duty.) That's how I created 3-person provisioner caravans - by equipping provisioners with a couple beacons via trade dialogue. I also used the mod to create caravan guards for Trashcan Carla, by equipping her with beacons via console commands (using trade dialogue with merchants won't work since it only adds the beacons to their respawning trade inventory). The created NPCs are aligned with the player faction so will attack enemies of the player - though they're not super aggro and won't go running off to attack far away enemies. (And you can always add them to other factions via console commands.) There's a bunch of options so, for your purposes, just make sure that you check the box that makes them have their weapon out even when not in combat. (They need 1 round of ammo for the equipped weapon.) Note that I haven't played FO4 for a while, so I'm talking a relatively older version of the mod, but I can't imagine that any of the major features I've described have changed. If so, it'll be spelled out in the mod description. But it's an extremely well-made mod and I'd wager that, if changes have been made, they'll just be options that allow for more customization. Really one of my must-have mods as, imo, it really adds to immersion by letting the player bulk up the defences of vanilla and mod-added locations in a super-cool looking way. E.G. in addition to adding more guards by the Diamond City entrance, I equipped the various DC patrolling guards with beacons so the patrols are 2 people each. (Very handy if you have a mod that increases enemies in that area.) Although I massively increased the vanilla guards' health, and equipped them with high-level armor and weapons, via console commands to prevent them from dying since, if they do, I think the beacon would disappear when the game despawns the bodies. I trust that long-winded explanation gives a pretty good idea how the mod works.

The Create Followers mod would work. Just place the follower beacon in a non-respawning container where you want the guard to stand. I've used it to create provisioner guards (place the beacon on the provisioner and they'll follow), extra guards for the Diamond city entrance (beacon in nearby container) and other locations.

I've found tons of info on mods looking ok in the CK (or Nifskope) but not appearing in game. I didn't find anything on this, exact opposite, problem. I loaded up a mod I'd been working on all afternoon (and on and off the last few days), the main feature of which is replacer repaired roofs for the Sanctuary houses. (It's not my mod, I'm just taking it further.) This time, though, the render window showed all houses as the vanilla destroyed version. Surprisingly, everything was fine when I went in-game. As well, the CK (and the game) correctly showed various objects and decals that I'd disabled (er, correctly didn't show I guess). I tried the original mod, untouched by any of my edits, and got the same result. Same thing with a Red Rocket mod that uses a custom mesh (most of the building was invisible in the render window - just floating doors and other random objects), and a custom weapon mod (the preview window was completely blank). Didn't see any obvious problems in the CK ini files (file paths look ok etc.) I'm baffled. edit: fwiw, the meshes/textures are in ba2 format.

Hmmmn... maybe not so scary after all. Nice going into this with a bit more confidence. Well, once I get done with all the clutter/cleanup fiddly bits. Thanks for all your input!

That's all good info, thanks. And thanks for the advance permission, much appreciated! Next time (assuming there's a next time) I experience that reversion, I'll try the console thing. I actually hope that's it, 'cuz it would be a nice definitive answer. You know, I'm actually more worried about regenerating previs than the precombines. Especially for such a large area. I think RRTV's tutorial should get me through generating precombs, and your precombined data editor mod (if I'm understanding it correctly) should nicely clean up any spots that I'm overinclusive and end up duplicating precombines. (I'm already thinking that, especially having your precomb cleaner mod at hand, it would be better to err on the side of overinclusion.) But the previs... oh boy. RRTV's gave me some good insight into the subject, but with this large an area to cover I'm probably going to have to get more of a handle on things. However, based on your comment (which was worded fine) I gather that after doing the precombs for all cells, I determine the centres (i.e. the cells the game uses for previs like you said) of all the 3x3 grids the outer borders of which cover all cells for which precombs were generated. If the outer borders of those 3x3 previs grids go beyond the cells for which precombs were generated, that's fine. It probably couldn't be helped, really. As far as I can tell, the alternative would be to generate precombs for each cell of those 3x3 previs grids (i.e. 9 cells of generating precombs for every 1 cell of generating previs), even if those cells weren't touched by a mod, which my gut tells me isn't necessary (my gut being based on what I recall from RRTV's tutorial). Man, I hope that made sense. My head spins a bit thinking about this.

Damn... I had a feeling that all that sleep and other life stuff was just mucking things up. I've been a fool!

Thanks for all the comments. One of my biggest enemies is that I forget all the little shortcuts if I'm away from the CK for too long. The e-key shortcut deadbeetftffn mentioned for example. And thanks for the reminder of FO4Edit's cleaning function VlitS, I had actually discovered that accidentally ages ago when I overhauled Breezehome and deleted/replaced a bunch of objects that were part of the house upgrades. (Was for personal use, so I didn't really care if it was messy but still functional.) I stumbled upon that z-axis repositioning when I cleaned the esp in xEdit. Glad to hear that's still a thing with FO4/FO4 Edit (though I guess it stands to reason), and that it doesn't depend on whether or not the objects have been linked (e.g. the Breezehome upgrades and their relevant x-marker) - I wasn't sure about that. Totally off topic but, man, (re) learned how easily something gets baked into a save. Was almost finished the house-interior part of my Sanctuary cleanup when I went in-game to see what was what and one of the houses still had an HVAC that I'd disabled. Went back to a save just before leaving the vault and, voila, the HVAC unit was gone. We're talking the HVAC being baked-in by maybe the 2nd or 3rd save after that one. Ran into that same issue with my Breezehome mod. Not sure if I'll ever release this mod but, yup, I'm going to be really careful just in case I do. Maybe, although it'll be a mashup of 3 different mods - a Sanctuary cleanup, Killroyics Sanctuary bridge, and Jenn Cave's Red Rocket (I'll probably use an older version of the RR that just happens to use VlitS' RR mesh - haven't merged that part yet, but that's the plan anyways). Aside from permissions, I've always had a bit of a problem with the Sanctuary mod and don't want to publish something that's kinda quirky. That mod repairs all the roofs and cleans up some of the major garbage but, once every maybe 7 or so visits to Sanctuary, one (and only 1) of the 9 houses reverts to it's raggedy vanilla state. Have to quit and restart to fix it. Not sure if it's a mod conflict, a problem with the original mod, something weird in my current game, or a previs issue. But if I can get that working, find time to play long enough to make sure it is, and get all the relevant permissions, then yeah, I might publish it. I think there might be some other players who'd like something like that with all the previs/precombines fixed up.

Awright, good stuff. Thanks very much. Damn, missing the 3d Data tab was a total brain fart. I thought I'd clicked the left and right arrow to scan all the tabs, but apparently did only the right one so missed everything to the left. Yikes...

I'm editing a Sanctuary mod to disable some clutter before I regenerate precombines/previs. I'm seeing things in the CK that seem different than what I've seen in the FNV CK, with which I have way more experience (tho maybe that's not sayin' much) and I just wanna make sure I'm not screwing things up. Here's a couple screen shots from the CK so you know what I'm talking about: As an fyi, when editing objects I usually create new forms by editing the base id, so I can see my edits better in the CK and FO4Edit, so that's what I did for each instance of that ceiling lamp. (E.G. change to 00kevCeilingLamp01short, 00kev1CeilingLamp01short etc.) Probably irrelevant info but, anyways... My Q's: 1. After creating a new form, I disabled the object by checking off the "Initially Disabled" and "Hidden from Local Map" boxes, and unchecking the "Respawns" box. This seems to work, as the objects disappear in-game, but I don't recall dealing with the Respawns flag in the FNV CK (aside from NPCs) so I'm not sure whether I should be changing that flag or not. Does it matter? 2. Am I correct in thinking that initially disabling and hiding from local map is better practice than simply deleting the object? 2. I expected to see x, y and z coordinates, as I was planning to also change the z # to move the objects under the ground but, as shown in the images, there are none. Again, the objects don't appear in game by initially disabling and hiding from map, so I don't think that matters. (I actually seem to recall seeing certain objects like that in the FONV CK.) Is there anything special about objects that don't have xyz coordinates or does that not matter for what I'm doing? Thanks

I've read about item count limits, but the discussions I've seen usually talk about #s of 50k and up. And, from what I can gather, that's not even a hard limit. It's more that trying to take out huge amounts at once can cause lag, and I seem to recall someone posting that it could result in a bit of lost materials but I might be misremembering (again, we're talking 50k+, though why anyone would do that...). As you can tell, I haven't looked too hard at the issue but, fwiw, I can say that I have lots of items in my Sanctuary workshop in amounts from 1k to 10k and have never had any problem. TLDR: 1000? Not even close to a worry.

Fixed by updating to the most recent version on Github. Looks like I was mistaken as to what versions got around the NMM API thing. (i.e. they were later than the version I had. Duh.)

Yeah, your video looks pretty easy to follow. Really nice tutorial. My biggest concern right now is my plan of combining/ optimizing a mod that renovates Sanctuary, including a new bridge, and a Red Rocket mod that I've used and really like (the author warns of possible overlap with Sanctuary mods). I know the RR mod doesn't address previs/precombines and am 99.9% sure the Sanctuary one doesn't either (I haven't installed that one yet). Save an esp slot and ensure compatible optimization at the same time. And my concern isn't really a technical one, or even the tedium of covering such a big area, it's simply praying that the CK doesn't blow up during such a long process. It's that plan that really came to mind when I looked at the script Vlits mentioned. I'd wager at least it's ability to clean out extraneous files after optimizing would be a godsend for my Sanctuary/RR project. As I get more comfortable with things, maybe I'll look into its other features too. Ha ha, this game... so much energy goes to modding. I actually haven't got back into FO4 yet, but am already planning out a bunch of tweaks I wanna do. :D I'll probably tackle settlement and other worldspace tweaking (e.g. TFTC) as I encounter them in-game. Which, alas, means the big job I mentioned would be first up.

Thanks Vlits, much appreciated. Definitely going to be looking into that script mod you linked. The clean precombined function looks very handy, even if I don't take advantage of all its other functionalities (simple as running a bat file - I like the sounds of that!).

1. Ah, that's good to know. 2. And again. 3. Oh man, I totally missed that. And... yeah, point taken. I sometimes get muddled in the details when learning stuff. I have a video of yours where you addressed the precombine/previs issues in Tales from the Commonwealth. Definitely something I can handle. Thanks a ton!

Well, dang. Thanks for the incredibly inconvenient info. :tongue: Kidding aside, I really appreciate your response. Yikes, really kind of an eye opener. I was intending to do just a bit of cleanup but, damn, soooo many crappy little things are part of larger precombines. Even doing some minor terraforming to clean up some of the dead shrubs that annoyingly stick up through crafted wood floors would break a bunch of precombines. And it looks like the shack stairs I mentioned share a .nif with some brambles and other little annoyances (like creosote, whatever that is in the game). The stairs you saw are the ones by the brick building, and appear to be part of same nif for the bridge supports and... well, honestly, my eyes were glazing over at that point. A script like the kind you mentioned would be a godsend. Couple Q's: 1. Would I be able to get away with deleting all components of a, and therefore the entire, precomined mesh? I.E. in the sense that maybe you can't break something that's deleted completely. I'd have to test it out in game but, yeah, it seems like the worst offending of the 2 sets of stairs (the one by the guardpost) might just be linked to various crappy items that I don't think would be missed. Although I'm thinking maybe I'd still have to regenerate PreVis. (That just came to mind, I'm already stretching my knowledge of the topic...) 2. In absence of an xedit script, I imagine it would be possible to extract the precombined meshes from the game archive and load 'em up in nifskope to at least get an eyeball of what all is in a particular precombine. Although I guess the usefulness of that would vary case by case. and 3. What's XCRI? I didn't see that in the xEdit record. For the info I mentioned above, I just looked at the FormID portion of each item's Record Header. Thanks again.