CoyoteAnnabis

For a while now I've been experiencing a few weird issues with the CS. I haven't been able to find any info on them, namely because I simply don't know of any way to describe them in concise, searchable terms. All I want to know is, do I have a bad install (unikely, as I've reinstalled a couple of times), a known issue or is it just something I'm doing wrong. 1st Issue. I can't modify Ebonheart. At all. Or rather, nothing I do in Ebonheart ever saves. I'll load my esm's, save under a new name, do what I mean to do and save again (often multiple times), close the CS, add the plugin to my mod list and... nothing. Nothing has changed. When I load up the CS and the plugin, nothing I did was saved. Any other cell, modifications save just fine. 2nd Issue. Random duplications/moves after CTD. Sometimes while working with the CS I'll get sudden CTD's (pretty normal I suppose) but when that happens, stuff will be duplicated and moved slightly. Not just one or two references either, but everything in a particular cell. Normally it only happens in cells that was working in at the time, adjacent cells, or ones that I had worked on earlier, but sometimes it even happens in cells that I didn't touch at all. For example, most recently I was doing something around Gnisis. Didn't do anything outside that area, but when I reloaded after the crash, Vos had been duplicated. Everything in Vos had been doubled and moved slightly to the left. 3rd issue. Books/scrolls not displaying everything in-game. I'm not the most tech savvy (obviously) but know just enough html to format a book/scroll in the CS. No matter what I do though, in-game I only get the first paragraph or sentence of whatever I typed out. To test it, I made a new book, and copy/pasted the contents of a stock book, which I know works properly, into the window. Same issue, it only displays the first few lines of text. Anybody have any ideas, or at least a set of terms I can use to search for answers? I'm about to just give up entirely. For reference, I'm using a GOG install, and I've re-downloaded and reinstalled a couple of times now. Bit of a tangent, but I have a really weird relationship with technology in general. I end up getting weird issues/errors with just about everything digital, assuming it doesn't just completely die prematurely. Everything is fine when somebody else uses the item in question, but it goes haywire as soon as I touch it.

Long story short, I'm trying to make a talking pot. Literally, just a pot that pc's can activate and talk to. It's a bit of an easter egg in a mod I'm working on. I've tried making it a creature, ala creeper and the mudcrab. I used one of the vanilla pot meshes, but without animation groups I keep getting a CTD every time I load the cell. Do I absolutely need to animate an object that doesn't move? Is there a script I can use to ignore the lack of animations? I can kinda do it as an activator, the pot has a limited dialogue anyway, but that kinda breaks the immersion I'm looking for. I want the player to activate it thinking it's a container, and then BAM, dialogue window. Is what I'm looking to do possible without having to create and animate a whole new mesh?

Thanks for the advice, I think I pinned it down. I narrowed it down to four doors that were doing it most often. They had somehow duplicated and I couldn't find them in the CS. Each time I tested, one or the other would be closer to the front. Two of them were on a cell border and I think they kept getting reassigned to different cells every time the cell reloaded in the render. Now I just wish I could figure out a way to make it happen when and how I want it to. It's a neat trick.

Recently getting back into modding after a long hiatus, and I'm encountering a strange glitch. I'm working on a large Balmora mod in which I've moved several vanilla buildings. Basically just selected everything and dragged it around. All of the interior doors are still working fine, I leave the cell and end up where I'm supposed to be. But some of the exterior doors are acting strange. In the CS, everything checks out. Name, ID, and destination marker are all correct, but in playtesting some doors end up getting linked to random exterior cells. It will display where it's going, not where it's supposed to go. For example, Ashlands instead of Mages guild. It's never the same door or the same destination across different loads. If I exit out and reload it will be different. I've only encountered it on doors I've moved. When testing, I always try to run as clean as possible. MBT and this mod only, new character saved in a test cell. Remove the mod, everything goes back to normal. That's gotta be the problem, I just can't figure out what's causing it. If it helps, I used another mod as a base and expanded off of it. I'll have to look around for the exact name. Plays through just fine on it's own and with anything else that doesn't touch Balmora. Near as I can tell, it's pure vanilla and nothing fancy, mostly just exterior work and landscaping (really nice btw). It does have one script, attached to the doors it adds. it's just a basic message script, good code, shouldn't be the problem and all the doors have a single, but unique ID. I'm wondering if something I did is causing the engine to get confused. I didn't really do much yet besides move things around, changed a few scale variables and duplicate a few statics. No dialogue, no scripting. Does anybody have any idea what I did wrong? If I can't figure it out, I'll just write it in as Sheogorath playing tricks. Thanks in advance.

Of course, given that it's house Telvanni, it would be perfectly appropriate to just kill everyone...