What happens if I change open world cell name?

[DaleTheeMagnificent]

I'm building a player camp that is going to have several options that can be added by finding resources in the world. (Like walls, decorations, and crafting benches.) Its in the open world in a Wilderness Cell (02,07) and its a pain to link refs from the otherside of the map mostly because the wilderness cell doesnt show up when I go through the cell list for ref linking.

My solution has been to rename the wilderness cell Im using to a new name and it pops right up. 

What I am worried about is the can of worms that can possibly open, if any? 

What should I be on the lookout for? Or what would be a better method for getting the open world cell Im building in to actually show up? 

I imagine the cell being renamed will cause conflicts with any mod that edits the same cell or am I wrong in that assumption?

[madmongo]

Changing the cell name will conflict with any other mods that edit the same cell. But then placing objects in that cell will also conflict with other mods that use that cell. Try to find an empty cell that no one else would want to use.

(02,07) should be pretty safe to mess with.

If you are making an actual building that can be built there (you said walls), you might see some weird things at a distance since the walls aren't constantly there and won't have any LOD. If possible, try to place your building behind some rocks so that it shouldn't be visible in the distance, then it's no biggie.

[JimboUK]

I think the best way to avoid a conflict is to create a new small worldspace and link it via a cave or something. When creating one take note of the "World Space Issues and Workarounds" at the bottom of this https://geckwiki.com/index.php/World_Spaces

[DaleTheeMagnificent]

Awesome, thanks guys for the replies! That answered everything I was curious about. 

[madmongo]

I personally have created quite a few worldspaces, and if I were making  a new location I would probably put it in one of those.

But I wouldn't be so quick to recommend that approach to someone else, especially someone with limited modding experience. Worldspaces gets you into the buggiest part of the GECK.

For example, the obvious way to start this is to create your new worldspace and then go into the heightmap editor and create a heightmap for it. Congratulations, you just cashed the GECK. Why? Who knows. It's Bethesda. What you actually have to do is create the worldspace, save your mod, exit and restart the GECK, and then go into the heightmap editor.

And what happens if you just accept the default heightmap that the GECK gives you? It crashes the GECK. I personally create a basically flat heightmap by setting the randomness to almost flat but give it an offset of about 14,000 or so. That gets it up high enough that it won't crash the GECK and also high enough that generating LOD later won't give you floating trees. Once I have the basically flat heightmap, I edit that and add mountains and rivers and such and do normal height-mappy things.

And you have to be gentle. If you are too aggressive with your heightmap editing, you can end up with landscape tears. If the GECK gives you an error about part of the heightmap being out of bounds, the GECK will ask you if you want to fix it. The GECK is lying to you. It can't fix it. At this point, the best thing to do is scrap your heightmap editing and start over.

And if you really want to have some fun, try to use the auto-navmesh generator under Regions. I actually got it to work once. And only once. The other dozen times I tried it I ended up locking up the GECK with a pop-up that re-appears over and over no matter how many times you close it that says simply "Get Jean" as the error.

And of course, beware the 16 MB limit for esp files, which is extremely easy to exceed if you are creating a new worldspace. It also completely bricks your mod. There is no way to fix it (that I know of) short of reverting to an earlier saved copy of your mod. If you want to make worldspaces with any real substance in them, you need to use the GECK's version control and put the GECK into network developer mode.

Oh, and while you are at it, good luck finding documentation on how to properly create worldspaces. I've never found any. There are lots of bits and pieces out there, but nothing that really puts it all together and warns you of all of the possible ways you can screw yourself over.

In my opinion, worldspace creation is proof that the GECK is really a secret Vault-Tec experiment designed to test modder's frustration levels.

But hey, if you want to do something that is only slightly more painful than pounding nails into your own skull, go for it. Try out worldspace editing.

[DaleTheeMagnificent]

I had a feeling fiddlin' with world spaces would be tricky considering how often the GECK has crashed doing simple things lol. Unfortunately, I will end up experiencing the headache eventually as I want to try a little bit of everything for modding. 

 

Ive opted to keep the original wilderness cell name for now, mostly cause I found out I was making it harder to link refs than it really was. I can just open the activator I want to link up then just manually search the actual cell to load it up in the render window. No need for me to use the cell list. 

 

Its a couple extra clicks but thats considerably faster than say, slowly scrolling from Nellis to the camp to link a single ref lol. 

 

Right now Im at making my own scripts and thats so far been either really, really easy or really, really frustrating lol. 

[Radioactivelad]

When I want to easily access cells I'm working with, I'll place a door hidden underground and link it to a door in a new (interior) test cell I've created; then I can just easily zip between them using the View Teleport Marker button on the door ref.

Just make sure to remove the references when you're ready to publish. Or leave them in as an obtuse easter egg- you can prevent the door from showing on the local map with a reference flag.

Edited November 30, 2023 by Radioactivelad

[DaleTheeMagnificent]

That's a solid idea actually. Im gonna be popping between the Mojave and the DLC areas a lot with work Im bout to be doing on my mod. Anything to make the switch between cells faster will be nice lol. Ill have to try it out.