How to learn CK

[willny4]

The best way for me to learn is to study what you guys have done before. When I open CK and check the Starfield.esm and an existong mod in my load order is there a way to find the changes the mod has made? i try scrolling through the objects and can't find any of what I would think had to be added or changed. For example,in the great Midas Home mod various slates trigger certain actions. When I look at the slate objects in CK  there are a lot of them but none that correspond to Dialectric's. I want to use a slate to unlock certain skills, Seeing how it's done on the base level will help. Are the mods locked in some way or is there some setting that shows the changes?

Thank you,

[aurreth]

1.  In the list items that are changed have an asterisk.  It can be hard to see, because the CK interface is a mess.

2.  The CK can not edit an ESM.  If you load an existing mod you can't change it, you can only create a new ESP that uses that mod as a master.  You then have to convert the ESP to an ESM to use it.

3.  Most of us use xEdit to examine the workings of someone else's mod.  It's much easier to see what has been changed and compare various records.

[LarannKiar]

On 9/6/2024 at 11:48 AM, willny4 said:

Are the mods locked in some way or is there some setting that shows the changes?

Thank you,

As mentioned above, the Creation Kit can't modify an ESM directly. If this ESM is a Full master, you can, however, use a hex editor to remove the ESM bit. To my knowledge, beyond the ESM flag there's no other file integrity difference between an ESP and a (Full master) ESM. (The Record Header holds plugin type info and the ESM bit is the 9th byte if I'm remembering right but to make sure, you can always save a dummy plugin in the Creation Kit as both ESP and ESM and compare them).

You can determine the plugin type of an ESM (Full, Medium, Small/Light) by attempting to open it the Creation Kit. (See the plugins list window).

If the mod is a Small or Medium master, you'd need to forward its records to a new plugin and edit that. (You can do that manually or if you know SF1Edit scripting, you can write a script in Pascal).

The Creation Kit wiki written for Fallout 4 and Skyrim still contain a lot of usable information. (There's no wiki for Starfield yet that I know of).

[SKKmods]

Using a hex editor on file offset 0x8 and 0x9

0x8 = 00 ESP
0x8 = 01 ESM
0x8 = 80 ESP Localization 
0x8 = 81 ESM localization

0x9 00=Full
0x9 01=Small
0x9 04=Medium

[RuneLore63]

A bit late to the party, but the best way to understand how modders do things, is to watch "How To" videos on platforms like YouTube - check out Gamer Poet's channel  (which is user friendly and explains how to setup your system for modding, etc). After that, you can load mods into the xEdit application for the Bethesda game you want to look at - the current xEdit version for games that have one is usually found under the Nexus mods page for the game by searching for the word "xEdit".

What xEdit does is display records contained within a mod under a list of Categories in the left hand panel of the app. When you click on any of the entries listed under the Categories, xEdit displays the entry's settings in the right hand panel of the app. Some versions of xEdit allow you to change settings via the right hand panel, but the current StarField version of xEdit (SF1Edit) is read only.