CK Bug: Objects in Exterior Cell Suddenly Invisible (Still Visible In-Game)

[Martimius]

Hey everyone, I wanted to document something weird and super frustrating I’ve run into while working in the Creation Kit, and hopefully get some input from others if they’ve experienced anything like it. I’m building a mod that edits an exterior cell in Tamriel - specifically formID 00000713B (mainly adding a woodcutting hut). For a while everything was working fine. The cell was rendering properly in the CK, I could see all my references, and everything behaved as expected both in the CK and in-game.

At some point, after adding a bunch of new references (mainly firewood, torches, containers -  things that were set to be toggled via scripts later), stuff just started vanishing in the CK render window. At first it was just the new objects. Then I realized even vanilla references I hadn’t touched -  like a trough that was there for a while (before I added in the new references) - were no longer visible. They were still listed in the Cell View → Objects tab, I could click them (but upon clicking them I was just shown an empty spot where the object should have been) and everything still showed up and functioned properly in-game. But in the CK Render Window? Gone.

I double-checked everything obvious: they weren’t marked “Initially Disabled,” (though the CK does display these in the render window usually without issue) they weren’t hidden behind enable parent logic, nothing in the render window was set to be filtered or hidden. I toggled the disabled object visibility (B key), reloaded the CK, loaded and reloaded the cell - nothing. I even deleted a bunch of the objects I had added, thinking maybe something had gone wrong with the edit batch. No change. Objects still invisible.

Then I noticed something weird. If I selected one of the invisible objects via the Cell View list and dragged it upward, it suddenly popped back into view. Move it downward again - poof, it disappears. It didn’t matter what object I tried it with, or if it was new or old. Even dragging a new object (like a fresh static trough) into that exact area made it vanish instantly once it hit a certain height. I could select it again in the list, drag it upwards slightly - it would reappear. It's like there's this dead zone in the cell where the CK's renderer just refuses to display anything.

At this point it seems pretty clear that it’s not an issue with the references themselves, but with the CK’s render logic for that part of the cell. The game loads everything fine, no crashes, no visual bugs, everything behaves exactly how it should. It’s only the CK that’s breaking. I checked my logs -  no real errors. Some texture and facegen warnings, terrain .BTR load failures, the usual CK noise, but nothing pointing to missing references or broken forms.

What’s wild is that I can load an old version of the plugin (from before I added the recent references) and everything displays correctly again in the CK. But even if I take that clean version and just start editing it again - adding even unrelated stuff - I eventually run into the same render bug. So whatever is going wrong seems to be cumulative. It’s like CK silently breaks the render bounds or occlusion culling in that part of the cell and never recovers.

For reference, if it wasn't clear already, this is a vanilla exterior cell in Tamriel. I know you can’t duplicate exterior cells like you can interiors, and I’ve also confirmed that the CK won’t let me fully “reset” this cell’s data without jumping through major xEdit hoops. So it’s not like I can just wipe the record clean and start over. At best, I can work around the problem by dragging everything slightly north or up into a neighboring chunk of the cell. That seems to work — stuff renders normally outside of that cursed zone.

I’ve seen old posts from 2012-ish describing similar problems, usually mentioning “Full LOD” as a workaround (which didn’t help in my case), or talking about large objects disappearing when scaled up or moved too far from the origin. This doesn’t seem to be related to object scale or LOD though - even small statics disappear just from being in the wrong spot. It really seems like a CK frustum/culling/occlusion failure. I've also set ugrids to astronomically high values (like 21) to no avail.

So yeah - has anyone else run into something like this? I’d love to know if there’s a way to cleanly refresh a cell’s render bounds, or repair the cell record via xEdit without completely recreating the scene. I’m currently working around it by nudging objects out of the bugged zone and continuing development, but its still not optimal especially since some items in the cell are effectively invisible and I basically just have to remember they're there.

Anyway, hope this helps anyone else who hits this problem. If you’ve dealt with this and found a fix, or even just have more info about what causes it, please let me know. Would love to crowdsource some answers on this because I feel like I’ve reached the limits of what I can test on my own.

[dafydd99]

You haven't had any responses here, so I'll give it a go, but you do seem to have approached everything thoroughly so chances are low I can help, but perhaps it'll spark an idea or two. Personally I have never experienced this problem.

Firstly if I were you, I'd try to find the edges of this mysterious cursed area. I'd be checking it's dimensions and orientation to get a clue as to what it could be. There's many different types of 'boxes' in the engine, not all are immediately visible (so double check the hide menu again), though if there were one there it shouldn't hide items within it. Particularly check for 'roombounds' (or room markers) - they shouldn't exist in exterior cells as they don't have meaning, but they're designed in-game to have that exact effect, they hide items within them when viewed from outside that roombound. You could try moving the camera into/out of the cursed area and see if that has any effect. When viewing the objects in that exterior cell, try going through the cell menu, and the list to the right that should include every object and checking them one by one, making sure 'visible only' isn't ticked at the top (if it's on your version of CK) - it also should highlight items that may have been set to be hidden.

A few other things with a low chance of helping, but you could double check...

• do a quick graphics driver update - you never know!
• make sure you've got plenty of free memory, and perhaps plough through the ck.ini settings, making sure there's no max limits that could affect things
• alt-1 should unhide everything. F5 should force a reload of graphic elements, and should unhide all much like alt-1
• try installing CKPE - never know the updates may have fixed or swerved this issue
• the ugrids stuff can be changed dynamically in editor - right mouse button on the editor window, and change '# of cells'. Might be worth trying a few options here to see if anything effects the situation.

In any case - good luck and I hope you find a solution.

Edit - also I know you don't want to go through in detail, but perhaps worth going through the cell in XEdit, removing any changes that apparently don't do anything, and double checking for any peculiar objects. You could do a backup, and remove ALL edits for that cell, just to confirm it's something you've done, then by a process of elimination track down which is the broken edit.

Edited Thursday at 11:38 AM by dafydd99