House Mod Guidelines

[Deleted119721User]

House Mod Community Guidelines

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Just so this is all in one place ...... here are some notes for house mod makers that are rarely posted anywhere....

1) Give credit to nif, texture, and script makers.

2) Make an attempt to figure out if a popular mod already occupies the space where you want to build. If a popular mod sits in the same place or even the same cell, nobody will use your mod and it will make both mods malfunction. Contact the mod author regarding a merge if there is synergy.

3) Don't situate your house on a border between cells ..... check position in CK first ....... If front door of this mod is right on the border of 4 cells which means the navmeshes for 4 cells need to modified and finalized ....... 4 times the compatibility problems..........

4) Never use vanilla assets and never make vanilla base asset changes as this can effect every item in the game. Make a Duplicate and use that.

5) Skyrim has severe lighting limitations and there is no way around them. Only a few shadow casting and non shadow casting lights can light surfaces and this is determined partially by your FOV. After you light your house you need to walk every area of your house to look for lights that flicker depending on where you look. Areas where a lot of light are visible are the worst offenders. THEN you need to activate the spell Candlelight and do it all again, unless the place is so bright that you doubt anyone would use Candlelight. If you have lights that only turn on during the day you need to check during the daytime too.

6) If you make any landscape height measurements don't do that near a cell border as it will make seams if other modder makes changes to the adjacent cell.

7) Check your mod with SSEedit for wild edits and ITMs ....... the CK generates these like crazy even when you are careful.

8) Avoid persistent item flags unless you really need it

9) Initially disabled is your friend ..... don't delete vanilla items especially base objects.

10) Navmeshing is a pita , don't span cell borders with changes as this is a recipe for disaster in terms of compatability

11) Keep your house as focused as possible ..... don't make changes outside your cell unless they are really compelling ..... your world edits may break somebody else's mod and are a nightmare to troubleshoot

12) Don't use Guard NPCs to limit access to your home ...... they requires scripts to keep them under control which are rarely done properly.

13) Adding a key that you need to find can be equally problematic as you can't just leave it sitting in the world somewhere because this is risky. Another mod may load something in the same area and send it flying. Another mod may move the object it is sitting on. Depending on how the meshes load the object may just fall through the floor and fall when a NPC walks by. Perhaps the best ways is to just set up a collision box in front of the door with a script that checks if the player meets some requirement before disabling......... this requires knowledge of the Papyrus scripting and aliasing and actually setting up your CK to work with scripts........which is way too convoluted :(

14) If you have windows consider making them transparent and building a fake exterior just outside. Then add time of day lighting using the external emittance mask but keep the. source point outside.

15) Don't allow instant fast travel. Usually keep the map marker hidden until discovered. It is easy to create a book or note that when read will reveal the marker. Include a COC marker and give COC instructiosn in the mod description for those that want to assess the mod.

16) Use the Noencounterzone flag to keep containers the whole house from respawning, and wiping out people's loot. You can pick nonspawning containers instead if you want and know which ones.