Anise's Cabin Remake

[RedRavyn]

I'm working on my first Skyrim mod, although it's not my first time modding for ES. I made a number of private mods for Oblivion, so I'm not entirely a newbie to the CK. The Skyrim version seems similar but I'm noticing some changes -- things I've never seen in the Oblivion version.

 

The mod I'm making right now is a remake of Anise's Cabin to make it easier to use as an early-game Player home, once Anise has been eliminated. The main problem is that some of the items (not all of them!) are set to the Hagraven ownership faction, which is why Moire sends a bunch of thugs to kill you if you steal anything from the cabin -- even when Moire isn't even spawned into the game, yet. I found this so annoying that it was the inspiration for this mod.

 

The main change will, therefore, be to remove all ownership from items within the cabin's exterior and cellar. I've already done this for every item but one -- tedious, but fairly easy. However, I'm not sure how to prevent every access to the cellar to be counted as a trespass. I suspect it might be linked to Hagraven ownership of the ladder, but ownership for that is ghosted out so I can't change it. A little insight into this issue would be appreciated.

 

The associated quest, triggered (as nearly as I can tell from examining things) by entering the "defaultSetStageTRIG" box is "dunPOITundraWitchShackQST". This seems to cause Anise to go aggro on the Player when you enter the cellar, so I'd assume that I should leave this alone. It also seems to remove ownership from the bed so that the player can sleep there. Since I can't find anything within Anise's AI that indicates she ever enters the shack to do anything (including sleep), changing bed ownership to default "NONE" wouldn't seem to interfere with anything -- at least I don't think so.

 

I'd like to extend things a bit and create a series of quests associated with Anise, although my knowledge of quest-making is pretty rudimentary at this point. I'd also like to script changes in ownership upon Anise's death, and arrange for her to come to an "untimely end" without the intervention of the Player, so that the Player can simply inherit the shack from her, but that's for the future. Right now I just want to make sure that after Anise is killed (by the Player) that no further crime will be committed in interacting with anything in the cabin's exterior or interior (cellar).

 

I'm just about there for this first stage in this mod's evolution. I just can't insure that entering the cellar won't be counted as "trespassing". This probably isn't really a big deal, but I'm a purist when it comes to such things, and I'd like this mod to be as "clean" as possible, with no unforseen consequences (Half-Life 2 reference) to doing things in and around the shack.

[AstralFire]

I'd love to see it when it's done; I was disappointed that this wasn't a default option. Skyrim was my first positive experience with a Bethesda game after disliking Morrowind and Fallout 3, but I was surprised to find so few options in a series touted around them - restriction on choice of house was one of the big things that threw me.

[RedRavyn]

I'll be sure to post it when it's finished, AstralFire. I have no experience with Morrowind or Fallout, although Fallout is on my "to get" list. Skyrim is no different from Oblivion in the choices of Player homes which are available. Basically, there's one in every major city, and you have to do something for the person in charge of that city to get the privilege of buying it.

 

If you want good Player homes, though, you should look into the many mods that are available and even being created as I write this. It's one of the more popular sorts of mods for games like this one.

 

I have big plans for Anise and her cabin, although my goal at the moment is to just make the cabin available to a beginning player without incurring a crime or getting a non-existent NPC to put a bounty on your head for taking anything in the home (Moire doesn't even exist in the game until you start one of the Daedric quests).

 

Eventually, I'll add a complete AI package to Anise, so that she'll actually eat, sleep, wander around a bit, and even tend her garden. There'll be a series of quests you can do for her that will put you in her good favor, so that when she dies you'll inherit her cabin with no strings attached. Unless I can do a convincing old lady voice she won't be voice-acted any more, but there will at least be more ways to interact with her, and I'm planning on her being a low-level Alchemy and Enchanting instructor, as well. She'll make some basic potions if she had the ingredients for them, and you'll be able to earn these by doing little quests for her. Supply her with soul gems and items and she will be able to enchant some very basic armor, weapons, or jewelry for you. Again, nothing extravagant. This isn't intended to give the PC god-like abilities -- just to sort of increase the immersion and give the PC an early home as a live-in apprentice to an old lady.

 

The cabin won't become an uber-mansion, as is popular with player home mods. It will just be cleaned up a bit and the exterior replaced with something a little less run-down if I can find something appropriate in the CK for that. I'll add a little bit of extra storage (nothing extravagant) and make all containers, both in the cellar and the exterior, non-respawning, so everything will be safe for storage. The basement will be expanded just a tiny bit to add enough space for a cot for her apprentice (i.e. the Player).

 

After you acquire the shack for your own you'll be able to get your own Alchemy/Enchanter apprentice who will live in the basement and occasionally go out into the field to collect alchemical reagents.

 

Like I said -- big plans, but my short-term goal is to just solve the issue of trespassing when you go to the cellar. Oh, I also removed the annoying fog from the basement. The developers seem to really like that sort of thing, but I find it less "ambiance" and more "immersion-breaking", since the game still doesn't, after all these years of developing ES installments, handle fog and mist well. That and it doesn't make sense to have a foggy basement. That's not the way physics works. The dripping water goes next if I can figure out how to do that.

[RedRavyn]

Well, I've got another little problem. Not so little, actually. In the CK all the items in the cellar are properly marked as unowned. In testing this out in-game, though, everything still comes up as "steal" if I try to interact with them. The exterior part of the cabin is OK -- nothing would be stolen if you take it. I'm at a complete loss to understand what's going on here.

[Pentigan]

Maybe it's because the cellar is treated as a character's "home" and such all objects are treated as automatically owned by the "home" owner?

[AstralFire]

Did you purge your recently loaded locations? It's triggered by a console command, uesp has it on their list of console codes. Wanna say it's pcb?

 

If you load a mod that changes an area you are in or recently visited, you need to exit the area and purge cached data before the changes will show.

Edited May 24, 2012 by AstralFire

[RedRavyn]

@ Pentigan: Setting ownership on an individual object should, as I understand it, override any global cell-based ownership settings, so I doubt that's the issue.

 

@ AstralFire: This was on a new game, where I had never visited Anise's Cabin, before. On the other hand, I've heard of settings from mods getting carried over to new games, even after the mods in question were removed before those games were started. Skyrim is full of little curiosities like that. I'll look into this possibility, although I'm not really sure at this point how to do so.

 

I might have to just reconstruct Anise's Cabin from scratch and replace the entire thing. Simple enough, I suppose, since it's not very big, but I was hoping for a less brute-force method.

[AstralFire]

pcb Purge cell buffer This will free up used memory, often times increasing fps after any given amount of time in game. Best used while in interior cells. However, since it purges cached cells, any cells you visited in the recent past will have to be reloaded completely when reentered.

 

Hit `, type in PCB, hit enter, hit `. Though not sure it'll solve your problem.

[kryptopyr]

Check the data for the Cell. Right click on the cell name in the Cell Window, then choose Edit. Go to Interior Data and change the Owner Faction there. I'm not positive this will solve your problem, as I'm still really new to modding, but I think any Cell settings will override individual item settings. At least it works that way with the Encounter Zone... if you set the cell to have a non-respawning encounter zone, then it doesn't matter whether you've set containers to checked to Respawn or not. They won't respawn if the cell is set to not respawn.

[RedRavyn]

@ AstralFire: This wasn't an issue, here, since this was a new game with an alternate start in which the cellar cell would never have been loaded. Thanks for the input, though, and the judicious use of pcb is known to resolve a lot of instability issues in ES games. I don't use it nearly as often as I probably should.

 

@ kryptopyr: That did the trick! It seems I was mistaken in my impression that setting individual item ownership would override cell ownership. I don't remember where I read that, but it was clearly wrong. This also solved the trespassing issue, which I had wrongly assumed was related to the transition between the exterior and interior cell, and not to just the act of being in the interior cell. Immediate problems solved ... kudos given. Thanks so much for the suggestion.