Settlement Borders.

[kaddigart]

I know the OP got this settled to their satisfaction, but I thought I'd throw in a couple of things that may help someone else that stumbles across this thread in the future (as I did).

 

Someone mentioned that the scaling gizmo may only work on primitives; this is correct as far as being able to scale on individual axes. The borders in both Build High and vanilla are static objects and may only be scaled as such. That is, the entire object. Build High's author at least uses four separate objects for their borders, so if you want to enlarge it you can just drop it into the ground more to compensate or make trapezoid shaped areas if you wish. For other shapes you could duplicate and resize as needed. If for whatever reason you wanted to shrink the area you could duplicate and stack them if you needed them to be taller. If at any time you can't locate the gizmo you're using, the hot keys are your friends. Hold Z, X or C then click and drag to move any selected object(s) regardless of its location on a single axis. Also works with scaling and rotation with the appropriate keys/gizmos selected. For example you can resize a selected object from anywhere in the render window by holding S while left clicking and dragging up or down. No need to find the gizmo.

 

As for using Build High as a master, the only real reason to do this would be to use the borders from it. Alternatively you could either resize the vanilla primitive or just create a new one (better idea IMO). Link it to the workbench and you're done. When doing my own resizing I ditched the borders completely by dropping them below the landscape (same action as undelete in xedit and what Build High does with the vanilla ones) and planted flags on the edges or walled it in for visual aid when I needed it.

 

As for the scrapping issues, if you use Scrap Everything the reason will mostly be previs/pre-combines. The only solutions I know of are to turn them off cell by cell or completely. If your rig can handle it it's easier to completely turn them off, but the most practical way is cell by cell. After that you should be able to scrap most everything you want (and some you don't - be careful!). There are some things on rare occasions that Scrap Everything can't scrap, in that case you'd have to add said item to SE's scrap list or just remove or relocate it in the CK. As for Starlight Drive In I'm pretty sure you can go down to a bare landscape using SE.

 

I've recently been fighting with the CK myself with the ESP/ESM master debacle. The only solution I've found is converting whatever.esp to ESM. This is very easy using WryeBash. I think someone already mentioned the load order changes this causes, so you may want to do this on a fresh play through. You can load any files and use their assets all you want in CK and save but CK won't add it as master, as someone above put it, for reasons. You can get around this by adding the files as masters in Wrye Bash and see your changes in game, but if you load it up in the CK again it graciously removes those masters for you. If you forget to add the masters with WB before re-opening your mod in the CK it will also remove any references to the assets you used. Fun stuff. I'd love it if someone knows a way around this, I've combed through the CK ini twice over and found no reference to this, but for all I know it isn't named logically or doesn't exist.