[LE] Guidance Requested - Using xEdit to remove a few trees as a compatibility patch between two mods.

[Grosaprap]

Pre-Load Background - I've been playing TES games and modding them since Morrowind. However due to life and other issues, I stopped in the mid-Oblivion era. Thanks to COVID and other fun life stuff, I've gotten back into playing Skyrim as of last July and am attempting to relearn modding and simple mod resolution skills. My current install is a heavily customized version of the Living Skyrim 2 mod list that used to be available for install via Wabbajack (he's working on 3 now and took 2 down because he didn't have time to keep updating the list as mods kept updating). I have a reasonable knowledge of how OLDER Elder Scroll mods worked but I'm still very much in the learning stage when it comes to Skyrim modding.

Actual Background - Living Skyrim 2 uses JK's Skyrim and Palaces and Castles Enhanced. One of the new mods I've installed also adds items to the various hold capitals and the 'castles/palaces' of each.

However many of these items seem to be buried under vegetation, or otherwise misaligned to how JK and PCE have placed things. What I'd like to do is go through each capital and each palace and create a patch deleting trees and plants that are in the way and moving other objects to better spots.

My first attempt at doing this was going to be through the Creation Kit but after having it crash for the tenth time while trying to load the Solitude worldspace in the rendering screen with just the relevant plugins loaded, I decided to first tackle removing plants and trees via xEdit (start with little successes then build on that...).

I loaded the game, went to Skyrim and went to the fire problematic location in Solitude that I wanted to work on, selected the first plant to delete, got it's reference ID, loaded up xEdit and only loaded the relevant plugins, did a search for that formID (updating it to account for the different load order) and double checked the information seemed to match the item I had selected in game.

This turned out to be in the "Temporary" section of the SolitudeOrigin cell, so I right clicked that and selected "Copy as Override into" and used that to create a new ESP with just the entries under the "Temporary" section of SolitudeOrigin listed.

I then went into this ESP and re-found the plant I wanted gone, selected it and deleted the record. I then did this again with five other plants in the same area. Saved the ESP and exited.

Adding the new ESP to the very bottom of my load order to ensure it's records would be the winners, I loaded up the game again and went to the spot where I had been working. Only to find the plants still there.

What did I do wrong? What should I have done differently?

[agerweb]

Whether using xEdit or the CK the mods you are changing have to be set as masters whilst being edited otherwise any changes to them in your esp will be 'forgotten'. This may be your problem.

[foamyesque]

Deleting records out of *.esps is bad practice in general and will lead to odd behaviour, so you shouldn't do it.

 

That said: To actually full-up delete something, you have to remove them from the original .esps in order to see things go away. What you've done is make a copy of one of the esps with the references gone, but because the original esp is still adding them, they're still there. As far as that last esp is concerned the records you deleted out of it simply don't exist and so it never tries to modify them at all, just as it wouldn't try to modify anything that was never edited in the first place.

 

(Which makes sense, or else the entire Skyrim world would vanish whenever someone made a mod adding a piece of armour somewhere.)

 

If you want to revert things to vanilla, or make them go away in game, without modifying the esps that originally place them, what you want to do is edit them in your override patch, not delete. If it's new material, you can usually simply flag it as 'starts disabled'. If it's something whose enable state isn't always-on by default (e.g., a guard in a hold that changes allegiances or something), it is a bit trickier and will need to be worked out case-by-case. Another possibility for statics is to just shift them down a few hundred points on the vertical axis, which will generally stuff them safely underground, but the disabled flag's simpler and cleaner.

 

If it's modifications to vanilla you want to revert, you'll need to copy over the original vanilla fields to your override esp for that record.