Creation Kit Level Design Tips
I was chatting with another mod author yesterday sharing some quality of life tips for improving your level design experiences and thought I’d share them here as well.
Most people know to press 11 to hide selected objects such as those ever present 654545155 invisible misters preventing you from clicking on the piece you aimed for. If you check the Layers window you can often find a layer just for the misters and other invisible clicking hazards and click on the eye icon to hide them all. You may find other useful layers to hide as well such as second floor layers. The M key can also toggle markers off hiding even more objects that may get in your way. Alt+1 will unhide everything you’ve hidden using 11.
The person I was chatting with was doing some area cleanup but didn’t want to break precombines. He was trying to be good about not deleting objects and setting things he wanted to get rid of as Initially Disabled by checking the box in the object’s edit window. However this approach was causing unintended errors as objects which had linked references were being disabled. One of the most basic rules that mod authors learn early on is to NEVER DELETE objects for good reason.
However in this case the safest and easiest way to remove vanilla objects you want to clean out of an area is to sort the Cell View window by either type or name on the right side and outright delete the objects you want to get rid of in bulk. Any object with a linked reference that you attempt to delete will give you an error message so you can then choose not to delete that object. Then open your mod in xEdit and use the cleaning procedures to convert deleted objects to disabled objects. This approach also reduces the likelihood of stray edits made by clicking things in the Render window that must be manually cleaned from your esp file in xEdit. Search for videos from GamerPoets or many others to learn how to clean your mods in xEdit.
If you also don’t want to break precombines you can then manually go through all of your edits in xEdit and remove any items that say [Placed Object] with the brackets included. The brackets indicate those are objects in precombines which become broken when changed.
If you find your mod has any errors, the simplest way to get the full error message is to load your esp file in the CK. Once loaded the editorwarnings.txt file will update to include errors from the loaded esp in addition to the 164657475 bizillion vanilla warnings. You can find the file in the directory above Data. In Notepad turn off word wrap and you can quickly scroll down the list looking for any warnings that say [CURRENT] which are errors in your esp file.
