Inspired by a post on the forum I decided to have a look at Battlehorn castle in the CS to make some long overdue customisations, but when I loaded just the oblivion master and the battlehorn esp the battlehorn banners and trophy animals were just yellow exclamation points. I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen, and I don't know if it is affecting it in game as it's not currently in my load list.

How do I fix this? (in noob friendly terms, with 1 sylable words etc)

1st - I assume you're using at least the Oblivion mod manager right? If not, you will need it.

2nd - you'll need to unpack the BSA file for the fighters stronghold. I think the BSA unpacker is under utilities. (I'm at the office right noe and will look when I get home.) The way I do it is kinda anol, but that's just me, lol. I browse to the BSA file and hit extract all. This will open another directory tree where I browse to a temp folder I make beforehand such as BattlehornBSA or whatever. Then, I extract the BSA file to that folder, and close everything out. Then I examine the contents of that folder, there will usually be 3 or 4 folders in there like meshes, textures, sounds and so on. I just then copy and paste what I need into my Data folder. You should be able to then load the plugin in the CS and everything should be in place.

Hope this helps!

Ok I've done that, and tried to make a simple change; switching the daedroth and the minator trophies and moving the front hall trophy and stand backwards. I saved that to a new esp and then checked the details in the Data window, and saw that for some reason it showed changes to dialogue and then instead of hitting cancel to exit the data window I hit ok, the CS reloaded everything and suddenly I got a bunch of warnings saying that the great hall cell had been duplicated and stuff. WTF is that all about?

Edit: I tried loading the esp into one of my saves and visited battlehorn but nothing had changed.

OK, here's what I'd do.

1st - make a backup of the original unedited esp in case it gets messed up.

2nd - since you're already working with an esp file, you cannot save it as a new esp I don't believe. (I could be wrong but I think you do that when you are making a new plugin (esp) from a master (esm) file. So just make the changes you want and simply hit save. You should then see your changes in game. However, It could be me, but it seems that Oblivion has a period of time before a cell resets or something so many of my edits did not show up for me immediately. So, I just made a save outside the interior cell at the front door BEFORE I ever entered that cell, and just loaded that up to view my changes.

Hope that helps!

Oh yeah, it's always a good idea to make multiple backups of your progress very often just in case you have a problem. You might just prevent yourself from losing hours of valuable work that way. (I know I did, lol!)

Ok seems I know a little more about the CS from my Morrowind modding days. If you don't load an esp or set one as the active file then when u save u make new esp with just the changes u just made in it. So far I've never tried to 'patch' an esp this way in Oblivion (or possibly in morrowind now I think about it), but seeing as the unofficial patch exists then it should be possible?

I will try doing it the way you describe and hope that it works.

You need to esmfy Battlehorns esp with Wrye Bash. TesAlliance has a nice tut on how to create a patch http://www.invision.tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/topic/1364-creating-a-patch-a-short-how-to/

You don't need to extract the files, Balok is incorrect. This issue is something I have come across with this plugin, when it was not enabled in Oblivion.

If you want to "esmify" Battlehorn you'll first need to open the unedited version the CS and svae it, the plugin is bad and if you esmify it before doing this you will get an error on every load, and it may cause other problems. It took me a week or so to work out the problem with this plugin, and it's not something I think anyone else has raised, it may have to do with where you got the DLC from originally.

I had missing meshes when I copied Battlehorn esp and bsa. Seems there is a folfer under meshes and textures called BattlehornCastle (it may be installed byt the unofficial official mods patch possibly). If you do not have these folders then you will have the missing meshes.