I'm having a hard time with my cave. I want to have a path following a stream that goes to a waterfall and ends in a wider cavern with a pool.

If you use the large cave pieces and step them down they don't fit together and you have floor and ceiling pieces sticking out at the wrong levels.

Would you not even bother with the large cave pieces and maybe put it all into an epic cave and use loose wall, floor and ceiling bits to define the shape or not even use the epic pieces and piece everything together with loose walls, pillars, cliffs and boulders?

I'm going to have to redo my cave entirely. The ceiling pieces look too tiled and putting the occassional boulder here and there isn't much help. And I've so many dirt piles masking the drops between islands I might as well do the floor entirely with dirt piles.

Advice about how to best manage level changes would be welcome.

I would look at some of the vanilla caves that are similar and see how they did it.

Fire up the CK without any active esp, and have a look. I learned a lot from Embershard mine.

without an active esp, you don't have to worry about inadvertently messing anything up on vanilla or your mod.

There are a lot of cave pieces, and even Beth used a lot of gap-camouflage.