I've noticed the CS making unnecessary dialog edits to active plugins when one of its masters edit any dialog type records. I've been told that worldspace edits of similar kind also occur. However, I've been unable to trigger such edits in my setup. Could somebody direct me to induce such edits in an active plugin ? In case you were wonder why, I'm investigating into the matter.

Thanks in advance

I've had a hard time getting this to happen too! I didn't want it to, but I think I did have it happen once and I wasn't sure what I did differently that time versus any other time I've edited plugins. I know that in some cases I was loading areas in the render window to see how some things were set up. I was careful not to move anything, but I seemed to have a bit of an issue when switching from one area to the next. Not much for you to go on, I'm afraid.

I can get the dialog edits to happen no problem, like you describe. I was creating a patch, so I made an esp the master and that master had some dialog changes - voila my patch had dialog changes even though I didn't touch any of that stuff. The odd thing was that this patch wound up with cell edits too. I had to clean that damned thing every time I changed something. The patch only consisted of a quest and a script. In my case I wondered if part of the issue was the plugin I was using as a master. The author of that plugin liked to change something in the Tamriel worldspace to prevent the CS from crashing or not recording the edits or something. I've never encountered that bug personally, but he's reported that the way to prevent it or solve it is to nudge a rock somewhere. Anyway I wondered if he had done that in the plugin I was creating the patch for, and that seemed to create some spurious edits for me.

So nothing solid, I'm afraid, but maybe some things to try... Of course, there's Compile All

It's ridiculously easy to get this sort of thing to happen when doing patches. ESMify an ESP, load the CS, make some edits, and you'll end up with plenty of crud in places you weren't even looking at. Dialogue, landscape records, path grid records, cell records, you name it. The larger and more spread out the parent mod, the more likely you are to see it.

For a straight ESP:

You might be able to cause some dirty edits by dropping a new item into the CS, then dragging it around in the render window making sure to cross as many cell boundaries as possible. Stop in each new one, then grab it and keep dragging. I think as the object leaves the previous cell, the data saying that cell is modified isn't properly cleared.

Another possibility, drop something in a cell, then delete it. Do the same in other cells.

Dirty landscape is hard, but you can sometimes induce that by doing vertex shading or height adjustments close to a cell border so long as when you're lifting up/dragging down you don't actually move a vertex on the other side. Painting landscape sometimes does this too if you get close to a border.

I've never managed to trigger a dirty path grid, usually when something causes that it generates an actual change in nearby cells, resulting in what I call "wild edits" - data changed you didn't want changed.

Tried and true, as Andalaybay said, the dreaded "compile all" will dirty up tons of scripts. And if you've got OBSE loaded, it will spam you with complaints about a number of them with syntax errors.

Ok, for casual readers:

Arthmoor's post is stuff you DO NOT WANT TO DO!

I think some as yet unnamed hero is looking at the CSE.

Thanks for the directions - I'll see if I can reproduce it.

EDIT: Are the edits usually accompanied by "Failed to CreateGroupData for CELL form ..." errors ?

I think that's how the CS works. It doesn't track references individually. When you move a ref into a cell and drop it there, the object list of the cell gets updated. Such an update flags the cell object/record as active. The same goes for dropping something and deleting it. As far it's concerned, you manipulated the cell's data in one way or another and that merits an 'active' flag.

Ah, there it is again! The sneaky 'CSE'. You folks seem to know something I don't ...

It has to do with the contents of the master, in the case that you're using any other than Oblivion.esm. I can make a master of out a standard house, inn, or shop mod, put the smallest dent ever in the land height, and get only the cell edit I expect. I can make a master from a UL mod to make a patch, and the same-sized dent flags twenty-two exterior cells as having been edited.

What I don't know is what the determining factor is - is it the sheer volume of exterior cell edits in the master? Is it edits that cross cell boundaries, and they're chain-reacting off each other when a cell containing one gets flagged (is that even possible)? Is there some leftover data from when a tree was plopped down, moved three cells over, and then saved in the plugin now functioning as a master? My inner mad scientist needs to know.

As would the rest of us, including ShadeMe. I've seen the same behaviour. I was creating a patch for something and always had to clean. I found a way to make the patch completely independent from the mods it was patching - no more cleaning. It does appear to be an odd chain reaction, as you suggest. My patch wasn't even doing any cell edits, but when it was a descendent (using java terminology), the master did have cell edits.

I've never seen such an error before so I'd have no idea.