I have Battlehorn Castle Enhanced and it has a nasty crash on exit all the time. I am told this is due to some errors made during it's altering of the world space.

Apparently you shouldn't delete things like spawn points, but isntead disable them or put them underground, is this true?

And what if I want to remove some trees and rocks?

How can I avoid these kinds of errors in my first exterior house mod?

My house will be situated on the IC isle, just north of the IC's main bridge and Stables.

From what I understand, mods that alter cells in a worldspace conflict with each other very easily. Instead of directly adding them, I'd suggest creating a script that adds the house and door to the exterior. You could either place the exterior house model within your interior and move it to the exterior with script (dummy cell), or use PlaceAtMe to create the items where you want them.

I'm not sure about the specifics though, since it's been a loooong time since I last modded.

I'm not sure what you mean by add it with a script.

I mean, I would need to know where to place it and make sure the land is right. I wouldn't want it plopping down over a tree or rock.

How do you position it exactly with a script?

Also, how do I remove grass? I have some showing up under my front door step.

I don't know about that. I do know that the CS doesn't like it when you try to delete a Persistent Reference.


Those should be safe to delete, as long as they aren't Persistent References. I deleted a lot of trees and rocks when I made a house for myself and haven't had any problems.


As long as you don't modify anything referenced by a script or AI package, you should be fine. You will need to delete any pathgrid nodes that are beneath your house, otherwise creatures and NPCs will try to walk right through it (without using the door). The easiest way to do this is to select your house in the Render Window once you have it place, and press the number 1 to put your house (and only your house) into wireframe mode. Then click on the Pathgrid icon to see which nodes you need to delete and proceed to delete them. Note: when I say "press the number 1", I mean the one with the exclamation mark above, not the one on the Number Pad.

Ok, how do I change my house back again from a wire frame?

And how do I erase grass? I see it is attached to the textures that can be placed for the floor. But can't seem to change them. I click on the texture in the Landscape Settings window, but I can't place them.

To erase grass, just overpaint the area with a texture that has no grass.

I believe the "wireframe" is a toggle control, so just do it again to switch back.

Throwing in a couple more points about houses:
Don't put them in the middle of a road. Even if you re-route the road around the house and adjust the path grids, the Road records can only be rebuilt for the entire worldspace, and you don't want to do that.
Don't put an NPC's home too close to spawn points for anything he can't handle, or your NPC won't live very long.

Normally, Wireframe is an easy to toggle control that you would just press again (like Ghastley says), but that won't work in this case. To return your house to normal, you will have to select it from the right hand side of the Cell View window, then click the top of the Render Window (not anything in it, you just want the window itself to be the active one) and then press the number 1 again.

Just thought I'd chime in here... NEVER move a spawnpoint below the terrain. Spawns which are placed below the terrain, either due to misplaced markers or pathgrids often cause crashing, If you're editing a vanilla cell and moving around pathgrids or spawns, users of your mod should not visit these locations until after the world has been respawned for exactly this reason.

It's this which is a common cause for some people having CTDs from your mod while others with similar setups run it fine. If you're unsure if this is the cause, always test from a new game.

For vanilla objects, although disabling is a better option, deleting non-persistent objects shouldn't cause any serious problems. If however you're basing a .esp off content in another .esp, disabling is the only way to go, and still requires deisolation to prevent crashing as one .esp tries to remove objects which don't exist within that .esp.

Ok, so just leave spawn points where they are and just disable to be on the safe side?

Yep, and adjust the pathgrid. Then make sure that either the cells are being freshly loaded or havn't been visited since the last respawn.