So I thought I should write some of my thoughts now that very technically speaking I have created and released a mod whether or not it works for anyone I have no freaking idea but it "should". I'll keep problems encountered roughly chronological in the order I encountered them and bullet pointed for brevity, This is a rant, a bullet point rant for the most part, I'm sure some of my questions will be answered as I continue to tinker with the creation kit but comments are welcome

Just because I've made an absolutely tiny mod doesn't mean I've answered all questions I've had to ponder during the creation of the mod

I will mention all my problems, hiccups when it came to creating my mod as well as any other nonsense I want to spout

• Creation Kit is user hostile - Will crash for no reason, requires opening multiplesubwindows to perform one action, crashes, hangs. luckily crashing only happened twice. CTRL+S OFTEN
  
• Render Window is stupid - Doesn't look anything like in game, seams, holes in ceiling, Z fighting etc etc.
  
• Quests are oddly structured - Easy enough to follow along with a tutorial
  
• Catastrophic problems with dialogue - Dialogue doesn't work with start enabled quests if you don't generate a SEQ file, nice waste of an hour. - Tripping up Newbs is fun
  
• Topic branch things in views are started with a single dialogue option - Irritating limitation but can be worked around
  
• All dialogue is conditional - a disaster waiting to happen but understandable
  
• Fiddling with topics in a quest dialogue view will get ridiculous very quickly - save often, don't be afraid to throw things so you can fix them, Not sure how multiple views work or what is the normal thing to do, one view per conversation or quest stage?
  
• Aliases - Jesus H Christ, one bad alias reference can break every piece of dialogue in the quest, how the fuck does that happen without a single warning to the user. Otherwise pretty much everything in quests uses aliases so I need to get used to them and find a way to manage them in a way that is not haphazard
  
• Topics - How am I supposed to give every topic a meaningful name, I need a way to control this
  
• Scenes are a control freaks wetdream - Its like I have a finger up every NPCs ass and I'm carefully moving them around like a fingerpuppet, lots of control but very slow, basic and mistakes are easily made
  
• Moving the player character in scenes has a trap - Setting Player Ai Driven and Disabling controls is simple once you've been told, otherwise its a bit of a tripwire for an unlucky newb, thank you b3lisario and CPU
  
• Combining Scenes with Dialogue is colossal fuck up, NPCs like to wander off, eat bread, use doors, leave the cell, and sit in chairs - NPCs aren't agreeable to being a fingerpuppet and want to run away, I think I added a "hold position" ai package to my NPCs but im not sure of an elegant solution
  
• Navmesh Generation thankfully easy - I only did a little bit of this but it was very straightforward and pleasant - however when it does go wrong it can fuck up royally when npcs are trying to path through tables and etc
  
• I am stupid at Compiling Sexlab - I made a balls of this repeatedly following the instructions until I was pasting scripts everywhere, what a disaster,
  
• I am stupid at Sexlab - Got simple things working, basic animation selection and sex but as soon as Actors added through specific references in cells it fucked up hardcore and dumped me at the desktop
  
• Creating and editing Items is a pain - Fucking disaster, spent over an hour trying to change the appearance of a burnt book to a letter in skyrim (not my own mesh or texture) still no idea how to do it, gave up.
  
• Creating Actors is a pain - Terribly boring and slow, especially modifying the face and equipment, glad I didn't need to do much of this though polish would demand that I spend time on it. I just copied delphine like 4 times, sick of her face.
  
• Scenes and sitting on Zaz Furniture - Why is this so freaking broken, the assets are fantastic but the non controlled characters try to path through them, do not sit on them properly, and randomly fall off and get stuck inside the objects, am i supposed to teleport actors on and off these
  
• Packing mod to zip - Fucking Hell this is menial and quite frankly silly as I need to do it pretty much manually and I've read on forums that it doesn't work all the time from the archive.exe tool
  
• Compiling Scripts with Devious Devices - Very awkward because I needed to paste in a bunch of things. Sexlab Aroused v16 scripts, ZAP scripts, some other things I've forgotten but I pretty much googled the name of the script that was missing or not compiling and fired it into the scripts folder
  
• Getting help from Loverslab forum - Absolute Magic
  
• Training Google-fu - Google-fu levelled up significantly once I was playing around with Sexlab and DD
  

Whew. Heres a list of all my confusions from my first little mod quest creation mostly beginning with how

• How am I supposed to manage topic names in quest dialogue, it seems unncessary and weird
  
• How the hell do I perform sexlab sex with actor ReferenceAliases in a quest
  
• How am I meant to make 'pretty' npcs for my quests when I dont want to include a bunch of hair mods or faces
  
• How to manage including a sexlab or DD property for perhaps my entire quest without firing it into every papyrus fragment I want to make, ideally have one property with enough scope that I can call MyGodScript.Zadlibs.ManipulateDevice(etc) or MyGodScript.SexLab.StartSex(etc)
  
• How on earth does anyone do anything grand scale like the skyrim overhauls and entire perk and weapon overhauls, this must take a monumental amount of effort. I estimate the time it took me to get two npcs clumsily banging was at least two hours. and about another hour or two to add a DD item to one of them.
  
• What is the recommended way to use zbf furniture in scenes, wooden horses, stocks etc
  

Typos, grammar, punctuation all excused from being a ramble.