During the previous chapter of this blog, we talked about the two major terrain blockers in Groot's - especifically, the Imperial Physician whose door ends up off center because of a building model change and the bookstore from Books of Skyrim that ends up in the same space as Groot's alchemy lab. We successfully repositioned the physician, but we couldn't get the bookstore to share its current location. Additionally, literally as I was writing that entry, I got a message from the mod author advising me that 1) a new version was up on the Nexus, and 2) it added interiors to most of the previously unused doors. Therefore, my earlier plan of just moving the door for one of these to a different building inside Solitude was a no-go.

 

The good news is that the mod author also told me that they don't plan on adding interiors to the six or seven buildings in the courtyard between the city gates. We'll use one of those today, and we'll be using it for the alchemy lab while keeping the bookstore in its normal place. Why? Because the bookstore has a more customized exterior, whereas the alchemy lab mainly just adds a banner. Therefore, it'll be easier to duplicate that look on a new building. 

 

To accomplish this, we need to start by disabling the old building. We'll do this using our existing working file; bascially, we'll go into the CK, delete all the geometry we don't want, then go to xEdit and "undelete and disable" to protect against potential CTD issues. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First we need to update to the new version of Groot's mod.

 

xEdit is reporting a bunch of navmesh errors relating to how this mod interfaces with LOTD. Initially I thought it was a case of bad data import, but on further examination it looks like this is actually a conflict between Groot's and my conflict resolution patch - something we should be expecting at this stage. Beyond, that we also had the same errors as last time, which we'll address (or defer) the same way as before.

 

Much more frustrating, the new version contains all the deleted navmesh from before. I'm kicking myself, because I should have checked this before I overwrote my old file with this new release. This is a major error that I can't ignore, and essentially it's going to be a huge waste of my time. Mod authors take note - please clean your mods before releasing them. Fortunately, I have xEdit backups of my previous work on this mod, so I'm hopeful that I can recover the previous navmesh work and not have to repeat it.

 

 

This mod also contains a hidden ITM where it reverts the characteristics of Erikur's house to vanilla, negating the fixes from the USSEP. I've patched this back to the USSEP data. 

 

Anyway, I'm just going to leave this stuff alone for now; we can come back to it later. Let's move that alchemy lab.

 

 

You can see here that we have four things that matter to us: the banner, the door, the teleport marker (the yellow cube near the door) and the building itself. We'll delete the building and the banner, but not the door and the marker yet, since we need to do some stuff with them in xEdit first. Here's our record for the deleted building:

 

 

Let's see if we have some SBitsandPieces buildings in the outside area.

 

 

We've got one - 80F0 - so let's use assess if that's a good fit for our relocation. First, let's examine the building in the game.

 

 

I think that'll actually work well. The only meaningful change we'll need to make is going to be to move the location of the banner, since it's hanging-spot is hidden by the hill here. We'll also get the form ID of the door and the coordinates for the teleport box while we're here. Since we're in town, let's also go over to the current location and make sure we aren't missing any statics that might have been hiding in plain sight when I visited the CK.

 

Fortunately, everything seemed fine. Let's make the relevant edits in xEdit now - basically we want to copy all the data except for the position from the old door to the new one, and then also remap the interior door from the lab to the new door and (importantly) the new coordinates that we measured earlier. This will leave errors in the navmesh, so we aren't done yet, but it we've officially moved the door. That just leaves the banner, which we'll do in the CK - here you can see the new position.

 

 

And here it is in game:

 

 

I need to raise it up slightly so it doesn't clip through the building but otherwise it looks good. However, can you spot the mistake I made? I forgot to move the door out of Solitude's persistent worldspace cell and into D74 (the main Tamriel PWSC), hence the missing door  

 

Let's fix those little glitches and then proceed.

 

 

 

 

And as you can see below, now the banner doesn't clip and the door does work. And most importantly, the bookstore is no longer stuck inside a different building!

 

 

With that taken care of, the next thing to do is to work through our punchlist of smaller conflicts, such as the market stalls. We'll start on that tomorrow (after I fix the reverted navmesh deletions) and start working our way closer and closer to full integration!