Next let's punch out the walls of the Whiterun old south gate and also the ruined east wall of Winterhold. We'll start by finding the problematic walls (and their associated navmeshes) and copying them to a working file, as well as building in any dependencies for the two NAVM records. Going into this I'm undecided, but I'm probably not going to mesh the top of the Winterhold wall - just punch out the side so actors don't get stuck on it at ground level.

 

The Whiterun old south gate doesn't have any conflicted navmesh, so that'll be pretty easy to work with. The top-level cell data has a few hooks but none of them appear to be relevant to the navmeshing. Same for Winterhold wall - so that's good, it'll make this process a little less complicated.

 

 

Here's the Whiterun gate. We have to be particularly careful about the little stone  knobs on either side of the entrance (see the red circle) because NPCs can and will get stuck on these. But there's a little wrinkle... see below:

 

 

The gate actually straddles four different navmeshes, so we need to record their form IDs can check them all for conflicts in order to ensure we aren't wiping out other mods' changes. Fortunately, a run through xEdit revealed that none of the four navmeshes are touched by any other mods, so we're free to start editing. So here below you can see kind of a gross punchout where we just removed the triangles that intersected the gate.

 

 

The next step is to fill in the areas that the mesh got pulled back from in excess. We also need to bend the preferred path area to avoid those two 'bumps' I mentioned earlier.

 

 

Here it is with the excess space filled back in. We'll finalize this (these!) meshes and then move on to Winterhold. Right off (no big surprise really) we see that this mod touches a lot of different exterior navmeshes. So we'll go through and check them all in xEdit for conflicts.

 

 

Fortunately, I only found one conflict - The Mysterious Breeding Rooms adds a door to one mesh which we want to ensure we don't lose. So we'll add TMBR as a master for our working file and also copy over the door reference for ease of access/checking. Fortunately the door is nowhere near the wall so it just needs to be there for finalization. Below you can see the first segment, with the walls punched out but the gates left walkable. On further consideration, I probably will also go in and do the top of the wall as it doesn't look like it'll be much of a problem to do.

 

 

And you can see the top in the image below. It was indeed pretty easy to accomplish.

 

 

Now we just need to go and clean the working file and then we can incorporate it into my conflict resolution patch. With that done, both areas should have no further problems with NPCs getting stuck. In addition to having tons of corrupted edge links, here's the other reason we need to clean the file:

 

 

Most of these were type 1 deletions, but I did find a single type 2 deletion that I had to go back into the CK to trim and drop. After taking care of that, the rest of the changes I made here were easy to integrate into my conflict resolution patch. However, I found a different conflict between Legacy of the Dragonborn and Ultimate College of Winterhold that I need to investigate - and I need to do so in the context of the wall mod also to make sure it doesn't mess with them either. Let's compare the two navmesh edits, first.

 

 

On examination, it looks like we can just forward the LOTD version of the navmesh and let it win - UCOW's change is small and unlikely to impact play at all if its missing. 

 

This won't be our last time making touch-ups like this. Not only do I suspect that there are other changes from The Ruins that pose navigation problems, but also I'm seeing a lot of edge link conflicts in my main conflict resolution patch that are going to make me need to go back and re-finalize some of those meshes.

Now let's get rolling with Bells of Skyrim. Right off the bat I can see that both of this mod's plugins are uncompacted. I'm not super thrilled about this, especially since its probably in my best interests to keep at least the main plugin uncompacted so it'll play nice with the Fortified Whiterun patches down the road. On the good side, there's no asset conflicts, which is helpful. Since I know I'm going to have to go into the CK to deconflict at least one of the bells, I'm going to go ahead and extra the BSA files this mod shipped with. They don't contain very much content so having it loose shouldn't be a problem.

 

 

This is an old enough mod that I'm not going to get bent out of shape about the lack of ESL flagging but seriously... it should have been flagged. Once we get Fortified Whiterun installed, I'll be coming back and compacting this mod - and in the meanwhile, I'm going to compact its patch immediately.

 

Both files were free of deletions, errors, ITMs, and navmesh edge link corruption. Actual conflicts were minimal, but there were three navmesh conflicts that may cause some headaches. Analysis of Windhelm reveals that its mostly just USSEP records forwarding and conflicting with my custom conflict resolution mesh. There's one added door mesh, but it uses a triangle that hasn't changed position and so we can patch it in safely with xEdit (we'll still need to regenerate the NAVI of course). 

 

Oddly, and by contrast, Whiterun reverts the USSEP navmesh fixes. Unfortunately we can't just manually patch it because USSEP adds two new triangles. We'll need to look up these two in the CK and compare visually. 

 

The big rock is Solitude. Bells adds a lot of triangles to SolitudeArch, which we've heavily modified as part of the Groot's Solitude project. We'll need to carefully analyze this and probably then weld on the new geometry from Bells (if it fits at all).

 

Before we start working on the navmesh, let's visit each city and make sure we don't have any geometry intrusion relating to the bells.

 

 

Whiterun has a simple terrain intrusion that we'll fix by disabling a few object references.

 

 

No problems with Markarth, and Riften is a lot less problematic than I feared. I think we just need to rotate the bell 90 degrees and pull it back towards the Jarl's hall a tiny bit.

 

 

Windhelm is a bit of a mess, with its bell in the middle of some industrial junk. I'll probably need to move the bell tower in its entirety.

 

 

And of course Solitude uses the same space as the bookstore. So we'll need to move the bell tower for Solitude also. 

 

So let's knock out the two easy ones (Whiterun and Riften) today and then we'll focus on the two capital cities in more detail tomorrow.

 

Whiterun is no problem, I jotted down the form IDs for the object that's intruding into the bell tower and I'll just disable them in xEdit.

 

 

For Riften, we're going to need to do this in the CK.

 

 

That should keep the bell post out of the way of the machinery.