Hey everybody, I'm pretty new to the forum although I have been working with my brother (User: Gargion) on a fully voiced quest mod and dungeon. I'm posting to get some answers and hopefully put this out there as a source of help for those with similar issues.

So here's the story. One night my brother went in and fixed a bunch of scene and quest issues we's been having. He saved and created a backup that night.

The next morning I continue; testing the quest and scene to see what changes were made. Everything is okay.

I make another backup (to be safe) and began working on one of our cells (cluttering and that mess...) and after about three minutes decide to load my backup instead of manually deleting what I had. (I know I shouldn't have done it.)

Long story short - I don't know exactly what happened - once I was done working for the day the scene changes that had been made were gone, but all my changes were there. I must have loaded the wrong backup. I then proceed to open my brother's backup and copy my updated cell into the .esp where the scene/quest changes were made. After my splicing everything seems to work okay, however there is a notable issue. After visiting my copied cell (coc MOD1HallsofInsecurity) I cannot return to a specific point in Whiterun using the coc command (coc WhiterunPlainsDistrict02.) I am not sure if this is the result of my tinkering or what, however, the problem only persist once per load (That is while visiting my cell and using the coc command to Whiterun the command will execute properly the first time. Punching in the command a second time successfully loads the Whiterun cell and everything is working again.

Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.

Additional Information:

Process for copying the cell

Opened Creation Kit
Loaded Skyrim.esm and Update.esm
Loaded MOD1Q.esp (the duplicated cell's original .esp) and Test.esp (a temporary .esp used to store the cell) with Test.esp being the active file.

* I did this because a direct move results in duplicates of all cells as the original and target plugins are both iterations of the same file (one was a backup)

Duplicated MOD1HallsofInsecurity (duplicated cell) and renamed to MOD1Temp
Saved to Test.esp
Loaded Test.esp as active file
Rendered Cell MOD1Temp to clarify cell transfer.

*No Problems

Loaded MOD1QAlt.esp (duplicated cell's destination) and Test.esp with Mod1QAlt.esp as the active file
Deleted MOD1HallsofInsecurity
Re-Loaded MOD1QAlt.esp (duplicated cell's destination) and Test.esp with Mod1QAlt.esp as the active file
Renamed MOD1QTemp to MOD1HallsofInsecurity
Saved to MOD1QAlt.esp
Loaded MOD1Q.esp as active file
Rendered Cell MOD1HallsofInsecurity to clarify cell transfer.
Saved to MOD1QAlt.esp
Renamed .esp files

*"MOD1Q.esp" to "MOD1QMain.esp" and "MOD1Alt.esp" to "MOD1Q.esp" to match .bsa

Tested

*No problems except what is listed above.

It sound like you didn't make the esp the active file when you started. Simply putting a X in the box is not enough.
This means that you would be prompted for a file name when you tried to save your edits/additions. If you clicked the original esp, then the new esp would overwrite the file, but it would only contain the work that had been done in that session.

The rule to remember is - Always remember to set your esp as active.

I try to set the files I wished to be saved to as active files. I may have missed that during my work period however I highly doubt it - the process is second nature to me. Regardless that doesn't help me with my current problem.

Edit: On second thought, I made several backups, saved and tested the .esp several times, so I definitely set the .esp as an active file. The most likely scenario is loading the wrong backup.

It sounds like there are a couple things you're doing that CK may not like.

First, try not to load additional files once you've loaded some already. Example: click the 'load plugin' button, select all the correct ESMs and d-click the plugin you want to edit. Once that loads, you should exit the CK completely before restarting it and loading anything else. If not, some data may load, some may not, some may stay in memory, etc etc... I always had problems doing that so I quickly started the fresh-load technique for everything. It's a pain and takes a while, but I never have stange happenings in terms of data.


Second, an ESP shouldn't reference/use or change something in another ESP. This may technically be possible, but if you need to have a plugin dependent on another plugin, the latter should be converted to ESM (after ensuring nothing in it alters another ESM, unless you know how to make an ONAM subrecord in 3rd party software). You should only load more than one ESP to see what something looks like in conjuction with the plugin you're editing.. but take care NOT to alter anything in the non-active plugins.

Well, while I much appreciate the help this isn't really going anywhere. I wish I knew just what the problem was and whether it was serious or persistent enough to warrant going back and reconstructing the cell or the scene. This issue doesn't seem to cause any normal game play errors, I just simply cannot coc to WhiterunPlainsDistrict02 while visiting my mod cell. I've tried coc - ing to WhiterunPlainsDistrict02 from random cells throughout the game including other custom cells in the mod, yet still none present the same issue. If anyone knows a reliable way to copy cells between .esp s I could simply reload a backup and transfer the cell; otherwise what I'd really like to know is whether or not this is an issue worth worrying about.

After further investigation I have discovered that this problem persists in all of our backups of not only the Halls of Insecurity cell but also two of our other dungeon cells (Halls of Dread and Halls of Cowardice) The problem is rooted much deeper than the duplication of the Halls of Insecurity Cell and likely cannot be rectified without removal of all areas of our dungeon that exhibit this problem. Until more information comes out I guess we'll just keep pushing and hope that this issues don't grow to impact gameplay.