I've focused a great deal on spell-building, monster AI and scripting. My world-building skills are basically limited to what's covered in the tutorials. At some point I got the impression that modifying vanilla cells caused all sorts of problems and would conflict badly with any other mod that changed that cell. My mod requires traveling all over Skyrim, so I would be modifying a LOT of cells, including the Archmage's quarters and probably dozens of Tamriel cells. But, instead, I use a crazy workaround...

I keep all my monsters, statics, activators, books and other objects stored in new, empty cell. At each stage in my quest line, I move the objects from that cell to the XYZ coords they need to be.

As you can imagine, this is leading to a lot of complications and I'm starting to question whether I even need to be doing things this way. For my most recent mod, Dwemer Defense Drone, I went to a great deal of trouble to avoid editing MarkarthWizardsQuarters01 (aka the Dwemer Museum where you pick up the eponymous item) at all, but just after release I had to go ahead and force-ref an object in there to get around a bug... Now that cell is marked as modified and I'm concerned that any other mod that changes the museum will now get screwed up by my mod...

Is this level of paranoia really necessary, or should I feel free throw caution to the winds and just place these objects in the cells they're going to need to be in? How much trouble is this going to cause for other mod authors?

If I place a boss monster in a cell that another author has placed, say, a player home in, will either one or the other show up? Or is the game smart enough to merge the two so that both will appear?

Apologies if these are silly questions.

Nope, not silly questions at all. My understanding is that conflicts really only arise when two mods edit the SAME THING in a cell. For example, let's say you are modding Breezehome, and you move the food on the table around a little to make room for a new plate or something. You save and all is OK with the world. But lets say I am also modding Breezehome, and move the same food you moved to a different location on the table. This would directly conflict with your mod. However, all is not lost. All that would mean is that which ever mod was placed LOWER in your load order would override the other one.

Now where things start getting dangerous is when modders DELETE vanilla references. In the above scenario, lets say you deleted those food items, but I just moved them. It's likely that because my mod was trying to place those items deleted in a different spot, you could get CTD's. That's why a basic cardinal rule has always been NOT to delete vanilla references.

In my Helgen Rebuilt mod, I have NPC's in multiple Inn's and Taverns all across Skyrim, and I'm definitely not using moveto's to get them there. So, as long as you don't delete vanilla references, modding vanilla interiors is fine as far as I know.

If I'm wrong in any of this, the guru's may feel free to correct me. But that's has always been my basic understanding of how it works.

BTW, edit's aren't "dirty" as long as they are intentional.

You can place your stuff directly in the cells. The CELL forms themselves will override their original iterations, but new forms placed by your plugin will not negate preexisting stuff.

For instance, Dawnguard.ESM adds new stuff to QASmoke, a preexisting CELL form introduced by Skyrim.ESM. Its changes are additive and all of the original stuff is still there.

http://i.imgur.com/CPMkq.png

The green highlighted forms as well as the yellow are all overrides to Skyrim.ESM forms, the green ones are 'dirty' edits while the yellow is a deletion, both instances you'll want to avoid.

Do you have a link to TES5Edit? I didn't think there was such a thing, and does it work OK?

TES5Edit's still in alpha, but a screentshot seemed worth a thousand words.

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1412754-wipz-tes5dumpfuture-tes5edit/

Thank you so much, folks. I think I've been making things needlessly complicated for myself. Maybe now I can work a little faster and get EM done before Elder Scrolls 6 comes out