Whats the best way to go about this? My group just got the version control working, and other things we modify merge just fine into the esm file we have. Terrain changes do not though. I have read that has to do with not being able to modify the skyrim.esm, but there was a hex code we changed to allow that.

This still didn't fix that.

Does anyone know of a good way to merge the terrain?

Bump?

Any help on this would really help our project...

I think the above has been a bit of an issue for many modders. What other tools are you using?

Version control is not something I've ever used (never taken on an ambitious group project as my capacity to dedicate time is unpredictable due to university and work commitments).

I'll tell you now that this isn't exactly my area of expertise.

If I could make a suggestion, from what I've gleaned here and there, somewhat related to the topic. Make all your worldspace and terrain edits in the single esp (an obvious suggestion, I know. haha) and then convert this file to an esm. Wrye Bash has the feature copy to esm and I've used it myself to great success for other purposes.

This esm shall then be your first master and you will copy every other plugin into this file (rather than trying to merge your worldspace.esp into XYZ.esm). I understand this suggestion may have grave implications and depending on how you've merged up to this point (I hope you've kept extensive backups) you could potentially lose some progress. If this is the case I would recommend setting up some test plugins really quick and seeing how it goes as to whether this is necessary.

Please know that my advice has been conjecture, but I wish you the best of luck!

This may not always be the case, but from what I've read, it sounds like you are supposed to create a blank ESM and merge into that.

We do have assets already merged but it wouldn't be too difficult to re-merge them if we can merge into a non-empty esm. I will be able to test that later this week but not today unfortunately.

I really appreciate it and will definitely try it out and keep you posted though.

I 'd be itnerested inthis as well as I have some cells to edit on Tamriel worldspace ...

What do you mean that it doesn't work? What happens? Do the LAND forms disappear from the list of your ESP in VC? Or do they seemingly merge successfully but no changes happen ingame?

The latter, no errors are thrown and the files seem to merge, but when you go into the cell or in game, the world space is the same as it is in vanilla.

Keep the Tamriel terrain changes in your esp.
I had the same problem. You can move things around in the Tamriel worldspace and merge to your esm. Onam list were created for this and things were moved successfully, but for some reason, terrain alterations were ignored
I had to keep the terrain changes in the esp and merge the rest. In the end, i just didn't bother with the terrain changes.