I followed the tutorial on how to make Skyrim.esm editable, so that it can be used with Version Control. This works fine, except for one aspect. All the Editor ID names and form IDs are correct, but most of the actual cell names (the names that show ingame) turn into gibberish. A few of them remain correct. See screenshot -

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/tambos.turf/Skyrim/CellNames.jpg

To play the game/test the mod, you have to revert back to the original Skyrim.esm, which I thought would fix things. It does,...unless you've make an edit to one of these cells. If you have, then ingame it turns to gibberish as well.

Is there anyway round this ?

Skyrim.ESM is a multi-lingual file. It doesn't actually have all of that text in it. Instead, all of that stuff just points to a location within its string file. You'll need to use http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2889 to first embed the English strings into the file.


And I'm sure you already know that editing Skyrim.ESM itself is really not a safe idea.

OK thanks, that explains things a bit.

I'm not actually editing Skyrim.esm. I'm editing my own esm, but in order for the CK and VC to allow edits to vanilla cells, it had to see Skyrim.esm as an editable master before it will let you merge your changes into your own esm...if you know what I mean.

I think it's just a safeguard against editing Skyrim.esm by mistake.