Some of you may remember a week or so ago when I posted that my mod file wasn't being loaded by the game? Well, I found out why.

It's whenever I add my own unique locations to the game. If I create a new Location Type, the next time I go to play my mod is not loaded up by the game. If I revert to before I added the locations, it loads up just fine.

What is going on here? I need to set up locations in my worldspace so I have a world location, my holds, towns, and one for each dungeon and so on. Along with having persistant locations for my NPC's so they can be Unique Actor alias's. Can anyone else sucessfully add locations to their custom worldspace?

Why would this prevent the game from loading the mod? I check it in the load order, same place as always, but none of the content is ingame anymore. It's just not being loaded in...

Thanks,
Alexander J. Velicky

I just added a new location, a lumber mill, to my custom worldspace. I created a new Location, assigned the LocTypeLumberMill keyword to it, added it to the exterior cell and checked it out in-game. No problems.

I've been using two custom locations on interior cells for weeks without any issues. One is used in the Tavern scripts and the other is used in the Jail scripts. Both work perfectly, as far as I can tell.

When you say 'Location Type' do you just mean a new Location, or are you creating a new Keyword as well? (I ask because the keywords start with 'LocType*'.)

Odd.

And I'm trying just a location. As in 'RiverwoodLocation'. That kind of thing. I make one 'parent' location for my entire worldspace, then several holds, and within each hold a location for each dungeon or area. It causes my mod to fail no matter what. I've tried just making certain locations. Just the parent world one, just a smaller indevidual location. When I add any new 'Location' my mod stops being loaded in by the game engine... It makes no sense. :/

I'm making no new keywords.

Okay I just tried this; I opened my mod, simply created a new location called TestLocation, set the name to the same thing, hit okay saved and tried ingame. It loaded in.

That means that it's something I'm doing with the location that's breaking my mods ability to load in, not just making them alone. I'm going to step by step make a location to see at what point it breaks, then I'll report back and see if I can get someone else to confirm the same thing.

Okay, wat? These are my results:

Creating a new location, and that's it, just making it: All good.
Assigning a new location to a custom interior made by me: Cannot Coc into the interior, but interior still exists and can be accessed via the load doors.
Assigning a new location to my custom worldspace: Worldspace still exists, but you cannot 'Cow' into it, and can only access it through load doors.
Assinging a new location to an exterior cell in the Tamriel Worldspace (Like the Lorkir's Tomb tutorial tells you to): All changes made to that vanilla cell are reset/no longer in effect.

As you can see, when I assigned a location to all 3 of my interiors, my exterior, and the cell I affect in Tamriel, I could Coc/Cow into nothing so I thought my mod wasn't loading. Though, the quests that were part of my mod didn't load either (Sqv said 'Lol wat quest'?), so that may have been the case... I did not check that this most recent time, I'll go do that now.*

*EDIT: The Quests are initiating now...

So adding a Location to a place just like half disables it... Anyone have any ideas? This is putting quite a dent in some of the stuff I had planned on doing here. :F

I created a new location for my interior and I can coc in...

I just tried coc'ing into my interiors. No problems. Random question: do you have markers of some sort in your cells? It looks for a COCMarkerHeading first, but will use other markers. If you don't have any markers at all, that may cause a problem.

Wat...
Oh yeah all sorts. Xmarkerheadings, PatrolIdleMarkers, DoorMarkers, CocMarkerHeadings. You name it. My cell is fully cluttered.

Okay so then, I must have some kind of a dirty edit that's interfering with all this. Boy I can't wait for TESVEdit to come out... Until then, I may filter through the 'Details' list in the CK to see if I can spot some dirty edits to take out. (As I think we all know that I have PLENTY in my mod that have built up)

So I looked through my mods details, and there is absolutely nothing related to Location type's, keywords, or encounter zones. I haven't a clue what would be preventing me from adding Locations like normal... I really would like to start adding them, but I just cant. Can someone do a step by step list of what you do to make a location and set it on a cell? Maybe I'm being silly and messing someone up? (Somehow...)

Interesting find; I recently forgot to set the esm flag when testing my mod. Normally I copy my esp, rename to esm, open in CK, close, then playtest. However I just copied it, then tried to test it without saving in CK.

I got similiar symptoms as when I added my own locations. I couldn't COC into my own cells, and trying to load in otherwise often resulted in an instant CTD. Can anyone think of a possible connection?

Well, for the record, locations decided to work abruptly for no reason...

I got around to them again, and I have sucessfully added a location and encounter zone to an interior. I have also added a location to the worldspace, and made a loading screen based of that.

So, it all appears to be working now... Either Beth fixed it at some point (Whatever 'it' may be), or t'was a miracle of the divines.

Don't you just love mystery fixes? I hadn't seen this topic before, but FWIW, I had no trouble adding a location to my alt-start mod for the farmhouse and assinging two Tamriel cells and a new interior to it, along with setting it as the persist location for the two NPCs who live there. Been in the mod for as long as I can remember.

Yeah, everyone else was saying they could do it. So I guess at some point something got corrupted, and through some means the CK must have overridden the corruption with proper data, thus fixing the problem? Oh well. I've only added like 2 basic locations, so soon I'll be adding locations to all of my 30 or so area's that I have so far. Hopefully they all work...

i know adding a custom location to a vanilla cell on an esm will corrupt the entire mod (self-delete most or all records)

Hmmm. I think that was it! I was trying to add a location to the one cell in my entire mod that is in Tamriel, and I gave the exterior a location and set it up as the tutorial says. That just may be it! I'll avoid that, thanks.

Though it does kind of defeat the point of that tutorial somewhat. Hopefully they can fix it.

well it works fine if you leave it on the esp. the vanilla cell cant have the location data changed on esm without an ONAM, and in this case the whole mod self-destructs.

assuming you are going to use an esm/esp combo, just make the location change on the esp only and you will be fine.

Then that's it for sure. I'm doing just an esm. So that's what caused it. I'll just avoid changing the location outside. The mod wont work for random bounties like I had hoped (Increasing it's feeling as 'part of the original game') but that's fine. Thanks for helping me figure that out!

another alternative is to use version control. i havent tried this yet, but you should be able to "check out" the vanilla location, edit it and merge it back into your esm with no ill effects. it's a bit more involved, but it should work fine.