Hello all, I am interested in creating a mod that starts the player with a whole new character and totally apart from the main quest. It would be intended to be a stand-alone quest and would load a pre-made character at the beginning of pre-determined questline.

Does anybody know of any tutorials for this kind of mod? Or even what I should search for? The main problem I am facing is I don't even know how to phrase the question which makes it difficult to find out if there is reference material to help me get started.

As a minor secondary question, is there a good example somewhere of how to get a player and some NPCs to ride a card like in the beginning of the game?

Thanks for the help!

99.9999999% of ideas won't have related tutorials and will require you to learn concepts and apply them to achieve your goal.

This is one such idea.

The best anyone can do is point you towards the http://www.creationkit.com/, pat youhttp://saxangle.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/BACKPAT.jpg, and say "Good Luck".

I understand the sentiment but I'm sure somebody has done something like this. I found a few mods doing some "alternate starts" and I'm in the process of reverse-engineering them, but anybody who has done this kind of mod before will certainly have some lessons learned. All I'm looking for is some advice and pointers, along the lines of "Whatever you do, DON'T just delete the main quest!" or maybe even a link to a thread where somebody has discussed this already.

I'm not asking somebody to make it for me. I have already done all of the CK wiki tutorials and some experimenting on my own so I'm totally down for putting in the effort - I'm just looking for some help getting pointed in the right direction because I don't know the best way to start. Part of how a community grows is sharing information and creating an accessible knowledge base, after all.

Heh. That's a good start though

Having gotten mine working, and having done a tutorial for the subject in Oblivion, I'll see what I can do about writing one up for Skyrim once I'm more certain of the bare minimums that must be taken care of to sidestep the Helgen start.

Hopefully the process will also aid those who plan TC's that don't want Skyrim stuff getting in the way too, but MQ101 is hardcoded as a launch point so it has to be dealt with.

Arg I just realized I posted this thread in the wrong forum. Maybe a mod could pop it over to the Creation Kit forum please?

<--- newbie

Edit: Also hey Arthmoor! Yours was one of the mods I downloaded to try to figure out!

Moving to CK forum

All i can say is for your purposes better to look at Arthmoor's mod than my Developer Quickstart


But overall, there's not too much you need to worry about - the question is how clean you want the alternate start to be.

The simple way to do it is to add a new option for a new value of MQQuickStart (check out stage 1 of MQ101) where you move the player somewhere else.
Then the hard part is getting MQ102 to start properly, and getting Helgen to be destroyed.
I got the impression that Arthmoor did it much easier than I did ...

It was anything but easy. Tracking down all the various stages that did something to bring about Helgen's destruction wasn't easy, and there's still one I can't find that makes the hole in the tower when Alduin tries to eat you in the beginning.

MQ102 doesn't strictly need to be started to bypass things, and you can even leave much of MQ101 dangling if you so desire. At some point though it does need to be brought to a conclusion or the rest of the MQ won't function, and there's still plenty of dialogue that will make no sense at all if Helgen is still in one piece.

Duplicate MQ101 and give it an ID of MQ101A

Edit MQ101A removing the character generation part.

Edit MQ101 so that it ONLY includes the character generation aspect. Have it take place in some generalized area, such as an interior room. When it is done, have a forced dialogue that has two options. Play Dragonborn storyline and Play [insert title here]

Choosing Dragonborn will end MQ101 and begin MQ101A

And since everything about the main quest is now in MQ101A, it should start the game normally. The most notable change will be that there would be no perspective change for creating the character and the story events would progress...

The tricky part will be that EVERY single reference to MQ101 will need to be updated to refer to MQ101A. Otherwise the quest will be broken horribly.

A mod that does at least this should be released as a .ESM so that is serves as a clean slate for those wishing to produce alternative storylines. The option at new game start should always allow the player the option of playing the normal main storyline as well as the alternative.

It should be noted that everything I just said is based on my admittedly limited understanding of how the start of the game works. If I am wrong about any of it, please correct me.

Without me going back to the CK and all of the notes I made, it is a Scene in the DragonAttack (sub) Quest started by MQ101. I did find it ... If you really need to know, let me know and I'll dig it out of my notes (it was one of my possible pickup points)

I'd advise against going this route for precisely the reason you later spelled out. Ridiculous amounts of other things would need editing. It's easier to fork MQ101 using the MQQuickstart global variable and hijack its first stage to proceed to your own quest. If one later chooses to run Helgen, set that global back to 0 and then invoke MQ101 stage 10 and everything is golden.

The final stage of MQ101DragoNAttack does *most* of the work (A few NPC's are left behind ...)
The difficult part for me was that MQ101DragonAttack doesn't always want to start ... don't know if it has a problem filling aliases, but I could only get it to work by going outdoors.

There's a weird looking check about the PC being in "some area name that I cannot remember". Once that area is exited - it is Helgen, basically - then the rest of the clean up is completed. I never finished 100% of the anolysis, but I was pretty certain that - if nothing had interferred (no other impacting MODs installed) - all characters and settings were completed satisfactorily (but then you see people reporting that X does not play for them and wonder if that is always the case).

I'd go and find it all, but I decided to Restore Vanilla by verifying the cache files of my CK ... But steam doesn't want to finish the updating ... Which is going to mean a reinstall of the CK ... but definately not now