I build things from the sky downward....who am I?

I also appended the statement as a note at the very bottom of the written tutorial on the Wiki, and posted about it in the YouTube video's comments.

No official word on this yet? Until it is fixed we are pretty much stuffed as far as modding goes. Surely they will fix this issue...

Just discovered this today and it svcks. It's made days of work pointless.

I should have to do nothing of the sort. The OP presents something as a direct quote of someone else, and fails to cite his source. It is not our responsibility to investigate his claim, but it is his responsibility to back it up.

Your search found only different quotes of Nick Breckon and of some mysterious entity called reptilescorpio. The OP claims Todd Howard says the engine is "rewritten from the ground up", so the source containing Todd Howard's "rewritten from the ground up" needs citing.

Twitter is not what I would consider an authoritative source. Twitter offers brief blurbs, often having no context other than a brief, ambiguous question. Tweets can be spur-of-the-moment comments made without serious reflection. Tweets are unreliable.

The Game Informer article shows some thought. It tells of things that were done and of the reasons they were done. You can play Skyrim and see for yourself evidence that the author understood what was said. The OP, on the other hand, comes out and confesses that he has no clue what was done or why. He says that Todd said the engine is "rebuilt from the ground up", but he cannot say why the engine was rebuilt, what the rebuilding is meant to accomplish. He is like some tabloid reporter who just wants to spin a fiction to sell a magazine. Fabricated quotes and quotes taken out of context are popular tools for faking reality.

Well, everyday that I'm doing something other than what I wanted to really do, because of the bug, is pushing me further and further away from the urge to mod.


*takes big rant out*

I understand your frustration. I have a project I want to start, but I have been holding off because of this issue. Sometimes we have to adapt to circumstances, so that is what I am going to do. I will design my content, for now, with NPCs that are static in that they only appear stationary. I'll use scripts that physically relocate them at different times of day, so a schedule of activity is at least simulated even if the bug prevents the AI from following a path between points. My plan is to go ahead and do what the CK will allow me to do, and if BGS has not addressed this and other issues that stand in the way of my precise vision of what I want to do, I'm sure the community will assist me in finding ways to work around them.

As a member of this community who is actively maintaining the video tutorial list both here and on the Wiki, I have noted everywhere that is relevant that this navmesh issue exists. That way, going forward, nobody can say that nobody made them aware of it.

Thank you for making note of this bug on the wiki GB! The issue is such that many people won't notice it at first glance, and the navmesh would only sometimes break (when traveling 2 cells away, etc), so I'm afraid many end-users and modders alike won't realize for some time that their work is just inherently being rendered buggy through no fault of their own.

It was the right thing to do. I don't want in any way to detract from the awesomeness that is the CK. But modders need to know what sort of issues they may face that are completely out of their control, especially when the tutorials BGS put together have been followed to a T.

And if this is truly an intermittant bug, it is possible that it was missed durring the beta. Perhaps those who used the Beta CK to create content that needed new navmeshes didn't think to travel several cells away and come back to see if it was STILL working, after they confirmed that it was working on the first visit that session.

Its at least conceivable.

Regardless of that, it is an issue and it needs to be addressed. Prior to that, it needs to be known to anyone who may be working with navmeshes.

Joel posted earlier that they do intend to continue to update the CK and that they are paying attention to the community. I would rather they just fix the problems and then tell us, then chime in just to say they are working on it with no solution available yet. Besides... when we see developers post here, we need to remember that they are exactly that: Developers. They are not Public Relations people. If they post it means they care about their work enough to chime in on something.

They are not done making money with Skyrim yet. They have yet to release the first expansion, and let's face it, the end of the main quest feels like the prelude to something else. That the Dovahkiin's journey is only beginning. That the fate of Skyrim still rests on his/her shoulders and it could go either way. And i have to say that the way Steam Workshop is set up, they could release a mod and update its quests and events monthly, require it to use a resource ESM available only through DLC which would make the monthly ESP subscription playable, but also make more resources available to modders. If the prices are low enough and they release regular enough, they will draw both the modder and player crowds who want to see Skyrim last as long as possible.

I'm not saying that this IS what they will do. I don't work for them so I have no inside info. But they are set up to effectively profit from Skyrim in the long term. They were not set up like this with either Morrowind or Oblivion. It is in their best interest to support the CK, as they can potentially use it to push content as easily as we can. So it needs to work for them as well as us, regardless of how they decide to release content.

Update on this horrible mess of a bug. Some of you probably already know this, but since I just spent a bit of time checking on it I'll report it anyway.

False flagging an ESP file to fool the game into treating it as an ESM does not work on modified vanilla navmeshes. Even when using the editor ID trick. I checked in Riften using my Open Cities mod and found that NPCs there were having exactly the opposite problem from before. Instead of getting trapped on balconies, they're unable to leave the central market plaza area.

Further, while the editor ID trick does appear to work on vanilla navmesh forms, it DOES NOT HELP if your navmesh is unique to your ESP file. In that case, the navmesh will simply cease to function and there's nothing you can do about it. This effectively puts a bullet in the head of any sort of worldspace modifications to Tamriel since you cannot escape the need to edit navmeshes with anything more than extremely small house mods.

Your own unique cells will function as false-flagged ESP files, but there's a major catch with that for those who want to publish to the Steam Workshop. You can't. The upload process strips that flag from the file.

A more creative/aggressive solution is going to be required if Bethesda chooses not to fix this.

Bethesda has to fix this, otherwise almost half the modding community will be hung out to dry, and they will get an earful about how they shafted the modding community through their negligence and the community will never let them hear the end of it. Imagine how badly their reputation would tank in that scenario. People would probably stop buying their games because they don't care about the tools they provide us, and modding is practically the only thing their games have going for them right now.

They can't afford not to address these major bugs.

so currently the only real "fix" is a bonafide ESM? personally, i don't mind going the esm route since i will never publish those particular mods on steam workshop, but i don't really know how to make a true esm instead of a false flag esm.

No idea. There is no technical difference as far as I'm aware between a bona-fide ESM and a false-flagged ESP.

I noticed this as well in my own testing and suspected as much. It seems that false-flagged ESPs (and perhaps even bona fide ESMs based on my testing) cannot alter vanilla navmeshes.

Ouch. This would explain some of the difficulties that I have been having with my own mod..............

FWIW, I pm'd Gstaff. The more people who do this the better, I think.

I converted my file to esm using the follwing method:

renamed with esm extension manually
loaded file into CK
made some random change on the map and saved (to make sure it actually saves something)
opened in tessnip to confirm esm flag is there (it is checked).


i loaded the esm into skyrim and played around for a few hours, fast travelling to many cities to make sure to purge the RAM, and every single time i come back to my cell the navmesh bug is STILL there. but the difference is, i can easilly fix this by going into the next room over and it resets itself and all npcs work again (whereas with the esp i had to quit to desktop and reload the save). annoying, but at least it's not totally broken.


on another note, the esm seems to fix most of the mannequin glitches (they dont wander off their pedestals anymore) but it doesnt fix the mismatched skin tone on the other npcs like everyone says, even after doing the ctrl+f4 and saving facegeomdata

You shouldn't have to change anything in the file to ESM'ify. Merely saving an active false flag master = insta-bonification.

Does this affect exteriors as well or just interiors? I have a navmesh regenerated and then reedited in an exterior cell(s), will this be affected by the bug?

Yes, exterior cells are where I fell victim to it, but it affects ANY cell.

The trouble with this is that:

A - It does not affect edited NavMeshes, so vanilla NavMeshes that have been changed will still be subject to the bug.

B - Uploading to Steam automatically removes the ESM flag from your mod. And if it does this for every ESM (not just false-flagged), then this is the crux of yet another huge flaw in how the Steam Workshop support is handled.

What makes it happen for exterior cells? The video described going 2 worldspaces away, for exterior cells would this be just when you are beyond the loading area of the navmesh? Ugh... I hate all these ridiculous bugs that make it nigh on impossible to make new things in the game. I'm really reluctant about continuing to make my town mod until these issues are adequately resolved.

Do the devs ever reply to personal messages here? I sent one of the devs I saw on this forum section a while ago about the dissapearing large objects but never got a reply.

What's best practice for editing exterior navmeshes?

I read something about editing the navmesh that exists instead of deleting and giving it some kind of ID but I'm really struggling to find where I read it.

Mostly no. But, if enough of us make some noise, perhaps they might listen. This breaks so many things that it will kill modding for the noobs and hurt SW. I don't think Bethie wants that...........................

Whaaaaat?! I've just started modding yesterday and learned this bug at the same time mid-modding. Killed my motivation right away. What's the point in modding with a bug that huge! I can't believe it!