Okay, I'm new to modding but a question occurred to me after reading several threads and I was honestly having trouble tracking what was and wasn't an answer and of course the threads have grown and I really don't feel like rooting through hundreds of pages again so here's my question.

I am in the early stages of creating a small "suburb" of Whiterun. It will consist of multiple buildings. One of which is a modified Jorrvaskr (this building will serve as a tavern and player home). I was wondering if I have to create a, I don't know what to call it, a "safe cell" to transistion from the interior of this building to the Tamriel cell or can I just do a straight link from JorrvaskrTavern load door to Tamriel load door.

Another related question: when NavMeshing around useable furniture do I put the NavMesh around the object or like half-way through it.

Example: Imagine 'O' is the top down view of the barstool with the sitting character facing up page.

Now would I place the NavMesh around the barstool like -|O|- or do I place it through the barstool like --O-- ? I no longer have a problem with them getting stuck but I'd like to know for furture reference and ease of NavMeshing, I use the around method.

Another question, and I'm not sure this is related to NavMeshing or not, is How do I get NPCs to use more of the worldspace? For example. I created a merchant/barkeep, a bard, and a bouncer. The merchant is at the bar near where Gray-Mane's quarters were and he uses the keg, a chair, and the barstools near the bar. But he never uses the cookpot near the fire in the middle of the room or the chairs over near the stairs to the basemant. The bard never uses anything but the chair near her sing song marker, and occassionally she doesn't respond to my requests if she's sitting. The bouncer moves from his wall lean areas to the chairs but never to the bar or cook pot.

Any help would be appreciated. (Please note I've already watched the tutorials.)

I'm not sure what you mean by a "Safe Cell" but you can create a door in the exterior worldspace (Tamriel) that links directly to a door in your interior space.

As for nav mesh, you're doing it the right way. Nav mesh should go exactly where NPCs are meant to and able to walk.

For your NPC's...look at their AI packages (probably a sandbox package) and maybe increase their wander radius...sounds like it is too small and they aren't able to access far-away markers? Usually a radius of 1024 should give them plenty of area to roam in an interior.

And like chuckbartholomew said....no "safe cell" is needed...just link direct between the 2 areas.

The buffer cell is only needed if you experience a CTD while travelling from interior to exterior. You won't need one to travel from exterior to interior.

Smaller cells don't seem to suffer this problem, probably because the memory usage is minimal. As your cell grows in size, more memory is used and for some reason it is not flushed when you travel directly to an exterior worldspace. The result is an immediate CTD (or sometimes you travel into a grey void).
That's why a buffer is needed between the interior and exterior. Travelling to the empty buffer interior cell does not cause a CTD. This clears the memory from the big cell and allows you to travel to the exterior.

Read more here -

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1362739-grey-screen-on-coc-to-towns/

Thanks for the replies folks.

I'll probably have more questions as I go.