That's like asking "what can a bit of rust do to a car?" Maybe nothing, maybe your fender will fall off, maybe your brakes will cease to work while on the highway. Even when the fender that falls off won't hurt you and just make your car look funny, I might be the one driving behind you when it falls off. The same applies to unclean mods, apart from looking sloppy they might cause damage under certain circumstances.

Not sure if anyone has mentioned this yet (didn't read everything closely), but if you go to where you load files to the editor (File -> Data), next to the Set as active file button at the bottom there's a button named Details.
If you click this while having your file selected it will list all changes you've done.
Then if you find a change that's not supposed to be there, you can hit delete. That will give it an "ignore"-flag, which will permanently undo that change.
So the cell or whatever will be restored to default and not have a * next to it.

EDIT: Edited typos

But that's like saying that a bit of rust will somehow cause this twenty story building to collapse... you can say that, but I'd rather know the details: what that bit of rust actually does to destroy the building. If you open an esp... do nothing in a cell, and a little asterisk comes up without you changing anything, what harm does that do? What's everyone really concerned about?

Because that record has be added to your esp file. Which means.... refer to my above post.

Missed your answer, thanks for the explanation.

Nice black mage.

here's another anology:

you're driving down a freeway in a truck, a blanket flies out of the back of your truck bed without you knowing. it doesn't matter right? that was an old blanket anyway it has no effect on you...... but it caused a 30 car pile up behind you without you knowing.


ok maybe a little bit overly dramatic but hopefully you get the idea.

that harmless jug you moved in breezehome is harmless to you but it could be a part of someone else's mod. if your mod loads after theirs, your jug will override their jug (maybe they moved that jug to place a key to their new expansion room, and now your jug moved it back into place, covering the key)

maybe a jug isn't worth crying over, but imagine of you accidentally made a change to a NPC or some thing larger without you knowing.

Black Mage is what my father. Call me Steepled.

Couldn't you load just your mod, select all the corrupted cells, and hit Delete, then save?

Dang, doesn't work...it just treats it as if you deleted it in Skyrim.esm, which isn't good at all..

why on earth would they make it so just looking at the data and not changing anything causes your mod to overwrite that thing? That's a major bug in the editor!

Someone could make a mod called "Peekaboo" where all they did was look at everything in the editor and save. It would completely wipe all mods before it in the load order...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIpxvudnjSo

that might just "mark for delete" on that cell, which will cause the cell to disappear in skyrim when your mod loads.

regardless, there are many ways to fix the issue. the point is just be aware it happens and clear your esps accordingly.

friends don't let friends upload dirty esps to steam workshop.

No, that's a major bug in human design, it's very difficult for us to move our fingers (to click on something) while keeping the rest of the hand absolutely still (to not move the mouse). we also have a slight attention problem and often click on OK automaticaly without thinking what might happen if we do so.

Unless Skyrim is drastically diffferent than Morrowind or Oblivion (I haven't downloaded the CK yet so can't check) this is wrong.

In previous games, if mod A added a forge to Bruma and mod B added a barn to Bruma the Rule of One would not apply and both the forge and the barn would show up. If mod A and Mod B both made a change to the forge the Rule of One would apply and the last change loaded would affect the forge.

But, as I say, it's possible that Skyrim is different. Someone else will have to confirm for sure.

I noticed that duplicating a cell marks the preceding one as changed. So if someone else modded that other cell, there might be esp precedence trouble. Is there a workaround for this? I suppose making a cell from scratch should become the norm.

That's not my understanding. I think there can be multiple changes within a single cell, but there cannot be multiple changes to the same properties of objects in a cell. So:

If Mod A moves the forge in Riverwood from its current location,
mod B accidentally clicks the forge but doesn't actually move it,
and mod B loads at a higher priority,
the forge will be back to its regular location instead of where mod A wanted it to be.

However:

If Mod A moves the forge,
and mod B changes the size of the forge,
you will have a larger forge at the new location

The is the beauty of TES, as I understand it. Please correct me if I'm wrong.


EDIT: OK, so I'm half right, went in and tested it:

Mod A changes size of object O and adds object A
Mod B changes location of object O and adds object B
Result: Object O's location has changed, but the size has not, and both objects A & B are in game.

So: Multiple objects can be added, but only one set of changes per object to a given object will register. And the danger of an unclean mod remains: If your mod touched an object but didn't change it, the game will register a "change" consisting of the original coordinates. If mod B comes along and moves it, but your mod is loaded at a higher priority, the object will not be moved.

i belive the override happens at the formID level, not individual subrecords and certainly not partial bit data within a subrecord (what you're describing).

so if one changes scale only and one changes location, the latter load order takes all for that particular formID.

Tip of advice to you. Copying objects from vanilla (Bethesda-developed) cells is probably never a good idea (IMHO, anyway), as it always registers as a change to that cell. A better idea is figuring out what the name of the objects you want to use by carefully double-clicking (as in not accidentally dragging while clicking, as that may change the location of the object, making the mod "dirty") on that object and looking at the name of the base object in the Reference window or the Cell View window, and then find those objects in the Object Window. For example, if you want to use a certain vase that is also present in a vanilla cell, you would look up the Editor ID of the object in the vanilla cell, and then look under the appropriate category in the Object Window (let's say this one is an item, so you would look under "Items"). To save time and frustration, you may want to make good use of the filter feature, so long you have the right directory (the different categories) highlighted, or else you'll never find what you're looking for. Copying objects from cells from other mods is probably not a good idea either. It may be a little more time-consuming this way, but ultimately, if done right, you'll have a lot less 'cleaning" to worry about. If done wrong, however, well you still end up with a big mess to clean up.

Never tried duplicating a cell, but I hear that causes "changes" to the original cell as well. As a matter of fact, I think it is literally impossible to create any new cells without it registering as a change to a preexisting cell, at least it pretty much was in Oblivion's CS, anyway.

You are correct. Rule of One only applies to edits to the same record. Adding a new barn + a new forge to the same cell works perfectly fine.

What that would wipe out though is if the barn mod also changed the water heigh, but the forge mod didn't. If the forge mod loads after the barn mod, then the water height would be reset.

I just did the exact same thing to test, apparently I was wrong. I could have sworn I had to make changes to a mod in MW to prevent cells from overwriting. Oh well, change the items in my example from cells to anything else in the CK and it holds.

Why the hell cells are special, I don't know. Would have been nice if they did the same for leveled lists.

We really could do with a big sticky thread of things like this to watch out for with using the CK, with the contributions of all those in the know.

It's quite worrying reading stuff like this, especially for people like myself who are total modding noobs.

I just never could understand (for all theses Beth games back to Oblivion) how this issue with this REALLY EASY to make dirty edits did NOT effect the Bethesda employees that were making DLC content like the Knights of the Nine?

I mean if they were using the same official DEV tools we are they had to have the same problem ....right?

Did they have dirty plug in files in their DLC?

I don't know about gamesas-made DLC off the top of my head, but the DLC packs for Fallout New Vegas (made by Obsidian of course) certainly have dirty edits in them.

The problem is that I loaded up a cell in the cell view window by double-clicking it. I got an error ('Yes to All'd it) and before I even got to look at the contents, the cell was flagged as changed. I didn't have to do anything. Just makes more work.


Edit: In Oblivion, I think all the DLC's were 'dirty', if I recall correctly.

Yes, they are listed as dirty on the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/index.php/TES4Edit_Cleaning_Guide.

You might have, in MW. I have basically zero experience with mods for MW because the only two I did worked fine and were relatively simple.

Because leveled lists don't contain actual attached references the way cells do. Leveled lists are the records. The equivalent would be as above, two cells editing water height. Only one can win that.

They did, huge numbers of them even. KOTN was quite the offender in that regard. The Fallout 3 DLCs weren't nearly so bad, but 95% of those was all new content that wasn't deeply integrated with the main worldspace.

You can run two copies of the editor. One for making changes in and one for looking around.

No worries, such things can happen to anyone, even experience modders. Anyways, thanks for the heads up, I assume I'll have a lot of crap stacked in my "my 1st dungeon" practice mod hehe.