Tutorial on modding an existing location?

E

eardstapa

First time out of the vault
What I want to do is pretty simple: add a bed and some containers to some existing interior locations so I can use them as housing. I would also like to create a mod package for FOMM of this mod.

Is there a tutorial for doing something like this? It seems like most of the ones I've found are a lot more complicated, e.g. building an entirely new location.

Also, how safe is something like this? Is it possible to permanently screw up the game files, or would I just be able to disable the mod and then the location would be back to normal?

Any help would be appreciated.
 
Drag and Drop, thats pretty much all there is to simply adding stuff. Open the GECK, choose the location you want to edit, open it in render window. Choose the stuff you want to add in the object window (for example a bed, found under world objects- furniture) and drag and drop it where you want. Save the file, activate it and have a look in game. Don't worry to try out stuff, you can always just disable the mod and are back to normal.

left click and hold to move stuff around, holding Z while doing this will raise and lower the object
right click and hold to rotate
F to let the object fall down on the next layer (floor)

Forget about FOMM-Packages for simple stuff like that. If you don't use new assets, like your own meshes, new sounds and stuff like that, the mod consists only of an esp file. The package feature makes sense only if you add tons of stuff to various folders. Uninstalling can be a bugger after that because you have to trace all the files and delete them unless you use the package manager.

Unless you try to edit the main esp you can't really break the game because you can always just disable the mod that causes weird stuff to happen and everything reverts to normal. Keep a Backup of the main bsa files and nothing really bad can happen:)
 
Thanks for the help. I guess I thought it was more complicated than it really is.

I ran into a problem though. After I first make my .esp file then try to load a cell, it throws a bunch of errors about missing textures. It has "yes", "no" and "yes to all" but there's no question. If I hit no the program exits, if yes, the cell loads but I can't see anything at all in the render window. I made sure the lights were on, but the window is completely blank.

Do you have any idea what this could be? I'm currently validating my game cache. I can't think of anything else to check.

Edit: I found out if you just double click on an object in the cell the render window will load everything.

Also, after adding some stuff to my hideout, I tested it and everything seems to work! Thanks again.
 
Can't have a look ingame because I don'thave FO3 installed, only NV. But nice to see it worked. Good work and keep at it. The moddability of Bethesda's games was always one of the things that kept me amused long after the point the game itself was interesting to me.

Did you copy a preexisting cell and edit it or build it from scratch? If it's from scratch don't forget to add navmeshes.

Building and changing cells is the first step.
Then some dialogue and quest related stuff, like giving three dog some intelligent lines
After that, i suggest some simple model editing (using nifskope)
then model creation using blender (never got the hang of that myself)
then scripting....

and then you can basically build your own game:)
 
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