So the first thing to do when starting a new mod with new locations and world spaces is to start creating those new locations. At least, that is what I’ve gathered so far in my research. For a decent mod, you’ll of course want to have a proper navmesh, and the only way to do that is to have an ESM file containing your spaces. It’s easier to create the basics of what you need and navmesh it, convert it to ESM, and then clutter and create your scripted scenes in an esp file companion.

So that’s what I’ve started with. For my mod, I’m creating a new world space. Two, actually, and both are islands.

The quickest and easiest method for terrain generation of any sort is to create a “height map.” If you’ve been to school, you probably know what one is. In the odd occurrence where you haven’t, a height map is an image of an area or locale with gradients in hue or shade depicting whether something is higher or lower in relation to other spots on the map.

To create and convert a height map into a form you can use in Skyirm, I highly recommend the tutorial from the good people at Hoddminir. It’s what I’ve been using to generate the height map for my island world. A long time ago, I used to create world spaces for Oblivion using a height map. This is actually a lot more easy.

You may have to fiddle around with the settings to get exactly what you want, and I had difficulty when the tutorial spoke of adjusting the height map for import into TESAnnwyn. I created several versions of my height map until I came out with something I was satisfied with. My advice, when lowering the brightness on your TIF file, is to take the eyedropper tool and click on the lightest part of your map, and then adjust the brightness until it falls within the acceptable range that Skyrim can handle. It will tell you in the color panel what gray % your highest area will be. Be warned, however, that at 76% it will generate as the highest possible mountain and if you don’t have a smooth enough gradient, it WILL create rips in the space-time continuum, as below:

If you have a small island, like mine, what I would do (and actually had to, with this height map) was reduce the contrast until the landmass fell between 92% at the highest and 97% just before water level. It created a pretty good world.

 

I tried it with 95% to 98% and got a much smaller island.

Helpful Tip: If you preview your new world space in the Creation Kit, as I did, you may notice that it will only render a few amount of cells at a time. Provided that you aren’t running anything else, and that your world space is barren like the ones above, you can click File> Preferences > Misc Tab and change the “Grids to Load” from 5 to any number between that and 20. You may want to stick with 11 or 13 if your computer is lower end, but I have had success using 20 grids before. Don’t use this on larger, populated world spaces like Tamriel unless you’re absolutely sure you want to crash.

Now, LOD generation is provng to be much more difficult. My first attempt at setting up for LOD via the first method described in the tutorial was… interesting. I loaded it up in Skyrim, and coc’d my way into the world space, and found myself surrounded by water on all sides.

Oops.

Apparently, by following the tutorial, it somehow raised the water level… to… some really… really… epic depths. I had to toggle god mode on, take the water walking boots off, and swim down for three minutes straight before I hit the top of the mountain on my island. For a while I thought there wasn’t going to be a bottom.

It turns out I had forgotten to add the – before 14000.0000 for the default water height and LOD water height. I adjusted that to the right value.

 

Flipping eggs.

Oh well, at least I’m ready for the next step: Creating LOD.

Using the CK, I loaded up the esp file and went to World> World Lod and started generating. Of course, it has crashed at least once and I am wondering if it plans on crashing again. Either way, this process is taking far too long for my taste. I think, for future world spaces I may use, I’ll probably populate it before generating the LOD.

 

What the ever loving….

….

 

Okay, yeah, that looks like a Salvadore Dali.

I have no idea how this happened.

Well, at least the map is working. Sort of.

Back to the drawing board.