User:Thingy Person

Welcome to the Arcane Mystic assignment for quest and dialogue implementation, where you will implement the small settlement of Marlinsvik, situated on Skyrim's northwestern coast. Although the scope of the settlement has been kept small, it is still a beefy exercise, and by the time you're done, you will have familiarized yourself with a sizeable amount of Creation Kit elements that will be useful for a project and for your own mods.

The writing document folder for Marlinsvik can be found here:

And you can load this esp as your active file and build off of it. It contains level design for the village, although the houses are of course still unpopulated:

This document, originating from the Beyond Skyrim: Cyrodiil project, lists many of the required steps, although some of its contents go beyond the scope of this exercise. For the most part, you can rely on the instructions below.

The exercise can be divided into four parts, taking you across all of the essential steps in implementing a settlement:

• Basic setup of the NPCs and any data needed to make the settlement function
• Dialogue and scenes
• AI packages
• Quests

Setup

• Creation of the NPC records
  • It is best to start with creating the Actor base records of the five NPCs (including the dog). Set them as "Unique", write their full name in "Name" and, if they have a surname, write only their first name in "Short name". EditorID should be of the format "<prefix>FirstnameLastname".
  • Thankfully, you do not need to waste time recreating their faces, because the writer has supplied .npc files for them in the "Facedata" folder that you can import. Set the actor to any of the playable races so that the "Character Gen Parts" tab becomes visible. Under this tab, click the "Import" button and select the .npc file. This will take care of setting the correct race, sex, weight and face data.
    • Wiske, being a child and thus not a playable race, does not have an .npc file, so you will have to improvise based on the written description.
    • Gaubelin is described as an Elder, which is technically a separate race designed to look older than the playable races. The .npc file is for a Breton instead; after importing, you can try setting his race to an Elder, which preserves most elements, but arguably looks worse. You can decide how to go about this. Note that the Elder race does not distinguish between Nords and Bretons and doesn't confer racial bonuses.
  • You will, however, need to configure the NPC's stats and inventory. Unique settlement NPCs tend to have static level, so don't use the "PC Level Mult" flag. A level between 5 and 10 seems appropriate for ordinary people; compare with NPCs from a similarly sized settlement like Shor's Stone for example. Combat-focused NPCs can be a bit more. You can use the "Auto calc stats" flag which will compute individual skills based on the level and their class. Set this class to something suitable rather than the default "EncDremoraMelee".
  • For their inventory, pick an Outfit that seems suitable and ideally fits the written description. Sometimes, you may have to create a new Outfit, but this shouldn't be necessary here. It is generally good to add a "LootCitizenPockets..." leveled list to the inventory so that they have some randomized objects on them.
  • For AI Data, make sure they at least help allies (i.e. close family) and possibly friends and allies.
  • For Gaubelin, don't forget to give him spells. You have some leeway to be creative here.
  • Once all NPCs have been created, set Relationships between them. Each pairing of NPCs that know each other should get a relationship if they are at least friends, or rivals.
    • Pick an association type that best fits their relationship. For example, Jerome is not Wiske's father, but stands in for one, so arguably you could choose ParentChild. Family and lovers should get the "Ally" rank, others "Friend".
    • The EditorID format is <prefix><Parentname><Childname>, where Parent is the "senior" NPC and Child the "junior" NPC. For association types that are essentially equal, the ordering is not important.
• Creation of Locations records
  • A Location is an abstract piece of data that holds information which could potentially be used in radiant quests. Create a "<prefix>MarlinsvikLocation" location and give it suitable keywords describing what kind of location it is (you can look at the Shor's Stone location for reference). Make its parent the Haafingar location.
  • Create Locations for each of the houses of the format "<prefix>Marlinsvik<Housename>". Since Gaubelin's shack has no interior, it doesn't need a Location. Set the Marlinsvik location from earlier as the parent.