Creation Kit: Getting Started

This wiki is meant to document areas of Skyrim modding that have very little documentation (SKSE and some areas of Papyrus and Creation Kit). There are many great resources already available for taking first steps in the Creation Kit. I highly recommend watching all of the Official Video Tutorials.

Below are a few points that most tutorials don't mention.

Disable Creation Kit's Nags

Disable Creation Kit from warning you every time you load a .esp be setting in SkyrimEditor.ini: bBlockMessageBoxes=1

Unofficial Patches

Pretty much everyone has the unofficial patches installed, and you might consider using them as dependencies for your mod because they fix a massive number of bugs in the game and you don't want your mod to rely on those bugs.

1. Install Nexus Mod Manager
2. Install patches

• Unofficial Skryim Patch
• Unofficial Dawnguard Patch
• Unofficial Dragonborn Patch
• Unofficial Hearthfire Patch

1. Install LOOT (A replacement for BOSS)
2. Run LOOT
3. Select the unofficial patches' .esp files when you start Creation Kit.

Using Content from the DLCs / Modding the DLCs

To use content from the DLCs or to mod the DLCs, you'll need to change some Creation Kit settings to prevent it from crashing when it loads the DLCs' content.

1. Make sure all the DLCs are installed

• Steam -> Library -> Right click on Skyrim -> Properties -> DLCs

1. Set Bethesda DLCs to load in Creation Kit

• In [General] on SkyrmiEditor.ini:
  • sLanguage=ENGLISH
  • bAllowMultipleMasterLoads=1
• In [Archive]:
  • Append onto SResoruceArchiveList2: Dawnguard.bsa, HearthFires.bsa, Dragonborn.bsa

SKSE and Creation Kit Installation

When the Creation Kit is installed, it installs all of the .psc and .pex Papyrus scripts into Skyrim\Data\Scripts. It will overwrite any existing files, so if you already had SKSE installed then you will need to reinstall it.

Scripting Functionality

The first place to look for finding if something is possible is to search through the Papyrus Reference. This has nearly all of the vanilla Papyrus functions listed. Next, see if the functionality exists in Creation Kit quests. There are many things that can be done in quests that can't be done in Papyrus. For example, it's possible to add an AI package to an NPC through a quest, but this can't be done through Papyrus. Finally, try SKSE. Some of SKSE's built-in functions are also listed in the Papyrus Reference, but many are not. Even if what you're trying to do isn't built into SKSE, you should consider writing an SKSE plugin yourself to extend what SKSE already does.

1. Papyrus
2. Quest
3. SKSE built-in
4. Make SKSE plugin