Troubleshooting

This is a list of hang-ups that I've overcome that I'm hoping others can search through to find a solution to their own problem. Probably all of these things can be found scattered around the web, but it helps me to have them in one place.

Creation Kit UI

• You've loaded a cell but your render window is completely grey
  • Double click on object in the right-hand of the Cell View window to focus on it
• Loading a certain .esp causes Creation Kit to crash = Loading any of the DLCs causes Creation Kit to crash.
  • You are probably not loading that .esp's corresponding .bsa file. Look to see if that mod came with a .bsa file. Make sure it's not only installed in the Skyrim Data folder, but also listed in the SkyrimEditor.ini file like the DLC's .bsa files as shown in Papyrus: Getting Started.
• You try to duplicate a World Space
  • This will either cause Creation Kit to crash or do nothing. It's not something it can do. You'll have to start a new World Space
• You're unable to select something in the render window
  • Select the objects in the way and press 1 to make them invisible
• Creation Kit crashes every time you try to edit or add a script to an object
  • You've added a .bsa file to the SkyrimEditor.ini load list, but you didn't unpack the BSA's script source files into Skyrim\Data\Scripts\Source. See Resources to extract a BSA.
• Creation Kit crashes every now and then and you're losing progress.
  • It's normal for Creation Kit to crash maybe once per hour. It's simply an unstable tool. You should go to Creation Kit's preferences and turn on Auto save. These saves will be put in Skyrim\Data\backups as .bak files. When Creation Kit crashes, just change the file extension on the most recent one to .esp and it will work fine.
• Pressing Ok in the Quest editing menu does nothing.
  • When you first create a Quest, fill in nothing but the ID, press OK to save it, and then open it again. Now you'll be able to edit and save any further changes.
• Objects in your World Space don't show up in the Render Window / When you move to a new area of the World Space in the render window, the objects don't appear.
  • Press F5 to refresh the render view.
• The objects you see in Creation Kit don't appear in-game.
  • Make sure "Initially Disabled" in unchecked in the object's properties
• You see square boxes like □ in some of the text you types into quest dialogue or any other area.
  • Skyrim can handle only a very limited set of characters. It's best to stick to ASCII-only characters and avoid characters such as ellipses (…) or any other non-standard characters. This often happens when you copy and paste text from another app into the Creation Kit. The copy/paste uses a non-standard encoding and even normal characters like apostraphes can get mangled.

Level Design

• You hear water splashing sounds everywhere you walk in your World Space
  • Decrease the Water Height in the settings for your World Space
• Lights are flickering. They turn off and on randomly as the player walks around near the light. Unfortunately, the Near Clip and Never Fades properties are deprecated and do nothing. These are the only solutions:
  • An all-black image space will cause lights to flicker.
  • Too many overlapping lights causes flickering. Remove some lights or make sure they don't overlap.
  • Too many lights in too small of an area. The bigger the room, the more lights you can have in it. The game's lighting engine starts to break down when you have too many lights in too small of an area. A medium sized room can have 31+ lights without any flickering but a smaller room wouldn't work with so many lights.
• World Space cell limitation: You can have a maximum of 7 or 8 different textures in a given world space's cell. You can see the cells demarcated by yellow dotted lines in the render window when you have a world space loaded and you press B.

Quests

• The voiceovers you apply to an actor's text are not working.
  • You need to apply a Voice to the actor (Female, Male)
• Your Quest Aliases are no longer filled when you load the game.
  • Quest alises are only stored in the save game when the quest is running at the time of the save. So, you need to start your quest running.

Papyrus

• Calling SplineTransitionTo or a similar function like MoveTo inside Event OnInit produces an error in the Papyrus log that the object doesn't have a parent cell or has no 3D stack.
  • This is because you're calling it at a point in the object's life before it's been complete set-up. Instead, call your move function inside Event OnLoad.
• You aren't seeing some output in a Papyrus log that you should definitely be getting, or you're seeing text like "will stop executing scrip" in the Papyrus log. If you do something not allowed by Papyrus, such as executing most functions on a None object, the script will stop and even Debug.Trace() lines of code BEFORE the error might not print out to the log. Comment out everything but the Debug.Trace() statements and see if it shows up in the log now.