Sh*t Happens

Can you see the problem in the image above? I can.

Skyrim Creation Kit, also known as the buggiest program in history, destroyed my  coastline along Farwind Point and most of the southwest coastline. I do not have a clean backup available. Back up your .esp at regular intervals!

So what happened? I decided that the western cliffs were too high and too straight, looking like they were just where the map ended (which they were), so I decided to open up the heightmap editor inside the Creation Kit and lower the cliffs and change the western coastline to look a bit more natural. This was supposed to be faster than editing by hand in the render window. Instead, something went wrong.

Really, really wrong.

Skyrim’s heightmap editor is basically defunct and really should only be used to import heightmaps into the game (there are better ways to do this, though), but can be used to make localized adjustments, like I was trying to do. Elevation is displayed via a color gradient. In Skyrim, black is the lowest point on the map, ranging upward through blue, red, white, and apparently green, magenta and gray as well. Up until now, my ocean basin has been displayed as flat gray in the heightmap editor. It should have been black. As this showed up fine in game (no tearing of terrain or other signs of problems, I chose to ignore it. Bad move. As far as I can tell, what should have been my ocean basin was instead a flat terrain so high in the sky that it was unconnected from the landmass and so high as to not render in either the Creation Kit or in-game. When I lowered the western cliffs and saved the edited heightmap, parts of this floating “ocean basin” became connected again, resulting in the huge mesh errors you can see in these screenshots.

So what can I do?

Once I stopped swearing at my monitor, I set to trying to fix this mess. I have a couple of choices at this point. I can attempt, through the hiehgtmap editor, to manually lower all of the ocean basin to the correct level. All of it, all the way around. Of course, the portions of the map I have the most work in, Farwind Point and Darkwater Sound, are the most severely effected. I will likely have to redo most of the landscape design along the coast. I can’t guarantee that subsequent saving of the heightmap won’t create more errors. This is probably the only way I can save the work I’ve already done. I only have about a week and a half of work into this mod at this point, so starting over wouldn’t be a huge hit (just to my morale). Option two is to try to import a new heightmap into my existing .esp. I don’t even know if this is possible, but I may try to find out using a copy .esp. Option three is to start over from scratch with a new worldspace .esp generated with TESanwynn. There are things I would like to change about the hieghtmap, including the west and east coasts and the depth of lakes and rivers, which mostly get obliterated when lowering the grayscale values to levels able to be accepted by Skyrim.

The moral of the story? Back up your files and make duplicates! Redundancy is your friend!