Greetings Adventurers,

As expected, when modding I've run into some interesting issues and learned some incredibly important lessons I want to share around.
And some of the massive challenges facing Cities Overhauled.

Firstly, to give a rough timeline and summary I've been working on this mod/project for shortly over the last year which is crazy in my recollection, but nothing compared to some of the other veterans what have I learned in that time.

Learning the Tools to mod DFU
Learning about world data and how to modify it.
Learning the WDE and modifying interior's.

Here are some bits of advice for other exterior modders and those I've met looking to work on handcrafting towns similar to my Orsinium or Fishguard Mods.

1. Do not add new buildings 
*(unless you want to add them into the World Data Code for the location, limit yourself to the buildings from the vanilla block EVEN if there are better options)
(If you add more buildings then the code allows your cities will simply disappear or not load properly (an issue I'm encountering with all of my mods besides Fishguard and the smaller overhauls.) 

2. Do not copy paste items duplicate
*unity is brutal and scrambles data

3. Exterior scaling is a big challenge in reusing assets with adding some diversity.
*in my mods i think back to the Knights of the Dragon RMB in the original cities Overhauled where the scaffolding became like MASSIVE.

4. Implementing new models
* I've struggled with this a lot trying to bring new meshes into the game its truthfully a bit of a challenge i have found guides on it but i haven't been able to make sense of them as I'm not a massively experienced DFU modder.
 

Regarding the 1st one that is the big challenge CO faces currently all of the blocks in the recent Armorer's/Mages Guild and Orsinium have added at least a new house or two which means if i want to continue with this segment i have to go back and find and delete all the added in houses to prevent some major bugs.


Orsinium has a finished testing build with much more clutter, however it has some game breaking issues with world data i've been unsuccessful in overcoming.
so after one year of hard work we've got 20~ or so RMB's that all need patching to work properly and don't get me wrong its a massive undertaking that i feel requires a team larger then 3-4 people.

I'll be taking some time to mull over continuing this specific project or simply open sourcing it and moving onto more mods like Fishguard/overhauling specific existing locations in a lite and lore friendly way for very specific areas.

Anyhow thats everything from me 

take it easy,
Tioradh an-drasta

-.Wayton