If you're working on a new lands mod and need a tutorial or if you're just curious about the kind of work that goes into making a new lands mod, I spent the past few months writing up a 1000+ page step-by-step guide to show you what my process was for making Wyrmstooth from start to finish.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim New Lands Mod Tutorial

It currently consists of 12 chapters covering the following topics:

  • Chapter 1: World space creation, generating a height-map in World Machine and importing it with TESAnnwyn, manual and region-based automatic cluttering, navmeshing, dividing a world space up into regions, setting up locations, encounter zones and performance optimization with occlusion geometry.
  • Chapter 2: Idle animation markers, setting up patrol markers, map markers, radiant markers and the side quests that use them.
  • Chapter 3: Adding sounds and music to your mod.
  • Chapter 4: Creating NPCs, generating facegen data, and setting them up as a home owner, merchant, follower, bard, innkeeper, or location boss.
  • Chapter 5: Adding random wilderness and road encounter triggers to your world space and creating new random encounters to add to the Story Manager.
  • Chapter 6: The basics of creating quests, scenes, adding NPC dialogue and player responses, and creating a basic MCM to control mod settings.
  • Chapter 7: Generating land LOD, object LOD, tree LOD, TVDT occlusion, .gid files for grass, and making a cloud plane for the map menu of a custom world space.
  • Chapter 8: Importing assets from SpeedTree, Zbrush and Substance Painter into 3ds Max to bring over to Skyrim.
  • Chapter 9: Setting up a skeleton rig in 3ds Max, constraining the skeleton to a biped, importing motion capture data and bringing new animations into Skyrim with Havok Content Tools.
  • Chapter 10: Training a tacotron and waveglow model in Google Colab to synthesize audio using voice acting from Skyrim.
  • Chapter 11: Other tasks that don't fit into the previous chapters, such as optimizing an interior cell with roombounds, cleaning your mod in xEdit, setting up version control so you can work with a team of designers, generating papyrus debugging trace, and so on.
  • Chapter 12: Porting a Legendary Edition mod to Special Edition and packaging it.

This is a work-in-progress, so if you spot any mistakes, know a better way to do something, or would like me to cover additional topics, just leave a suggestion in the comments below. I will be updating this document periodically with new sections and possibly new chapters so keep an eye out for that.

When I started modding in 2012 there wasn’t much out there to follow in terms of guides and tutorials, so a lot of this was learned through trial and error. Hopefully some of you find this tutorial useful in your own projects.

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Jonx0r

2 comments

  1. jaderiver
    jaderiver
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    • 127 kudos
    Thanks for for the thought and sharing this !
    ( kudo'd and endorsed )
  2. klydeking
    klydeking
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    • 9 kudos
    Thanks! I just started looking at this and it is an invaluable guide. WT is a far more ambitious mod than anything I'd care to take on, but I'd like to do more and this is another tool in my belt.