I like your mod, a nice expansion without rebuild the entire city, but I have a problem: The blacksmith and his wife disappeared, and their door is always locked. I didn't pay attention to your others npcs, but I think I didn't see them for a while. I use the "wait" to see different hours of the day, but it remains the same.
Also, I notice the walking behaviour of Morthal's npcs (vanilla guards and children) are strange in this area. They stop on strange spots, aglomerated in the end of the bridge, and my follower can't follow me well there. Valdimar don't follow me if I sprint, but he follows if we are in the marsh. Before Valdimar, I was with Erik the Slayer, and it was difficult for him to leave Falion's house. I dismissed him (don't remember when) and now I encountered him standing still in front of Falion's door, waiting to be hired again.
I only use 4 mods for Morthal: Yours, Morthal House (gives you Alva's house after the quest), Road to Morthal, that just paved the road of the south entrance and the Morthal Wheres Wares Lite (somedays an argonian appear with her boat and stops at the frozen part of the lake near the north bridge. She is working properly).
EDIT: I restart the pc and the blacksmith reappeared, but I would let this here for you to know. On another occasion, in the beginning of the platforms in front of the Highmoon Hall, I saw the health bar of a "farmer" rapidly decreasing and then I received bounty for the killing and everyone attacked me. I could not walk on that area without triggering this. It was fixed after a pc restart too, but very strange.
Sometimes Skyrim just bugs out in new and unpredictable ways. The dying farmer and getting a bounty could potentially be Follower related, I've had NPCs decide they suddenly hate my follower, go crazy and attack them (and not me), get slaughtered and suddenly there's a massive brawl and bounty has randomly been applied to me.
I've also had Morthal randomly decide to murder me because I got too close to the Fishing guy and he decided to randomly attack me out of nowhere (which prompted the rest of the town to join in).
As for Falion's house, I didn't touch the Navmesh outside that, only around the back. When I was working on Morthal Expanded, I did notice that Morthal's navmeshes, especially on the wooden walkways, aren't great to begin with, which when paired with Skyrim's less than stellar pathfinding when it comes to raised walkways in general can cause issues. Could possibly be a conflict, but your other Morthal mods don't strike me as touching the Navmesh in that area either.
Really love the direction of this mod, tried it out in my load order and it's honestly a very nice addition. It expands morthal in some pretty logical ways without going overboard. Also its mostly compatible with JKs Skyrim some slight inconsistences that honestly can be ignored (like the farm and the house that are just outside the wooden fence).
But I did witness a problematic situation which I suspect would be navemesh in my game, specifically with the wooden walkway that spans from Fallion's house to the guardhouse.
NPCs seem to either get stuck in that path or some will walk up towards Alva's house and across into Anarenia's house. I did try moving the esp really early in my load order and very late to see if that made a difference but it didn't.
NPCs pathing on walkways is never the best, and the way it's set up in ME is that unless they fall from the walkway (which NPCs don't tend to do), going past Alva's front door is the accepted way into Anarenia's house (because the walkway is a little too high for NPCs to get on, and the solution to extending it wouldn't be pretty (either steps into water, or awkward extension). This is actually how the Navmesh was originally too, to get to the patch of land where I put Anarenia's house, NPCs would have to go past Alva's door (or round the back of her house potentially, but they tend to stick to the walkway as it's set as preferred path). Unless you have a follower and go behind Falion's house vanilla, you'd likely never notice it was built this way as most NPCs have no reason to waddle back there.
So if they can reach Anarenia's house by going past Alva's door, that's normal and to be expected. If they can't, then JK's Navmesh is overriding (not sure what changes were made there).
As for the farm being outside the walls, that's not too abnormal for a farm, many of the cities do that, and the Argonian siblings? They're deliberately away from everyone else by design.
Understood. So NPCs going from Alva's house to Anarenia's house is intended.
However I suspect that there still might be some oddities with navemesh just outside the guardhouse. Noticed that Joric will just stand there and a patrolling guard might walk just a little bit past him but end up just standing there as well.
Mods that I have affecting morthal (with this ordering in my LO): 3DNPC's Jk's Skyrim Mortal's Where's Wares Morthal Expanded Denizen's of Morthal
They are all pretty compatible with expanded with the one caveat that I mentioned. Might do some some more investigating and see what turns up or I might just ignore it since it mostly works. Its just often the tiniest things that can lead to greatest annoyances.
I fell like this category of mod that adds to locations with the intention of filling out the space and making it feel more lively and more convenient is kinda sorely missing still I must say great mod and I will be checking out some of your other expansions.
Just outside the guardhouse strikes me as probably JKs and 3DNPCs, ME doesn't touch anything there. Could even be Vanilla, Morthal's walkways aren't the best.
That's also why I'm making these lightweight Vanilla style expansion mods, I can't find any I like, they either go too far and look obviously modded and nothing like Vanilla, or they don't go far enough and don't add new buildings and NPCs. So when it fails, do it yourself.
P.S. I'm currently working on Falkreath, but through a lack of creative urges and lack of good space (Falkreath is like Dragonbridge, there's very little flat land that isn't a mountain or cliff) progress is slow.
Hi. Thanks for your mod. I'd like to use it, but unfortunately I've checked some deleted navmesh, that may cause various issues. Could you upload a version with new navmesh without deleting the originals ?
Do that and simply put, navmesh won't work right. If something else is making changes to the deleted bits of Navmesh, then that something else is either the Unofficial Patch (which should be loaded before EVERY other mod), or is incompatible as it's placing objects in the same places.
What is loaded last overrides changes made to anything loaded before.
Navmesh serves TWO core functions. To let NPCs move around and allows the use of Load Doors. That's it. Nothing except Navmesh and Load Doors actually has any direct connections with specific Navmesh pieces, although NPCs have numerous indirect connections (all of that happens locally).
Using Hearthfire (mainly because it's the only official bit of content that actually adds something that requires changing Navmesh rather than just adding (like Dawnguard and DragonBorn, as well as most CC content) as an example, https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/768195698280628245/879013284202823760/unknown.png , that's for the cell that contains ONE of the building plots (not sure which BYOHHouse3 is outside of internal references), and that doesn't just delete the odd bit of Navmesh, it deletes the entire Navmesh for the cell.
I understand the concern, normally deleting anything Vanilla is a big case of don't under any circumstances. But with Navmesh, it's acceptable and something even Bethesda themselves have done. With exterior cells, as long as you keep the cell border ones that border unchanged cells the same, it will still link up and work properly. The only issue is when you have multiple navmesh changes in the same cell, which is usually a bad idea anyway as chances are new assets will clash with each other as cells aren't that big. Worst case scenario you have to make a patch for it.
https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/1704/images/6289/6289-1608750913-879986347.jpeg I found that on JK's Morthal's image gallery. Is that the one you are referring to Tetrol88?
If so, it's probably been in your modlist from near the start to mistake it for vanilla, as one look at that and I can tell instantly that it isn't vanilla due to the caged area and it's unusual roof. (I have an ability to spot things that are modded, it's both a blessing and a curse).
I just converted your mod to LE to test it out. It functions. Here's some critique/suggestions.
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1. Blacksmith - I ran around for 5 minutes (okay more like 20 but I was also watching A:Ultrons) trying to find it. It finally ran into it tucked behind some trees. That's not a good visible business location. You should swap the farm and the blacksmith locations since the farm is a non-essential. Side by side with Jorgen and Lami's home. 2. The farm - The oxen keep escaping the pen. Maybe one less oxen will stop that. The oxen were also easily killed by a frostbite spider so it's not the optimal location for them either. Nice touch with the potatoes and cabbage in cold climate. Not many would catch that. 3. Anarenia's House - I found of bunch of NPC just huddled in the home. Check your navmesh and make sure the door linked have been finalized. 4. Overall - Despite your adding new homes and businesses the city still feels empty (that's still mostly the fault of the vanilla system). A few more homes would work since there's still so much real estate here. Adding a few trading stands would really help since you got NPCs to spare. Mayhaps between the inn and the main bridge? Since Morthal is a river trading port adding a medium or large ship to the water could give the illusion of a busy port. 5. I broke into Sujeeva"s (?) house and they immediately attacked. The gave no trespassing warning. By broke into, I mean used the unlock command and walked in. Correction: Sujeeva attacked me. Neeb-something gave me a warning. 6. A couple of your NPCs went missing at night so you may want to check their night behavior and pathing to be sure they made it home and to bed. 7. You should set up a generic guard post on the north end of the city to protect your new assets. See #2. If a spider can take out the farm imagine what's going to happen when vampires and dragons attack at random. No sense in building all this up if they die in one strike.
Also ditch the gate you created at the south entrance. It's uneven and out of place. If you want to put a gate there then move it further south up the road where there is more even ground.
You should consider walling off the north end of the city with the same architecture from Riverwood. The guard walls come with archways (where you can add doors/gates if you want) and it would also limit the enemies coming in from that direction from across the river.
1. Trying to fit such a large building in elsewhere is problematic, and it's Morthal, only really has residents visiting and locals know where shops are.
2. Those cows are gonna have issues. They shouldn't be escaping unless something attacks (which given on one of my tests I fast travelled to Morthal and found all 3 cows dead (one by the mill) but no sign of any other creature or hostile so I had no idea what killed them). They shouldn't be escaping without combat making them bolt though, as they are just the default cow, which given the size of the pens you see elsewhere in Skyrim (take the one one in Whiterun for example) shouldn't have capacity issues. May make a special variant of them that's friends to the "Predator" faction to stop them being attacked and bolting (which shouldn't happen anyway with the gate (which is the only navmesh hole as well), but for some reason the gate gets opened despite animals not being capable of opening them).
3. A few NPCs are supposed to visit her house to browse (or sell their kills to her), you may have just caught them as they overlap (About 6pm ish if I remember right). I'll have a check on the Navmesh (although if they can find their way IN, they should be able to get out) though as given most of my pre-release issues centred around Anarenia not actually being finished (despite being PLACED first, hence being internally known as House1, I worked on her last and thought I finished things I hadn't)..
4. Morthal's swamps are too shallow to support anything bigger than a rowboat. Especially in the town itself which has a solid bridge blocking the waterway in and is so shallow you don't even have to swim in many parts of it. Morthal's reclusiveness also was taken into account, trade = outsiders, and Morthal isn't fond of outsiders.
5. That's weird. Sujeeva's a notch more aggressive than Neebanza if not identical, but shouldn't be enough to make her attack on sight for trespassing. She wasn't attacking when I walked in on them during testing, but I wasn't trespassing at the time.
6. At night? Most of them sleep late, like 11pm, and several of them visit the inn in the evening. Only the two Argonians ever really leave the confines of town. Which ones were missing?
7. Weirdly, apart from the farmer, smith and smith's son, they all fight a lot better than the guards (who do go over the bridge occasionally and stand near the mill, but being a Skyrim guard, will usually go "Gods a fight!" rather than actually engaging the enemy). Given the farm's close proximity to the mill, it shouldn't be suffering from attacks the vanilla guard won't notice. Also, due to the civil war crap, adding new guards is somewhat problematic, mainly due to them being replaced with either generic Imperials or Stormcloaks on Civil War ownership changing which requires scripting (and scripting is best avoided).
Thanks for pointing this all out, I'll go and give some more checks on the Navmeshes and AI packages, as well as have special cows that won't be such a target (which should stop them getting engaged in combat and leaving their pen and/or dying). It's possible some of these issues (like the packages screwing up) may have happened in the LE backport, but I'll give it a good looking at.
8?. The gate on the south entrance always seemed like the only defensible spot in Morthal and the only real way in (at least the only way with a road), the swamps are too open and hard for people to navigate, which is why I put it there, so that if Morthal is invaded, they can barricade the gate and use a ladder to station some archers above it. You should be able to happily disable it (it's a grand total of about 9 assets (Arch, Gate, 2 torches, 2 lights for the torches (may just be one), the banner post, the banner itself, and the banner ring attachment)) without any issues. I only put this in as every other intact hold capital (and even some of the larger towns like Riverwood and Helgen) except Morthal had some form of gate or arch on it's main entrance(s) and it seemed odd that Morthal didn't.
EDIT: 1.01 is up, should fix the cows dying issue (they should no longer be targeted by predators as they are no longer in the Prey faction and are in the PredatorFriend faction (like carriage drivers) so should no longer be bothered). Also did a check on Anarenia's Navmeshes, all fine, but there was an issue where she took her evening meal early (locking her doors) at 6pm rather than the intended 8pm, which could've been why NPCs got stuck in her house (they are supposed to visit during the 4 hours she's inside her house/shop and leave at least an hour before she has her evening meal). Couldn't see anything wrong with the AI packages other than Anarenia's accidentally early evening meal and subsequent house locking.
I moved the gateway further south where its leveled, added a double market stand (good spot for Anarenia and another NPC), added a scaled-down (undecorated) sail boat, and removed the trees blocking the blacksmith (the visibility for the player is what I was talking about in my original response which I guess wasn't too clear). This is all in "Build01".
Build02 is bad, Build03 I moved the farm and put the blacksmiths home where the farm is. I didn't clean it up. It's only a conceptual build to show the orientation of the blacksmith placed where the farm is.
I was going to build a wall on the northwest end behind the farm (in Build01) but I had other things to do. The group of spiders coming from the west are what are killing the cows and likely why the cows keep leaving the pen as well. Also Anarenia is (the seller) was locked inside her house again (at about 230-330pm). I didn't check her AIP to she why she did it. What is her intended design? Is she meant to sell goods from within her house or outside of it. If she's an indoor seller then why not rename her building into a business name (if you're not going to use the trading post of course). Why is she locking the door while indoors eating? NPC typically lock doors when sleeping or when they leave home (to go to their job). I didn't go hunting to see what their nighttime behavior was because I'm working on other things.
Anarenia behaves like the Whiterun Blacksmith in that she sells inside and out, having more inventory inside as she sells whats on display in addition to her merchant chest. Her house is named as a house because her selling is an informal thing (and to symbolise her role as a skinner) and she isn't a proper store.
2pm if I remember right she's meant to be outside and nothing should be forcing her inside except Player (sometimes NPCs mid-dialogue follow through load doors). She shouldn't be inside at 2pm (and my internal testing found her outside on the tanning rack during these hours) as her packages aren't telling her to do so at this hour. As for locking her doors while eating, she's just a bit weird like that.
Her schedule is. 7am-9am Eat (Locked), 9am-10am Relax (L), 10am-1pm Work and Sell Outside (Unlocked), 1pm-2pm Visit Farm (L), 2pm-4pm Work and Sell Outside (U), 4pm-8pm Relax and Sell Inside (U), 8pm-10pm Eat (Inn on Weekend, Home Weekdays) (L). 10pm-7am Sleep (L).
Hrolka (Smith's wife) is meant to visit Anarenia's informal store from 5pm-7pm. Neebanza (Male Argonian) is meant to visit from 6pm-7pm, and Sujeeva (Female Argonian) is meant to visit from 4pm-6pm but only on Weekends. All of these potentially clashed with Version 1.0's (fixed in 1.01) dodgy Anarenia eating package (which was 2 hours early, maybe I was thinking of Metric Time when setting that up) which could potentially trap all 3 visitors.
As for the cows, they really shouldn't be having issues any more with 1.01. But I'll do some more intensive testing with console commands.
UPDATE: Tested the cows (and numerous cow pens across Skyrim). https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/768195698280628245/855877549925597266/20210619193035_1.jpg The cows were only "Fleeing" because they are cowards (cowardly NPCs bolt whenever a fight is nearby). Without some silly NPC opening the gate, they stayed in the pen. HOWEVER, given how dodgy Skyrim is with 4-legged creatures, they can occasionally (only seemed to be the case for the cows in a very specific spot and only if they were being pushed) glitch THROUGH thin fences (including some of the vanilla cow pens). This is the same for the wolves, and can be triggered almost on command by just riding a horse (as Horses really show off the quadruped issues) into small static objects.
As for Anarenia, she seemed to be working fine for me at the hours. Only issue seemed to be her doors were locked when she was working on her porch, this seems to be how the door locking works requiring an NPC of the door's ownership faction to actually be in the cell or moving through the door to change it's state. It's minor and really doesn't amount to anything, but when it appears to be an engine thing it's not fixable.
K. Thanks for the clarification. If anything I've learned from follower mods is that AIPs are wonky and don't always fire off when they're supposed to.
AI Packages can always be a bit wonky. Probably why many NPCs that offer a service tend to have very simple AI packages where they basically just root to a spot for most of the day and rarely ever leave their place of business anywhere near business hours.
Good news. For the most part your mod is compatible with JK's Morthal. The farm is like just right on the edge of the NW wall but there's no crossover.
I was wrong. Like the very corner of the cow pen clips through the wall and one of the cows I found grazing outside the pen. Where I placed the trading stand JW put a stone fence there. After reading through several comments it appears that his mods may have some issues with refresh rates and bugs with mess with the pathing behavior of NPCs. I'm going to uninstall it and see if I can find others that just tweak around the edges.
Looking at them, I could see pathing errors springing up if the navmeshes were radically changed (I try to keep edits minimal, and preserve key parts like "Preferred Pathing" intact so NPCs don't get more confused than usual). I tried to not touch any vanilla navmesh tris in Solitude Under Arch (due to where it was, I could mostly get away with it as only the dock would require messing with vanilla navmesh tris) but it resulted in NPC pathing onto the docks being really dodgy (they'll only use one side) so I've gone for a more total approach since (but keeping them clean and minimal, sometimes actually neater than vanilla (the auto-navmesh used can be REALLY messy with trees and rocks).
As for performance hits, they didn't look THAT overdetailed, but the screenshots were never that close so it's hard to tell for sure, but performance hits generally are not a good thing to have.
I personally haven't had performance issues with JK morhal mod. I had enough sense early on not to buy into those gimmick "performance mods" that were listed in the guides and were top downloads. Do you plan on adding anymore changes to your Morthal mod? I'm about to finalize a location for a mod I've been working on and was spot checking different locations to make sure I kept conflicts to a minimum.
Not planning on doing any exterior changes to it. May add some little quests to a few NPCs in the future (with xVASynth), same applies to my other expanded villages/towns/cities, but that isn't planned for a while. If possible these would be in a standalone .esl as I would want to keep them optional.
I considered a General store, but decided against it due to how few people were in Morthal and the presence of the Vanilla Inn and my new Blacksmith. As a consequence though, the Blacksmith sells a little bit more than normal Blacksmiths do, mostly building supplies.
Between the Blacksmith (New), Falion, the Apothecary, the Inn and the Skinner (New, pretty much exclusively animal hides and animal parts (like bear claws), no meats), you can get pretty much everything except books, clothes and jewellery.
Would love to see a version for cities of the north morthal. That mod doesn't add anything it just completely reshapes the buildings into more unique shapes. Would love to see your buildings in the style.
Not something I would do I'm afraid, as it would pretty much require the entire mod to be rebuilt (only the NPCs, their journals and AI packages would really be transferable).
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Also, I notice the walking behaviour of Morthal's npcs (vanilla guards and children) are strange in this area. They stop on strange spots, aglomerated in the end of the bridge, and my follower can't follow me well there. Valdimar don't follow me if I sprint, but he follows if we are in the marsh. Before Valdimar, I was with Erik the Slayer, and it was difficult for him to leave Falion's house. I dismissed him (don't remember when) and now I encountered him standing still in front of Falion's door, waiting to be hired again.
I only use 4 mods for Morthal: Yours, Morthal House (gives you Alva's house after the quest), Road to Morthal, that just paved the road of the south entrance and the Morthal Wheres Wares Lite (somedays an argonian appear with her boat and stops at the frozen part of the lake near the north bridge. She is working properly).
EDIT: I restart the pc and the blacksmith reappeared, but I would let this here for you to know. On another occasion, in the beginning of the platforms in front of the Highmoon Hall, I saw the health bar of a "farmer" rapidly decreasing and then I received bounty for the killing and everyone attacked me. I could not walk on that area without triggering this. It was fixed after a pc restart too, but very strange.
I've also had Morthal randomly decide to murder me because I got too close to the Fishing guy and he decided to randomly attack me out of nowhere (which prompted the rest of the town to join in).
As for Falion's house, I didn't touch the Navmesh outside that, only around the back. When I was working on Morthal Expanded, I did notice that Morthal's navmeshes, especially on the wooden walkways, aren't great to begin with, which when paired with Skyrim's less than stellar pathfinding when it comes to raised walkways in general can cause issues. Could possibly be a conflict, but your other Morthal mods don't strike me as touching the Navmesh in that area either.
But I did witness a problematic situation which I suspect would be navemesh in my game, specifically with the wooden walkway that spans from Fallion's house to the guardhouse.
NPCs seem to either get stuck in that path or some will walk up towards Alva's house and across into Anarenia's house. I did try moving the esp really early in my load order and very late to see if that made a difference but it didn't.
So if they can reach Anarenia's house by going past Alva's door, that's normal and to be expected. If they can't, then JK's Navmesh is overriding (not sure what changes were made there).
As for the farm being outside the walls, that's not too abnormal for a farm, many of the cities do that, and the Argonian siblings? They're deliberately away from everyone else by design.
Thanks for pointing it out though.
However I suspect that there still might be some oddities with navemesh just outside the guardhouse. Noticed that Joric will just stand there and a patrolling guard might walk just a little bit past him but end up just standing there as well.
Mods that I have affecting morthal (with this ordering in my LO):
3DNPC's
Jk's Skyrim
Mortal's Where's Wares
Morthal Expanded
Denizen's of Morthal
They are all pretty compatible with expanded with the one caveat that I mentioned. Might do some some more investigating and see what turns up or I might just ignore it since it mostly works. Its just often the tiniest things that can lead to greatest annoyances.
I fell like this category of mod that adds to locations with the intention of filling out the space and making it feel more lively and more convenient is kinda sorely missing still I must say great mod and I will be checking out some of your other expansions.
That's also why I'm making these lightweight Vanilla style expansion mods, I can't find any I like, they either go too far and look obviously modded and nothing like Vanilla, or they don't go far enough and don't add new buildings and NPCs. So when it fails, do it yourself.
P.S. I'm currently working on Falkreath, but through a lack of creative urges and lack of good space (Falkreath is like Dragonbridge, there's very little flat land that isn't a mountain or cliff) progress is slow.
Thanks for your mod. I'd like to use it, but unfortunately I've checked some deleted navmesh, that may cause various issues.
Could you upload a version with new navmesh without deleting the originals ?
What is loaded last overrides changes made to anything loaded before.
Navmesh serves TWO core functions. To let NPCs move around and allows the use of Load Doors. That's it. Nothing except Navmesh and Load Doors actually has any direct connections with specific Navmesh pieces, although NPCs have numerous indirect connections (all of that happens locally).
Using Hearthfire (mainly because it's the only official bit of content that actually adds something that requires changing Navmesh rather than just adding (like Dawnguard and DragonBorn, as well as most CC content) as an example, https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/768195698280628245/879013284202823760/unknown.png , that's for the cell that contains ONE of the building plots (not sure which BYOHHouse3 is outside of internal references), and that doesn't just delete the odd bit of Navmesh, it deletes the entire Navmesh for the cell.
I understand the concern, normally deleting anything Vanilla is a big case of don't under any circumstances. But with Navmesh, it's acceptable and something even Bethesda themselves have done. With exterior cells, as long as you keep the cell border ones that border unchanged cells the same, it will still link up and work properly. The only issue is when you have multiple navmesh changes in the same cell, which is usually a bad idea anyway as chances are new assets will clash with each other as cells aren't that big. Worst case scenario you have to make a patch for it.
If so, it's probably been in your modlist from near the start to mistake it for vanilla, as one look at that and I can tell instantly that it isn't vanilla due to the caged area and it's unusual roof. (I have an ability to spot things that are modded, it's both a blessing and a curse).
My advice would be test it for yourself though, as not using JK's Morthal, I don't know.
2. The farm - The oxen keep escaping the pen. Maybe one less oxen will stop that. The oxen were also easily killed by a frostbite spider so it's not the optimal location for them either. Nice touch with the potatoes and cabbage in cold climate. Not many would catch that.
3. Anarenia's House - I found of bunch of NPC just huddled in the home. Check your navmesh and make sure the door linked have been finalized.
4. Overall - Despite your adding new homes and businesses the city still feels empty (that's still mostly the fault of the vanilla system). A few more homes would work since there's still so much real estate here. Adding a few trading stands would really help since you got NPCs to spare. Mayhaps between the inn and the main bridge? Since Morthal is a river trading port adding a medium or large ship to the water could give the illusion of a busy port.
5. I broke into Sujeeva"s (?) house and they immediately attacked. The gave no trespassing warning. By broke into, I mean used the unlock command and walked in. Correction: Sujeeva attacked me. Neeb-something gave me a warning.
6. A couple of your NPCs went missing at night so you may want to check their night behavior and pathing to be sure they made it home and to bed.
7. You should set up a generic guard post on the north end of the city to protect your new assets. See #2. If a spider can take out the farm imagine what's going to happen when vampires and dragons attack at random. No sense in building all this up if they die in one strike.
You should consider walling off the north end of the city with the same architecture from Riverwood. The guard walls come with archways (where you can add doors/gates if you want) and it would also limit the enemies coming in from that direction from across the river.
Other than that, good lightweight expansion.
2. Those cows are gonna have issues. They shouldn't be escaping unless something attacks (which given on one of my tests I fast travelled to Morthal and found all 3 cows dead (one by the mill) but no sign of any other creature or hostile so I had no idea what killed them). They shouldn't be escaping without combat making them bolt though, as they are just the default cow, which given the size of the pens you see elsewhere in Skyrim (take the one one in Whiterun for example) shouldn't have capacity issues. May make a special variant of them that's friends to the "Predator" faction to stop them being attacked and bolting (which shouldn't happen anyway with the gate (which is the only navmesh hole as well), but for some reason the gate gets opened despite animals not being capable of opening them).
3. A few NPCs are supposed to visit her house to browse (or sell their kills to her), you may have just caught them as they overlap (About 6pm ish if I remember right). I'll have a check on the Navmesh (although if they can find their way IN, they should be able to get out) though as given most of my pre-release issues centred around Anarenia not actually being finished (despite being PLACED first, hence being internally known as House1, I worked on her last and thought I finished things I hadn't)..
4. Morthal's swamps are too shallow to support anything bigger than a rowboat. Especially in the town itself which has a solid bridge blocking the waterway in and is so shallow you don't even have to swim in many parts of it. Morthal's reclusiveness also was taken into account, trade = outsiders, and Morthal isn't fond of outsiders.
5. That's weird. Sujeeva's a notch more aggressive than Neebanza if not identical, but shouldn't be enough to make her attack on sight for trespassing. She wasn't attacking when I walked in on them during testing, but I wasn't trespassing at the time.
6. At night? Most of them sleep late, like 11pm, and several of them visit the inn in the evening. Only the two Argonians ever really leave the confines of town. Which ones were missing?
7. Weirdly, apart from the farmer, smith and smith's son, they all fight a lot better than the guards (who do go over the bridge occasionally and stand near the mill, but being a Skyrim guard, will usually go "Gods a fight!" rather than actually engaging the enemy). Given the farm's close proximity to the mill, it shouldn't be suffering from attacks the vanilla guard won't notice. Also, due to the civil war crap, adding new guards is somewhat problematic, mainly due to them being replaced with either generic Imperials or Stormcloaks on Civil War ownership changing which requires scripting (and scripting is best avoided).
Thanks for pointing this all out, I'll go and give some more checks on the Navmeshes and AI packages, as well as have special cows that won't be such a target (which should stop them getting engaged in combat and leaving their pen and/or dying). It's possible some of these issues (like the packages screwing up) may have happened in the LE backport, but I'll give it a good looking at.
8?. The gate on the south entrance always seemed like the only defensible spot in Morthal and the only real way in (at least the only way with a road), the swamps are too open and hard for people to navigate, which is why I put it there, so that if Morthal is invaded, they can barricade the gate and use a ladder to station some archers above it. You should be able to happily disable it (it's a grand total of about 9 assets (Arch, Gate, 2 torches, 2 lights for the torches (may just be one), the banner post, the banner itself, and the banner ring attachment)) without any issues. I only put this in as every other intact hold capital (and even some of the larger towns like Riverwood and Helgen) except Morthal had some form of gate or arch on it's main entrance(s) and it seemed odd that Morthal didn't.
EDIT: 1.01 is up, should fix the cows dying issue (they should no longer be targeted by predators as they are no longer in the Prey faction and are in the PredatorFriend faction (like carriage drivers) so should no longer be bothered). Also did a check on Anarenia's Navmeshes, all fine, but there was an issue where she took her evening meal early (locking her doors) at 6pm rather than the intended 8pm, which could've been why NPCs got stuck in her house (they are supposed to visit during the 4 hours she's inside her house/shop and leave at least an hour before she has her evening meal). Couldn't see anything wrong with the AI packages other than Anarenia's accidentally early evening meal and subsequent house locking.
Build02 is bad, Build03 I moved the farm and put the blacksmiths home where the farm is. I didn't clean it up. It's only a conceptual build to show the orientation of the blacksmith placed where the farm is.
I was going to build a wall on the northwest end behind the farm (in Build01) but I had other things to do. The group of spiders coming from the west are what are killing the cows and likely why the cows keep leaving the pen as well. Also Anarenia is (the seller) was locked inside her house again (at about 230-330pm). I didn't check her AIP to she why she did it. What is her intended design? Is she meant to sell goods from within her house or outside of it. If she's an indoor seller then why not rename her building into a business name (if you're not going to use the trading post of course). Why is she locking the door while indoors eating? NPC typically lock doors when sleeping or when they leave home (to go to their job). I didn't go hunting to see what their nighttime behavior was because I'm working on other things.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g1dfRV6ppF0DBGaeoZeiN9vJ9hc_RrBB/view?usp=sharing
2pm if I remember right she's meant to be outside and nothing should be forcing her inside except Player (sometimes NPCs mid-dialogue follow through load doors). She shouldn't be inside at 2pm (and my internal testing found her outside on the tanning rack during these hours) as her packages aren't telling her to do so at this hour. As for locking her doors while eating, she's just a bit weird like that.
Her schedule is. 7am-9am Eat (Locked), 9am-10am Relax (L), 10am-1pm Work and Sell Outside (Unlocked), 1pm-2pm Visit Farm (L), 2pm-4pm Work and Sell Outside (U), 4pm-8pm Relax and Sell Inside (U), 8pm-10pm Eat (Inn on Weekend, Home Weekdays) (L). 10pm-7am Sleep (L).
Hrolka (Smith's wife) is meant to visit Anarenia's informal store from 5pm-7pm. Neebanza (Male Argonian) is meant to visit from 6pm-7pm, and Sujeeva (Female Argonian) is meant to visit from 4pm-6pm but only on Weekends. All of these potentially clashed with Version 1.0's (fixed in 1.01) dodgy Anarenia eating package (which was 2 hours early, maybe I was thinking of Metric Time when setting that up) which could potentially trap all 3 visitors.
As for the cows, they really shouldn't be having issues any more with 1.01. But I'll do some more intensive testing with console commands.
UPDATE: Tested the cows (and numerous cow pens across Skyrim). https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/768195698280628245/855877549925597266/20210619193035_1.jpg The cows were only "Fleeing" because they are cowards (cowardly NPCs bolt whenever a fight is nearby). Without some silly NPC opening the gate, they stayed in the pen. HOWEVER, given how dodgy Skyrim is with 4-legged creatures, they can occasionally (only seemed to be the case for the cows in a very specific spot and only if they were being pushed) glitch THROUGH thin fences (including some of the vanilla cow pens). This is the same for the wolves, and can be triggered almost on command by just riding a horse (as Horses really show off the quadruped issues) into small static objects.
As for Anarenia, she seemed to be working fine for me at the hours. Only issue seemed to be her doors were locked when she was working on her porch, this seems to be how the door locking works requiring an NPC of the door's ownership faction to actually be in the cell or moving through the door to change it's state. It's minor and really doesn't amount to anything, but when it appears to be an engine thing it's not fixable.
As for performance hits, they didn't look THAT overdetailed, but the screenshots were never that close so it's hard to tell for sure, but performance hits generally are not a good thing to have.
Between the Blacksmith (New), Falion, the Apothecary, the Inn and the Skinner (New, pretty much exclusively animal hides and animal parts (like bear claws), no meats), you can get pretty much everything except books, clothes and jewellery.