Crosslinking plugin files

The Workaround

Created by COMPUTWITCH

For my example I will use a plugin currently available (on August 5, 2006)at www.oblivion source.com: The "house tunnels/catacombs" mod.

The "housetunnels/catacombs" mod connects all of the purchasable houses in the game to one another via trap doors in the basement and a short but winding set of caves. Lets say we want to link the house in the "Myhome" mod to the catacombs in the "housetunnels" mod. If we load the construction set, put doors in the catacombs and the house, save the doors, reload the construction set, and then link them, the resulting save will crosslink the two mods together and create the aforementioned "not a unique object" errors, no matter which file is set active. The only way to make this type of link work is to link a door from the catacombs to a wilderness space just outside your house.

What I did was loaded the catacomb mod as the active file, put a door in the catacombs in a likely looking place, then saved the mod with the door added but not going anywhere. Then I reloaded the construction set, opened the myhome cell (catacombs is still the active file) and viewed the linked door going to the outside. Just outside the front door is a well door siting to the left of a stable. the well door doesn't go anywhere, but i cant use it, because it is part of the "myhome" mod and it's use would create a crosslink. Panning around the well gave me an easy reference to an available wilderness cell on the other side of the stable. Since I'm no good at landscaping yet, I dragged a matching well door from the object menu and plopped it down by the stable on the rignt side, so now looking out my front door I see a well door to the left of the stable and another well door to the right of it. Once added, I clicked the teleport tab, linked it to the previously added catacomb door, adjusted the teleport markers accordingly, then saved again.

End result: If I load the "catacombs" mod but not the "myhouse" mod, I can walk down the road by where my house should have been (but isn't,) and see a well sitting off to the side of the road. Approching the well I see it's a door and POOF!! down to the catacombs I go, meaning that the link to the catacombs is independent of the "myhome" mod and will work with or without it running. But since we intentionally placed the well door next to where the stable sits with the "myhome" mod running, the house tunnels mod now works nicely with the "myhome" mod running as well. So, if I reload the game with the "catcombs" mod and the "myhome" mods both running, I can walk out my door, go to the stables, go to the well on the rignt, and access the catacombs, and it looks like the well was originally part of the myhouse mod all along, even though it's not. WAY cool effect!!!! (I created a well and attached it to the other well door later, so both doors would go somewhere)

I can now do the same thing with each one of the other house mods I have (and mabye my favorite shops in town while i'm at it) by adding more doors to the catacombs and placing well doors, trapdoors, or whatever other portal object seems appropriate ousdide the homes, creating an interlinking set of tunnels to wherever i want to go. If winding tunnels do not suit your taste, you could create a room full of doors or Arcane Univiersity tower portals and use it as a sort of "Grand Central Station" to go anywhere in the oblivion world you wanted to go in liu of fast traveling everywhere.

Another variation of this plan would be to skip the catacombs entirely and link a door fom one house mod directly to a well door or other portal object outside the other house, saving the change, then loading the other house as the active file and linking a door from it to a portal object ouside the first house, to create two way transport.

The moral of this story: While there as many variations to the way you execute this plan as there are people to execute it, the concept of modifying .esp mod files to fit together like puzzle pieces so they appear to be joined while actually remaining independent is one of the simplest yet effective plans I can think of to solve the potential crosslinking issues that arise when trying to link structures created in different .esp mod plugin files.

Hope this has helped.

Computwitch