This is a basic tutorial on quest creation for Skyrim. It covers the following: Creating new dialogue, using Papyrus fragments in dialogue, adding items to a player's inventory through scripts, disabling/enabling an actor, and creating a basic quest. If you're looking for a tutorial in one of those subjects, then read on. The CK is necessary, and a good text editing program such as Notepad++ or SublimeText is recommended (I prefer Notepad++). They are both free programs.
We use the terms CK, response, topic, branch, view, info and mod. CK is the Creation Kit, the tool used to modify Skyrim, and a mod is a modification to the game. Information about responses, topics, branches, views, and infos can be be found by searching their name on creationkit.com.
This tutorial assumes that the reader understands the basics of using the CK's (Creation Kit) interface; a rudimentary knowledge of scripting (a basic knowledge of properties, functions and events - how they work); some, small experience in NPC creation (or read this guide); and requires the Skyrim Meshes.bsa and Textures.bsa to be extracted. You can use BSAopt for this. A basic guide to scripting can be found here, and the second part can be found here.
If you find any phrases colored any of the following colors, refer to this key to understand their purpose.
Red text denotes phrases or words of great import. Read sentences in this color carefully, and more than once.
Orange text signifies a section of text that applies only to certain readers/modders. Skim over this to see if it applies to you, and if it does, read it. Otherwise, you can skip it.
Purple/pink text is a sidenote, or a useful bit of information. Skip them if you want, but you may find useful information if you read them properly, especially if you're an advanced modder.
Please note that this tutorial is incredibly long, so it has been split into three parts for better readability. This is part 1. Part 2 can be found here. Part 3 can be found here. I recommend that you create your quest as you read this, rather than reading it and then creating your quest.
Now that that is out of the way, let's begin.
Creating the Quest:
1) First, open up the CK. Once it's finished loading (this may take a few seconds), click on the folder icon in the top left of the screen, located on the toolbar. A box will pop up, with a list of the mods you have installed. For this tutorial, we will only be using Skyrim itself. So double click Skyrim.esm and Update.esm, so a check appears in the box next to their names. If you already have a plugin to add this quest to, then set that as the Active File. Otherwise, just click OK. Give the CK a while to load, since it has to process every asset in the game.
2) Once it has loaded, save your plugin immediately. This can be done by clicking File>Save (top left corner), or by clicking the icon next to the folder, on the main toolbar. (I believe that is a floppy disc.)
Why do we do this? The CK is an extremely powerful, but extremely buggy, program. It is infamous for it's inclination to crash unexpectedly, and often. Learn to save often, and you're less likely to lose progress. In fact, this is a good habit to get into for modding Skyrim in general. Always backup, and always save.
2) Once it has loaded, save your plugin immediately. This can be done by clicking File>Save (top left corner), or by clicking the icon next to the folder, on the main toolbar. (I believe that is a floppy disc.)
Why do we do this? The CK is an extremely powerful, but extremely buggy, program. It is infamous for it's inclination to crash unexpectedly, and often. Learn to save often, and you're less likely to lose progress. In fact, this is a good habit to get into for modding Skyrim in general. Always backup, and always save.
If you go to File>Preferences and then the Misc tab, or click the icon next to the save button, and then to the Misc tab, you can enable autosaving, and the interval between saves. This is a useful feature, but no excuse not to perform manual saves as well.
3) Navigate to the Actors>Actor subcategory. Create a new NPC (right click in the list of NPC, and select New). Name your NPC, and make them Unique, then give them a face and clothes, and press OK. Place your NPC somewhere in the world (Double click an interior in the Cell View, and place your NPC). We will be using WhiterunBanneredMare for this example, or 'The Bannered Mare', in Whiterun. Our NPC will be named Sam, and he is an old Imperial man. Be sure to give him a normal voice type! Or, if you're going to have him be voice acted, create your own voicetype for him.
4) Now we get to make Quests! Go to the Characters>Quest category, and create a new quest. (Right click in the Object Window and select New.) Enter a unique ID for your quest (ours is TuSamQuest), and name it something fabulous (in our case, Sam's Quest). Choose Side Quests from the Type pulldown menu, and give the quest a priority of 50. Let's go through what we just did.
Quest ID: The QuestID is how the CK refers to your quest. It's not the name that shows up in game, however. It is important that it is unique. If it conflicts with another quest, it will cause incompatibilities. Be sure to follow the proper naming conventions. Changing this once you've begun to add to your quest is very hard, so make sure it's something you like and can remember.
Quest Name: This is what appears in-game, when the quest starts, or the stage changes. It also shows up in your journal. Don't worry - you can change this whenever you want.
Type: The type simply tells the game that this is a Side Quest, not a miscellaneous or main quest. It governs where it is in your journal (miscellaneous is a collection of small quests, with no names), and how large the name is (Main quests have large text, side quests have medium text). Change this to whatever suits you, but I recommend Side Quests.
Priority: Despite the name, priority isn't all that important. It just governs how high your quest is in the journal. Higher is higher, if that makes any sense. 50 or 60 is good for medium main quests, 100 if you think your quest would be incredibly important to the player, but not Main Quest level important.
If you want, you can place your quest in a subcategory in the Object Window Filter. More on this can be found at my "naming conventions" post.
5) Close the quest window by clicking OK. It's time to start creating items. Close the Character section, and open up Items>Book. A good tutorial on book making can be found here. If you are familiar with the CK's book system, make a list with three item names (in handwritten font) and skip to the next step. Otherwise, right click and select new in the list of books. Type in a suitable ID for your book (TQSamList for us), and give it a name. Ours is Sam's List. Now, we're going to choose what it looks like. Change the texture to HighPolyNote and the mesh to Meshes>Clutter>Books>note01 and then choose a .nif file (not a bloody one). Now we type in the text:
<font face='$HandwrittenFont'>
1. Get 1 mudcrab chitin.
2. Get 1 piece of firewood.
3. Get 1 blue mountain flower
And press OK to exit the menu. You don't have to use those item names. You can do whatever you want - you can even add custom items to find.
6) Now we're going to begin the dialogue. Open up your quest. Head over to the Dialogue Views, and right click in the Dialog Views section. Create a new view. A prompt will appear, with your quest's name already put in. I recommend leaving that there, and adding on to it. Give it a simple, but fairly descriptive, name. For example, ours is TQSamQuestSamView. I named it this because: I wanted to keep the prefix, and SamView is fairly simple. It means that this dialogue view is where I'll put all of Sam's dialogue.
7) Right click in the massive, empty white space next to the dialog view section, and click "Create new Branch". You should probably name it something like: PrefixViewNameSimpleName. Ours is TQSamQuestSamViewMeetSam. This signifies that this is a branch governing the dialogue when you meet Sam. It should prompt you to create a new topic. You can change the name, if you want, but I recommend keeping it the same as they suggest. (For more info on views, branches, topics, responses and infos, you should look them up at creationkit.com)
8) Now go over to the Player Dialogue. I only use the Dialogue Views to create new views, since I've had issues with it (links going around the entire branch, branches hiding behind one and other, etc.) You should see your branch and topic, in their separate tables. Click on your topic, and give it a topic text. Keep it short and simple, since the CK can only accept 80 characters for the topic text (unless you use a .ini tweak). We'll use: "Hello. Do you need anything?" Anything similar will work, too. It all depends on how you want it to look.
If your topic text is grayed out, then try going back to the Dialogue Views and double clicking on your topic there, and pressing OK in the window that pops up. Then, you can return to the Player Dialogue to continue editing. Reloading the CK is another solution, or verifying the game cache through Steam. If that doesn't work, reinstall it.
9) Right click in the field next to the topics section, and select New. A response window should appear. This is where we type how the NPC responding will reply (Sam, in this case.) I'll put in this:
A spellchecker should pop up. It should complain about the spelling of mudcrab. Just ignore that.
10) Press OK. A larger window should pop up. It should look something like this:
3) Navigate to the Actors>Actor subcategory. Create a new NPC (right click in the list of NPC, and select New). Name your NPC, and make them Unique, then give them a face and clothes, and press OK. Place your NPC somewhere in the world (Double click an interior in the Cell View, and place your NPC). We will be using WhiterunBanneredMare for this example, or 'The Bannered Mare', in Whiterun. Our NPC will be named Sam, and he is an old Imperial man. Be sure to give him a normal voice type! Or, if you're going to have him be voice acted, create your own voicetype for him.
4) Now we get to make Quests! Go to the Characters>Quest category, and create a new quest. (Right click in the Object Window and select New.) Enter a unique ID for your quest (ours is TuSamQuest), and name it something fabulous (in our case, Sam's Quest). Choose Side Quests from the Type pulldown menu, and give the quest a priority of 50. Let's go through what we just did.
Quest ID: The QuestID is how the CK refers to your quest. It's not the name that shows up in game, however. It is important that it is unique. If it conflicts with another quest, it will cause incompatibilities. Be sure to follow the proper naming conventions. Changing this once you've begun to add to your quest is very hard, so make sure it's something you like and can remember.
Quest Name: This is what appears in-game, when the quest starts, or the stage changes. It also shows up in your journal. Don't worry - you can change this whenever you want.
Type: The type simply tells the game that this is a Side Quest, not a miscellaneous or main quest. It governs where it is in your journal (miscellaneous is a collection of small quests, with no names), and how large the name is (Main quests have large text, side quests have medium text). Change this to whatever suits you, but I recommend Side Quests.
Priority: Despite the name, priority isn't all that important. It just governs how high your quest is in the journal. Higher is higher, if that makes any sense. 50 or 60 is good for medium main quests, 100 if you think your quest would be incredibly important to the player, but not Main Quest level important.
If you want, you can place your quest in a subcategory in the Object Window Filter. More on this can be found at my "naming conventions" post.
5) Close the quest window by clicking OK. It's time to start creating items. Close the Character section, and open up Items>Book. A good tutorial on book making can be found here. If you are familiar with the CK's book system, make a list with three item names (in handwritten font) and skip to the next step. Otherwise, right click and select new in the list of books. Type in a suitable ID for your book (TQSamList for us), and give it a name. Ours is Sam's List. Now, we're going to choose what it looks like. Change the texture to HighPolyNote and the mesh to Meshes>Clutter>Books>note01 and then choose a .nif file (not a bloody one). Now we type in the text:
<font face='$HandwrittenFont'>
1. Get 1 mudcrab chitin.
2. Get 1 piece of firewood.
3. Get 1 blue mountain flower
And press OK to exit the menu. You don't have to use those item names. You can do whatever you want - you can even add custom items to find.
6) Now we're going to begin the dialogue. Open up your quest. Head over to the Dialogue Views, and right click in the Dialog Views section. Create a new view. A prompt will appear, with your quest's name already put in. I recommend leaving that there, and adding on to it. Give it a simple, but fairly descriptive, name. For example, ours is TQSamQuestSamView. I named it this because: I wanted to keep the prefix, and SamView is fairly simple. It means that this dialogue view is where I'll put all of Sam's dialogue.
7) Right click in the massive, empty white space next to the dialog view section, and click "Create new Branch". You should probably name it something like: PrefixViewNameSimpleName. Ours is TQSamQuestSamViewMeetSam. This signifies that this is a branch governing the dialogue when you meet Sam. It should prompt you to create a new topic. You can change the name, if you want, but I recommend keeping it the same as they suggest. (For more info on views, branches, topics, responses and infos, you should look them up at creationkit.com)
8) Now go over to the Player Dialogue. I only use the Dialogue Views to create new views, since I've had issues with it (links going around the entire branch, branches hiding behind one and other, etc.) You should see your branch and topic, in their separate tables. Click on your topic, and give it a topic text. Keep it short and simple, since the CK can only accept 80 characters for the topic text (unless you use a .ini tweak). We'll use: "Hello. Do you need anything?" Anything similar will work, too. It all depends on how you want it to look.
If your topic text is grayed out, then try going back to the Dialogue Views and double clicking on your topic there, and pressing OK in the window that pops up. Then, you can return to the Player Dialogue to continue editing. Reloading the CK is another solution, or verifying the game cache through Steam. If that doesn't work, reinstall it.
9) Right click in the field next to the topics section, and select New. A response window should appear. This is where we type how the NPC responding will reply (Sam, in this case.) I'll put in this:
Yes, actually. I need mudcrab chitin, a piece of firewood, and a blue mountain flower. Blue, I say! What a wonderful color, really...When writing dialogue, there's a few things you need to do to make it good. I've presented Sam as a bit of an eccentric guy, maybe a little crazy. You can do what you want. But creating interesting dialogue is key to making good quests - you want to draw the player into the story.
A spellchecker should pop up. It should complain about the spelling of mudcrab. Just ignore that.
10) Press OK. A larger window should pop up. It should look something like this:
The dialogue system is far too complex to explain in a few paragraphs, so I'm going to link to a separate post all about dialogue, if you want to learn all the ins and outs of CK dialogue. Otherwise, continue on to the next part, since I'll explain the basics there. The next part is here.
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