Understanding the Creation Kit

Simple preliminary guide to the Starfield Creation Kit (CK). This is not intended to be a comprehensive guide on making mods, there are plenty of those all over the internet, spanning Fallout 4 and Skyrim's Creation Kits. Most of the information in those will apply to Starfield CK, and those are the best resources to learn from.

In this guide, I will go over the files that come with Starfield and how the Creation Kit displays information about them. I will also go over the methodology I use to interpret the vague information the CK offers about those files.

Topics of Discussion

• Before we begin....
  
• Data files
  
• CK components
  
• The CK workspace
  
• What the...?
  
• Closing

Before we begin....

They are not kidding about the 32 GB minimum RAM requirement. If your computer doesn't meet the minimum requirements, stop now because this is going to be an unpleasant experience for you.

If you cannot comprehend how to install and run the Creation Kit, leave now, because the rest of it is so far above your technical ability that you need to avoid this type of thing entirely. Spend some time making mods in more simple games like Redneck Rampage, Blood, or Quake. Learn the ins and outs of installing programs, and why Windows hates you (it hates everyone, it's nothing personal).

If you don't have View File Extensions turned on in Windows, you want to. If you don't know how, leave this program alone until you learn more about Windows in general. Trust me, this is far more complicated than making Windows user-friendly.

Starfield Data files

The game files are located in Starfield\Data, and the ones the CK concerns itself with are *.esm files.

The important files are:

• Starfield.esm
  
• Constellation.esm
  
• OldMars.esm
  
• SFBGS003.esm
  
• SFBGS006.esm
  
• SFBGS007.esm
  
• SFBGS008.esm

There's also a BlueprintShips.esm but the CK doesn't open it, it just hangs infinitely, which means it's either heavily encrypted or buggy. It doesn't even show up in the File list for you to open. If you double-click on it to open with the CK, it just hangs. This, I assume, is where all those "Let me see what ships you have for sale" and "Ecliptic Falcatta" and "Va'ruun Dirge" and Mission Reward ships are.

These are the Master files. "esm" means "Elder Scrolls Master" because the CK was first introduced with the Elder Scrolls series, and they never changed the file extension it outputs. Even Fallout's game files are .esm, so this is normal.

The *.ba2 files are basically zip files that contain all the actual game assets (models, textures, sounds, etc) that the *.esm files control. We don't need to deal with those here.

Stafield.esm is the core game master file. All other *.esm files reference this file.

Constellation.esm is, from what I can see, where the Constellation space suit and gear you get from Sarah and the bunch is handled. If you want to edit the stats of that gear, load this.

OldMars.esm is what governs the Old Mars texture for certain gear, like the Constellation suit, and the Cutter.

SFBGS00x.esm means "Star Field Bethesda Game Studios" 00x.master file, and each of these apparently govern specific game items. In Skyrim, these would be named "Hearthfires.esm", "Dragonborn.esm", "Dawnguard.esm", etc, but for some insane reason, they were given a very generic name.

From what I've been able to determine, 003 deals with the Trackers Alliance, 006 deals with the Empty Habs for ship building, 007 deals with the Survival stuff, and 008 is for all the existing cities (New Atlantis, Akila, etc).

How do I know this? Launch the CK, go to Open, and you get a list of the ESMs. Double-click on one of them to put an X in their checkbox, then down at the bottom click Details. The Details window shows what the file contents are. Just scrolling through the Details window for SFBGS003.esm shows a bunch of entries that say Trackers Alliance, Bounty Hunter this and that, and so on. Given that it's a short list, and a small file in general, it's got a limited scope. This methodology applied to the other files individually will reveal similar focused information, and you can clearly see they're basically just mods.

Creation Kit window components

The CK has a LOT of available windows to display, and the first time you launch it, many of them open. I don't know what all of them do. I only use 3 windows, but I make simple mods like faster arrows in Skyrim, or adding a bunch of loot to a chest you can reach at the start of the game.

You can either close these windows with the X in the corner or by the View option on the Menu bar.

The mod you're making will determine what windows you need open.

The only windows I use are the Object window (this is where you can see all the game assets and their categories - Actors, Items, Magic, World Objects, etc. and each of those has subtopics like Actors/People, Items/Ammo, etc.), , Cell View window, and the Cell window under View/Render/Cell.

I usually place the Object window on the Left, Cell View on the RIght, and the Render window in the middle, spread end to end, and shrunk vertically so I can see the title bars of the other two. The Toolbar counts as another Window, and has the basic File Open and Save icons, as well as the more advanced stuff like Lighting, Navmesh, etc, which we won't go into here.

So either I'm doing something wrong or Steam is having trouble with images, because the screenshot function doesn't work, and taking screenshots in a 3rd party app doesn't display them correctly on Steam. You get postage stamps. WTF. Anyway...

Double-clicking literally anything will open up another object-specific popup. Those are covered in actual CK modding tutorials.

I resize the Object and Cell View windows so they each take up about 1/3rd of the screen, with the Render window visible between them so I can select them without selecting anything in the windows (because that can cause problems - you want to be able to reach the Title bars at the top of each window).

The Creation Kit Workspace

So as we covered in the previous section, the CK has a lot of different windows that do different things and display lots of different information. What you're doing depends on what you'll need open. You might look into a multi-monitor setup, but I don't even know if it works with multiple monitors. It would make sense for a program with this many windows, but hey, it's Bethesda, right?

What The...?

Starfield is somewhat unique in how things are named, meaning most things are not named with any kind of sense.

So you have the Form ID, which is how the game itself references things, and then you have the name you see while playing the game.

For example, in Skyrim's CK, if you wanted to find Whiterun's exterior cell, you select Whiterun World in the Cell View. If you want to find the Argos Mine where you first meet Barrett, it's "lc001World".

If you want to find the Breezehome interior cell, you go to Interiors and select WhiterunBreezehome cell. That's its FormID.
If you want to find the actual mine you start Starfield in, with Lin and Heller riding the elevator down, that's FormID VecteraMine01

So, how do you find that it's lc001World? First, find the Interior you're after (VecteraMine01), then find the door marker at the elevator that links back to the outpost. Remember, after you create your character, you can take the same elevator back down to the mine where you got the artifact, right? So it stands to reason there's a loading screen door marker.

But there's a LOT of markers all bunched up, so finding it isn't without potential problems.

The other way to find it is to just start going through the Worlds until you see it.


Those POIs everyone hates seeing everywhere? They're not named for what they are, but things like "DR00xWorld". Muybridge has its own name, as do some "Cave" and "Abandoned Hangar", but there's a lot of things that are prefabricated and have attached buildings.

There's also a "Default World" which is a block of flat, barren terrain. This, I guess, is where you'd start building your own "world".

Interiors can at least be sorted by their in-game name under the Name column, but exterior spaces don't have a Name column, so if there's something in particular you're looking for, like Abandoned UC Listening Post, you'll have to sort through the "DR00x" worlds to find it. Temples are, thankfully, named "Temple", so you can find those. However, everything is dynamically placed in the game, so it's not like you can go to "SkinkWorld" and then find "Temple Eta" on that.

In fact, there are very few actual worlds you can locate in the CK. You can go to some World Orbit locations, but can't see much in the render window.

There are some preset worlds that are on the same level as Interiors, but are counted as exteriors, like the exterior of the Deimos Armored Transport, the Eye, and other ships and star stations, and these also have their own entries on the same level as Interiors.

Closing comments

Modding Starfield with new areas, new star systems, new planets, populating existing worlds, and changing POIs is going to be extremely difficult. I don't expect to see anything new in space for 2 years. You can drop interior cells full of stuff all day long, but for a game about being in Space and on the surface of various worlds, making mods for that is going to take a long time.

Even working with interiors is going to be difficult.

[TheGibberingWave]

BRB, modding Redneck Rampage into Starfield

[williep]

Thank you
Very good info