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The Cell
By now you're probably just dying to get into the editor and actually do something, but you'll have to bear with me for just a little longer.
Besides knowing what all of those tabs in the Object Window do, it's absolutely imperative that you know your
way around the Render Window. That's the window at the top-right, which at start just displays what looks like a flat, mottled brown surface.
You should have your Morrowind.ESM file loaded, so you'll have a list of cells (Interior and Exterior) in the
Cell View Window, below the Render Window. Highlight an entry in the list, and on your keyboard, hit the letter S.
You'll see that you scroll down to the beginning of the S entries. You can type multiple letters, too, like 'SE',
in short sequence. (Note that you may need to click away from your "result", or use one of the arrow keys, between "jumps".) Find the entry for
"Seyda Neen, Arrille's Tradehouse", and double-click on it.
After a brief loading sequence, you'll probably see something like:
"Um, what the heck is that?" you're wondering. Well, it's good ol' Arrille's Tradehouse, indeed - zoomed way out.
The grey "ether" surrounding the little blotch of color is just that: empty space, the nothingness
that you would see were you able to look through a hole in the wall. This isn't actually a part of the rest
of the world, it is indeed its own "cell" of space, that is linked with the outside by means of a door
that teleports you to a different cell - the cell for Seyda Neen.
The quickest way to get yourself zoomed in and ready to work with a cell is to double-click on one of the objects
listed on the right half of the Cell View Window. Try double-clicking Tolvise Othralen.
Ahh, much better. Well, kinda.
It's a little dark in here, and when you're editing things, you'll usually want a very clear view of everything. You can turn on all the lights with the A key: 
"Now how the heck do I move around?" you're wondering next, grasshopper?
It is good you should ask. Getting a hang for navigating in the Render Window is one of the first, and most important skills you will learn, in TESCS.
First, you'll always find you have to click on the Render Window itself before you can navigate in it.
Now hold down the Shift key on the keyboard, and move the mouse around. Holding down the
Shift key is the equivalent of putting you into "mouselook" mode.
Get the hang of mouselooking before you go much farther. Hit D on the keyboard (de-select) and see how that affects your mouselook.
You can zoom your view in and out with the mousewheel, or by holding down V and moving the mouse,
much like you use Shift. In general, V provides a more granular level of zoom, and is a bit
less agonizing than flinging through the wheel five times just to get zoomed out to the right
level you want. Now pan the camera around a bit by holding down the spacebar (or middle mouse button),
and dragging. Practice using combinations of shift, V, and spacebar to move yourself around Arrille's Tradehouse.
Try going downstairs and back up, or turning a circle around an object.
If this is your first 3D editing experience, it may be a bit disconcerting at first to have
to move around in so unnatural a fashion: you'll find you want to walk, strafe, jump,
and look around an object with it centered in your field of view. It just takes some getting used to.
Remember that you're operating in true 3-dimensional space, here, and the controls which allow
you to move and look don't necessarily assume such nuisances as gravity and the limited mobility of the human body.
If you get yourself lost, remember that you can always double-click on an object in the Cell View window
to re-orient yourself. There are two other ways to get yourself back on track: the T and C keys.
Select an object somewhere just off-camera, and hit T. You'll see you zoom in to the object,
looking down at it from above. Try the same thing with C. Now you get a "perspective" view.
This helps if you see an object that you want to zoom in on or center your view upon, but don't
want to go hunting it down in the object list. Moving around using just the C and T keys can become very natural after a while,
and you'll find yourself zipping around your cells with the greatest of ease.
This is handy, too: not sure exactly what you have selected? The name of it appears at the lower-left,
as well as its type, coordinates, and cell (respectively, moving over to the right).
Now what about moving objects inside of the Render View? Well, this is done with the most intuitive
of actions: simply select the object, and drag it around with the (left) mouse button.
(I'll say "left", but if you have your mouse buttons switched, of course I mean your "primary" mouse button.)
Give Hrisskar a double-click, remember to re-select your Render Window, hit T to give yourself a
better view of him, and drag him around like the big ol' pussycat he is.
Note how you can only move him when your mouse gives you the four-way arrow icon.
This makes moving very thin or small objects difficult, so using zoom and mouselook to get a good angle is critical.
Now use Shift (mouselook) to give yourself a different angle on him, and try dragging him around a little more.
You should see that you continue to move him only along the X and Y planes (left/right, forward/back),
but not along the Z plane (up/down). To move an object along the Z axis, you have to hold down Z,
and drag with the mouse. In fact, you can also hold down either X or Y to move an object
only along one of those planes, too. This is very useful for aligning objects.
Speaking of aligning objects, you may have noticed that as you drag around ol' Hrisskar, you don't have much precision -
you're free to place him pretty much wherever you like. This is usually fine for things like NPCs or objects,
but when it comes time to put architecture together, you're probably going to want to make sure everything aligns perfectly,
with no visible seams or gaps. This is easily accomplished with the snap-to-grid button:
And as you can see, by default it's off. The button next to it, snap-to-angle, is used for rotating objects,
and by default it's on. Now, with snapping turned on, try moving Hrisskar again.
You'll see he now snaps around at an increment, and you can line him up easily with the walls or the floor.
There's actually a much easier way to get something to align with the floor (or any surface), though: the F key.
Use Z to drag Hrisskar a ways up into the air, then hit F. He should land perfectly flat on the floor again.
Drag him over to and above the bar and drop him on top of it. Drop him on top of Elone.
Trying hitting F multiple times: see how Hrisskar sinks to new depths (he continues to snap to each progressive surface level down).
Get used to using F. F stands for "friend".
I mentioned rotating. Yes, you can rotate things, too. What good would your world be
if everything only faced north? Well, might be kind of eery in a cool way, but a little boring, too.
You use the right (alternate) mouse button to rotate. And as you can see, your rotate is snapped,
as well (by default to 45-degree increments). You can turn that off with the other button shown above.
And, as with moving objects, you can also change the axis upon which you're rotating by holding down
either X, Y, or Z while you drag with the right button. But, Z doesn't rotate on the Z axis, as you'd
first expect. In fact, Z rotates on the Y axis, and you don't need to hold down any key to rotate on the Z axis
(it's the default). Yes it's a little weird. But I guess it's not so bad once you get the hang of it.
Also, note how NPCs will only rotate on the Z axis: you can only change an NPC's facing, not its tilt or pitch.
You'll probably find you want to change the increments by which you're moving or rotating things, at some point.
You can change those increments by going to File, Preferences, and setting them in the Grid Snap and Angle Snap fields:
Some of the other settings in this window bear mentioning, too.
The Movement Speeds change how quickly you can move things around with the mouse
(including the camera, when in mouselook mode). Not the increment of how far things move, but how
quickly they get there. In general, leaving these at 1.00 is a good idea, unless you find you need
to move things really long distances really fast. I also often touch the Camera settings when I
need greater or finer control over the camera.
The "Use Data Files on CD-ROM" option is, by default, checked, and you'll probably want to leave
it checked, unless you've copied all of the files from your CS CD onto your hard drive
(which can be useful, but I won't cover that in this tutorial). You will find, however, that with that option checked, if you hit OK to this dialogue,
this little nag may come up. It's telling you that you don't have the CS CD in your CD-ROM, so it won't be able to "use" those files.
Everything's fine, and you don't have to have the CS CD in your CD-ROM to run the editor (except in more advanced scenarios,
where you need to grab some of the meshes and art from the CD), so just click OK if you get that one. You'll still need the
game CD in your CD-ROM to test your mod anyhow, so swapping CDs every time you want to look at your work so far could get a little annoying.
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