[RyanS]

Claiming! The entrance will be a crystal cave with a single mage. Further in, there will be a very small, well hidden daedric shrine.

[Yeti]

Granting.

[RyanS]

Update!

[RyanS]

Please revoke this, I have held it for much too long. I do like what I have done with it, but I just haven't had the inspiration or time to continue.

Hmm, my first revoke here at TR.

[Aeven]

Revokey dokey.

[Ragox]

Claiming.

I'm a crystal cave fanatic.

Would continue with RyanS's work.

[Seneca37]

Go to it.

[Ragox]

First update.

I managed to work out the giant cave part, now I need to do all the smaller corridors and rooms.

[Ragox]

Big update of happenings

[Seneca37]

Any progress on this?

[Ragox]

New file is up.

It's not far from being finished now

[Ragox]

It's so close...

[Seneca37]

I was just looking at this and have a few questions
1) Why did you mix moldcave stalactites with the mud pieces?
Typically we do not mix cave type pieces, unless there is a good justification.
2) You do know that bk_fryssajournal is unique and can not be used here?
3) Typically a cave will only have one type of mineral rock, you used both iron and gold. I think that there is enough treasure here so that the gold is not needed.

The structural design of the cave is very nice (just played in-game). It does seem a bit bright, maybe a bit lower lighting settings, especially the sunlight setting. Very good work.

[Ragox]

[Seneca37]

Lighting is usually very subjective, I like caves to be very dark requiring the player to carry a torch or use a spell to see. Its tough to tell in the CS, so be sure to go in-game and look around.

I would try out setting all the lighting values to 1/2 their current settings, and see how that is. I did like the colors throughout but not sure if they were from the ambient/sunlight settings, or the various light sources.

[sasquatch2o]

I rather liked the gold deposits in the lava area. They are hard to reach and dangerous to harvest. Player would have to levitate down there to collect them. Reasonable, I think.

[Ragox]

Production completed.

[Rats]

Off to the review section, then!

[arvisrend]

Partial review, up to the last in_mud_rock_04. (Not having that much time today.)

A wonderful int! (Reminds me of Thief's Lost City a bit, and this is a good thing.) I made the following changes so far:

- Please follow the naming conventions. Names should reflect the claim they belong to. If they don't, different claims could conflict with each other (I can easily imagine two claims introducing a "TR_m4_en_slowing" enchantment), causing bugs that will be hard to track.

- Added another mushroom cluster and a few daedric darts opposing the skeletal corpse on one of the niches in the lava room (a little amusement whoever died there had at the end). (Daedric darts are not unbalancing loot.)

- A flora_bc_vine_03 was not going all the way to the ceiling, a bookskill_destruction2 was resting unstably, an in_mud_rock_06 was floating behind the bed, and there was an in_dae_room_l_floor_01 not really visible from accessible territory.

Fixed version below. I'll look further into this file.

A more important issue: This is near Teyn. Does it even fit the exterior geometrically? And if it does, to me it still feels too difficult, too scary and too desolate for a place so close to Teyn. Would it make sense to make another (smaller, friendlier) cave int for this location and reuse this one for something on the Roth-Roryn/Armun or TRV/Armun border?

[arvisrend]

More changes made, up to the last in_mud_rock_17.

- There was some subtle ceiling caspery at the bottom of the lava room. Covered with an in_mud_rock_25.

- An in_mud_rock_16 was caspering very slightly, and an in_mud_rock_07 was bleeding through a wall.

- The in_mud_rock_06 at 3831, 4120, -852 was not visible from anywhere, so it is removed.

[arvisrend]

TESAME: Clean

Fits exterior: No

This is the one thing that needs discussion; see below.

Northmarker set: Yes
Loading errors: No



Review: Review complete. The reviewed version is TR_i4-498-Hla_arvisrend_3.esp.

Masterful work, RyanS and Ragox! The cave will be atmospheric and interesting to explore ingame. IMHO we should populate it with few, and easy, daedra, to compensate for the difficulty of finding one's way through the cave.

Now, whether this cave should actually be in this location in (-4, -13) is a wholly different matter. It boils down to the question whether there should be an obscure spooky Daedric ruin (with lava pits!) right under Teyn. I normally would say "no", since it breaks the geographical division between safe places and dangerous places (and this division creates part of the atmosphere in an open-world game). On the other hand, this might be the kind of weirdness that Morrowind breathes. What do you people think? (The Daedric shrines under Vivec are a bad comparison -- Vivec already feels alien, inhospitable and scary to begin with. Compare Teyn to Seyda Neen.)

(I have not checked but I am pretty sure it would be easy to switch this cave with a Roth-Roryn one if we agree that it should not be under Teyn; so the decision should not create much overhead work.)

Comments Very few errors, despite the layout of the cave offering a lot of occasion for things bleeding through. I corrected a couple casperers and floaters in the last part of the review; the only bug that is worth mentioning was a bread loaf was bleeding through a plate.

Rating 9.5/10

[Gnomey]

I think it works as is; though close to Teyn, it's hard to reach without levitation, so for gameplay purposes it isn't really 'close-by'. It also makes a lot of sense for a Daedric ruin to be located around that area, which would have been heavily settled by Chimer before the creation of the Inner Sea.

That being said, switching it out for another interior works just as well, and I'm ultimately neither for nor against.

[arvisrend]

I think that if we keep it in Teyn, we should lampshade it in dialogue, though. Some kind of urban legend about a Daedric temple (urban legends are prone to hyperbole) under the town spreading among the inhabitants, and maybe even someone who got lost in there.

[Rats]

[Seneca37]

Do all caves need to have doors? It would make more sense if the entrance to this cave was a small dark opening (door_load_darkness00) within a rockslide.

Also the current door is clearly visible from Fort Ancylis, so the Imperial guards and the towns people should know about this cave.

[Gnomey]

I'll have to be dull and say it works either way again.

Caves do not have to have doors; I neglected to place any dark holes in the North Andothren-Thirr merge either because I simply forgot to or because I figured there would be a lot of smugglers and the like in the area, so natural caves weren't too important.

That being said, in TR caves usually have doors when they have human occupants, and this interior is intended to have a human occupant (the mage), so having a door for this interior is reasonable.
I also think it's fine if the guards and such know about the entrance. It's probably the first place they'd check if any problems appeared in Teyn, but for the time being it's clearly not a smuggler cave, they haven't had any trouble with it, and it's hard to access. Compare with Addamasartus, which is a smuggler cave, may well have given the people of Seyda Neen trouble, and is easily accessible, but the guards still never bothered to deal with.

I frankly think it might be fun, in a mean kind of way, to set it up as a red-herring for a quest. If there's any trouble in Teyn, most NPCs will tell the player to go here. If the player asks around properly, he'll find out about the alternate (correct) location, but if he just asks the first NPC he finds and rushes off he'll end up clearing a fairly large cavern for no reason. The mage might also have some fun dialogue for the player if he gets that far in his wild goose chase.

[sirrah]

Clean- Yes.

Lighting- Good.
Northmarker- Good.
Illegal to Sleep Here- No.

Floaters:
furn_de_screen_guar_01

Bleeders:
active_de_p_bed_10
bookskill_destruction2
chest_tomb_large01

Other:
Replaced in_mudcave_exit with in_mudcave_nat_exit


File uploaded to new site.