With the NPCs, I can churn them out fairly quickly.  There are only so many details to be parsed through with regard to facial features and inventory.  Most are chosen at random to prevent myself from crafting them based on my own personal tastes, although it’s debatable whether human beings are capable of proper randomizing.

However, as my powers have grown and I’ve started making quests, I’ve learned just how pain in the ass painstaking modding truly is.  There are battles to orchestrate, scenes to direct, and dungeons to build.  All of the sudden you have to consider a whole new world of things.  Music, furniture, AI pathing, to name a few. The amount of work involved makes me wonder if this is the last new location I will ever build, as I will probably die from exhaustion.

It really doesn’t have to be that way.  I could just copy something from another place, and for the most part, that’s exactly what I’ve done.  But the devil is in the details.  Take this picture for example.  I probably spent the better part of an hour(and half of the shitty part too), crafting this stupid bowl.  When I was done with the bowl and done questioning my sexuality, I looked at it like a proud papa and thought, There isn’t a person alive who is going to fucking notice this bowl.  Not one.

This is just the stuff of the self-inflicted variety.  There are just so many ways for even the smallest of cells to get buggy, so many permutations that you can’t possibly account for while testing, that you really have to admire what Bethesda was able to create, albeit with a much larger army and a giant money pit guarded with alligators.

Everywhere, details, details, details.  The decorative ones I put in, the fundamental ones you try not to overlook, and all the types in between.  You have to remember all of them, because one single fuckup can break immersion.  This is why arranging a set of virtual flowers and apples may not necessarily be a waste of time.

I mean, it’s like I tell in Hjoromir in our imaginary conversations.  It’s important to wire yourself a certain way.  If you spend an hour on a stupid bowl of apples, you’ll be that much more meticulous when you make the rest of the quest.  Still, I wish I had a better grasp of when to be lazy, and in exactly which details the devils like to hide.